The notion of tensegrity was discovered and first explored by the artist Kenneth Snelson in the 1960s, and throughout his career he has been commissioned to create many tensegrity sculptures around the world. Later, R. Buckminster Fuller elaborated on what you might call the metaphysics of tensegrity and actually gave it the name. One Snelson sculpture, the Needle Tower in the Kroller-Muller outdoor museum in the east of Holland, captured my interest in the mid-1990's, and I have been interested in the structural principle ever since.
This software has taken many forms throughout the last decade and a half, having been restructured and rewritten a number of times. This particular Tensegrity Klein Bottle program is intended to give people an opportunity to explore tensegrity, and to discover a novel potential application of it - in biology! I attended a meeting in the west of France dealing with the nascent subject of "biotensegrity" which is an effort to find evidence of and use the principles of tensegrity in the context of biology. One of my fellow-presenters was a South African researcher Craig Nevin who introduced us to the idea of finding Mobius shapes throughout the body, as a kind of organizing principle, and he suggested extending this to the higher-dimensional analogue, the Klein Bottle.
Experimentation with the Klein Bottle shape as realized through tensegrity has shown that the extra "twist" of the Klein Bottle introduces a kind of anomaly into the tensegrity shape which can express itself by convulsing into various shapes, many of them perhaps recognizable as biological shapes. There are spontaneous "invaginations" potentially analogous to those observed in early embryo development, and other shapes which seem to resemble various other things like bones and heart muscles.
An algorithm in this program starts by building a tensegrity cylinder of almost arbitrary circumference and length (within the limits of computing power) and then the top and bottom circles are merged together, in reverse order (flipped) to achieve the Klein Bottle topology. Then with the sliders at the right of the screen the user can play around with the various different cable groups and cause the structure to take on any of a number of characteristic stable shapes.
This software is licensed under GPLv3, so feel free to experiment but please make your results available to me.
Gerald de Jong