This series of drawings contrast two very different ways of modeling the world and our ideas about it. Minimal surfaces are mathematical shapes that stretch out in the most efficient and economical way to create a surface between boundaries using the least material possible. These idyllic surfaces have practical applications in architecture, material science, and physics, and they are named after their visual appearance or the mathematicians who discovered them. 

Drawn suspended beneath each surface are the branching blood vessels of the human eye. The vessels in these drawings are based on images generated by AI neural networks. Scientists train these programs to detect patterns in the blood vessels of the human retina, so that they can be used to accurately detect a person’s identity or to predict disease.