June 6th, 2010
The image above is known as the Mandelbulb, Daniel White and Paul Nylander’s 3-D rendering of the famous, complex fractal known as the Mandelbrot Set. The Mandelbrot Set was first rendered in 2D about 30 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2007 or so that progress was made in rendering it in three dimensions. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
To get the full effect, zoom in on the Mandelbulb here, and try this further zoom-in of a section of the bulb here, and others here, the latter links being from White’s site, which offers, among other things, a fascinating history of how the Mandelbrot Set became rendered as a Mandelbulb.
I once sent the above Mandelbulb image to some friends, without explanation or subject heading, in an email. I didn’t want to frame it with any language that would predispose them to view it as startling, beautiful, awe-inspiring, scary, weird, ugly, ad inf. — rather, I wanted to see what people would feel presented with the image in its absolute is-ness, because for me, nature’s moments of infinite outgrowth & cluster (an incredibly fitting symbol of which is the Mandelbulb) simultaneously inspire all the above feelings and none. The fringes on curly kale, the natural fractal of Romanesco broccoli, the lung’s alveoli, the detail of certain crystals at the microscopic level, the infinite expansion of the universe itself — all these phenomena showcasing nature at her most endlessly dense, whether seen or unseen, implosive or expansive, micro- or macrosopic, all are capable of filling me with way too many feelings to ever hope to catalogue, not all of them pleasant. [READ MORE . . .]
