For those of you spending the holiday season in colder climes, that invariably means staying indoors with your grandmother and spending 17 hours piecing together a giant ass puzzle. Eventually, though, you find that thousandth piece that you dropped on the floor four hours ago and slap it into place, revealing a picture of some idyllic landscape or a super close-up shot of a daffodil. And then it’s done forever. The experience was equal parts wholesome and infuriating, and now you can move on with your life, fulfilled. But what if the puzzle never ended?
Nervous System, a generative design lab that works at the intersection of art, science, and technology, has just revealed the Infinity Galaxy Puzzle. Based on topological spaces that continuously tile, the Infinity Galaxy Puzzle is a wild phenomenon that has no beginning, no end, no proposed shape, and no preconceived expectations whatsoever. It’s the kind of puzzle you can truly be yourself around.
The concept is based on a scientific curio called the Klein Bottle, which, according to Gizmodo, is an impossible 3-D shape whose insides and outsides are mathematically identical. Using this principle, the innovative minds at Nervous System created pieces that, when flipped, can be swapped from the right side of the puzzle to the left, and vice versa. That’s right puzzle nerds: no need to dump out the box and spend the first half hour flipping the pieces right side up! Both sides of the Infinite Galaxy Puzzle pieces are outfitted with a photo of our galactic center as viewed from the Hubble Observatory, so juxtaposing them will only result in more colorful and psychedelic globs of the cosmos.
The 133-piece puzzle, which Nervous is selling for $100 right here, does include a “correct” image of the Milky Way, but don’t let that limit you. Go ahead and mix and match. Buy seven copies and let ’em mingle. Blend and rearrange your astral masterpiece to ad nauseum. And go call your grandma and give her the good news.
Image: Nervous System/Vimeo
Can you be sucked through a hole in space?
