Community Mural Projects

Visualize Pi

Artist Ellie Balk and The Green School’s Assistant Principal Nathan Affield are using mathematics to connect high school students to the community by painting large-scale murals in East Williamsburg.

In 2012, students constructed an image of the golden spiral based on the Fibonacci Sequence and began to explore the relationship between the golden ratio and Pi. The number Pi was represented in a color-coded graph within the golden spiral. In this, the numbers are seen as color blocks that vary in size proportionately within the shrinking space of the spiral, allowing us to visualize the shape of Pi and its negative space to look for “patterns”. The students soon realized that the irrational number of Pi created no patterns at all, resulting in a space that resembles “noise”.
So in response to that, last year they visualized the number Pi as a reflective line graph that resembles a sound wave. The colors of the mural change at each prime number in Pi so that the viewer can visualize a pattern of prime numbers within Pi. Located on a busy corner in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the sounds of the bustling traffic and rhythmic commuter passing creates the perfect backdrop for our visualization. The project was funded by launching a successful Kickstarter campaign.

(source:http://visualizepi.tumblr.com/)

Soundwaves

130’ community mural created in September 2011 by Ellie Balk working with 9 pianists and drawing the distance between their hands as they played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to create a musical landscape. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, supported by Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project.

(source:http://elliebalk.com/#/soundwaves/)

Histogram of Emotions

In May-June 2011 E.Balk worked with high school math students in surveying the whole school, collecting data on how they were feeling based on different times of the day to create a bar graph that resembles a cityscape. Made Possible by LCB Grant.

(source: http://elliebalk.com/#/histogram/)