Throughout history, cultures have been bending the human form in different ways.
Mayan
Japanese
Ghanaian sculptures
And they’ve equally manipulated the forms of animals.
Chinese
Cypriot
Greek horses
Bending happens not only in the open, but also out of sight. Consider cardiology. Hearts are prone to fail, so researchers have long harbored a dream: in the same way that they build artificial bones and limbs, could they build an artificial heart? The answer, as first proven in 1982, was yes. William DeVries installed an artificial heart in retired dentist Barney Clark, who lived for another four months and died with the heart still pumping. It was a resounding success for bionics.
But there was a problem. Pumps require an enormous amount of energy, and their moving parts are quickly subject to wear and tear. Fitting the machinery inside the chest of a person was a challenge. In 2004, doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier came up with a novel solution. Although Mother Nature only has the tools to pump blood around the body, there’s nothing to say that has to be the single solution. Cohn and Frazier wondered: what if one could use a continuous flow? Like water circulating in a fountain, could blood get oxygenated as it passed through a chamber, and flow right back out?
In 2010, United States Vice President Dick Cheney was outfitted with a continuous flow heart, and he has been alive but pulseless ever since. A pulse is simply the byproduct of the heart’s pumping, but it’s not a necessity. Cohn and Frazier invented a new type of heart by taking nature’s prototype and putting it on the workbench.
Bending can remodel a source in many ways. Take size. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Shuttlecocks on the front lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art are inflated to the size of teepees.
For the 2016 summer Olympics, the artist JR installed a giant sculpture of high jumper Ali Mohd Younes Idriss atop a building in Rio de Janeiro.
What can expand can also contract. Confined to a hotel room as a refugee during the Second World War, sculptor Alberto Giacometti went small, creating a series of tiny human figurines.
Alberto Giacometti’s Piazza
French artist Anastassia Elias creates miniature art that fits inside toilet-paper rolls.
Anastassia Elias’ Pyramide
Using a focused ion beam, artist Vik Muniz etches nanoscale artwork on grains of sand.
Vik Muniz’s Sand Castle #3
What might these art pieces have to do with, say, making nighttime driving safer? At first glance, not much. But the same cognitive processes were at work when a baffling problem about windshields was solved. Early in the automobile age, riding around after dark was dangerous because of the blinding glare caused by approaching headlights. American inventor Edwin Land was determined to create glare-resistant windshields. To increase visibility, he turned to the idea of polarization. It wasn’t a new concept: during the reign of Napoleon, a French engineer had noticed that the sunny reflections of palace windows were less brilliant if he looked at them through a calcite crystal. But there was a problem. Several generations of inventors had struggled to put large crystals to practical use. Imagine a windshield made up of six-inch-thick crystals: you wouldn’t be able to see through it.
Like everyone before him, Land tried working with large crystals but got nowhere. Then one day he had his A-ha moment: shrink the crystals. What Land later described as his “orthogonal thinking”1 involved the same mental process as the diminutive artwork of Giacometti, Elias, and Muniz. Turning the crystals from something you held in your hand to something you couldn’t see, he soon succeeded in making sheets of glass with thousands of tiny crystals embedded inside them. Because the crystals were so microscopically small, the glass was both transparent and cut down on the glare. The driver got a better view of the road – and the creativity that produced it remained invisible.
The view through an unpolarized windshield and Land’s polarized one
Like size, shape can bend. In classical Western ballet, dancers’ postures create straight lines as much as possible. Starting in the 1920s, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham used innovative poses, movements and fabric to bend the human form.
As dancers can change shape, so can structures. Using computer modeling and new building materials, architect Frank Gehry warps the normally flat planes of building exteriors into rippling and twisting facades.
Three buildings by Frank Gehry: Beekman Tower
The Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health
Dancing House (with Vlado Milunić)
Volute’s conforming fuel tank
How might a similar bend allow the cars of the future to hold more fuel? One of the impediments to converting engines from gasoline to hydrogen is the bulkiness of the tank: standard hydrogen tanks are barrel-shaped and take up too much cargo space. A company called Volute has developed a conforming tank that folds upon itself in layers and can snake into unused space in the car body, finding ways to make the volume work by bending and twisting it.
Human brains bend archetypes with endless variety. For instance, artist Claes Oldenburg (co-creator of the giant shuttlecocks) not only bent big, he bent soft: in place of