Knot Serpent (1994)

A Virtual Sculpture by Georg Gerber

"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." -- Walt Whitman.

Many things are serpents and we just don't realize it. Birds, for instance, are serpents.

This knot belongs to a family called the (p, q)-torus knots. By definition, a torus knot is a nontrivial knot that can be placed on the surface of a standardly embedded torus without crossing over or under itself on the surface. By a standard embedding, it is meant that the torus is unknotted in space.

I made this virtual sculpture by programming an IPAS routine for 3-D Studio that takes a parametric equation and builds a tube around it with continuous mapping coordinates. I then created a texture for this knot in PhotoStyler, applied it, and rendered several views of it.