19th May 2012
Reblogged From troythulu
Notes: 38
Fractal Artforms of Nature
The nineteen century German biologist Ernst Haeckel is famous for his fantastically illustrated book Artforms of Nature. The copyright for this book from 1904 has now expired and thanks to Wikimedia Commons it is available for everyone to appreciate.
Haekel’s artistic interpretation of the biological forms he studied have a clarity of symmetry and detail that has been a source of inspiration for many artists and engineers over the years. They provide the perfect subject matter for my Photoshop plugin Pixel Bender Fractal Explorer.
(Source: onlunar)
Drawing programs don’t always have a “point”, even if they are fun. Recursive Drawing, however, aims to use a simple and addictive user-interface to explore how drawings could be translated into programming.
On the surface, it’s a purely fun tool (which you can, and should, play with!) to draw crazy-awesome things like Fibonacci trees (like in the video). But deep down, it’s an experiment in translating visual objects into programming commands. That’s called a spatial or visual programming environment, and it’s a way to disconnect the syntax of programming from the logic and math.
Environments like these also let non-English speakers and young people get introduced to programming skills without having to master the language itself. But if you don’t want to pay attention to all that, it’s just really FUN!
Previously: A dangerously addictive online fluid dynamics simulator and a particle/gravity simulator that really looks more like fireworks.
The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.
But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.
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Images of Aggregation by Andy Lomas.
Lomas on his work:
These works come from a study of organic natural forms and their relationship to simple mathematical rules.
Influenced by the work of D’Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing and Ernst Haeckel, they study how intricate forms of plant and coral like structures can be created by digital simulation of flow and deposition.
The sculptural shapes are created by a process of accretion over time. They are gradually grown by simulating the paths of millions of particles randomly flowing in a field of forces. Over time they build on top of an initial simple seed surface to produce structures of immense complexity.
“Gate of the Liche Lord”
“The Eld”
