The prop was made by KO Sticks. You can see some set photos with the wire star.
In 1997, a Six-Axis Star made its way to being a prominent prop on the MIT math professor's desk in the movie Good Will Hunting:
The site's owner explains, in considerable detail, how these objects were formed mathematically and what they represent in terms of folded space.
A few years later, I began to do just this, starting with building models of some of the structures I had learned from Fuller. Of particular interest was a concept that he called Tensegrity, which is attributed to Kenneth Snelson. In these models, struts, or sticks, are suspended from each other by a network of tension members, such as strings, or wires. The sticks do not collide or intersect, but are coupled together by tension as they pass by each other. Thus symmetry and structural integrity are resultants of the assemblage of simple linear components, tension and compression, push and pull. The sparsity of this kind of definition of spatial form was very appealing to me.
The basic idea, the story of the stars, is that I found it inspiring that one could build objects that are mathematically elegant and have structural integrity, working with simple, readily available components, and using basic tools and techniques. These wire sculptures are stable, yet flexible, expressions of spatial symmetry that do not require any precision machining, casting, etc. The intent was, and still is, to make the geometry and physics that are expressed through the stars accessible and appealing. They are a kind of fusion of science and art.
