Tom Beddard – Geometric Organica
Friday, 20 May 2011
Surface Detail – Tom Beddard
Tom Beddard [Sublue] has been featured on these pages before – in a post on Structure Synth, in a Selected Tweets, and at least two Flicker Fruits collections: #17 and #34. It’s time to devote a complete post to his work concentrating on recent projects.
Tom develops his own ‘home-brew’ raytracing shader software to generate highly complex fractal topologies, tessellated surfaces, and three-dimensional objects. Surface Detail is a good example of the capabilities of his software. Combined with a monochromatic palette it generates fractal aesthetics distinct from any you’ve seen before. A rotating planetoid structure, mutates through a steadily transitioning surface of subdivisioned self-similar cells. The effect is morphogenetic, biological and botanical – compare his work to this SEM picture of Gephyrocapsa oceanica for example. Flickr stills of Surface Detail can be found here. Geometric Organica, a precursor to Surface Detail, similarly deals with organic networks of fractal forms, which appear as machine-crafted seeds and fruits.
The most recent update to this sequence of works is the realisation of a WebGL application that can run in any current browser supporting Mozilla’s powerful WebGL library (Google Chrome & Firefox 4 Beta). The intense Sci-fi like scenographs generated by Fractal Lab hint at the kinds of landscapes perhaps envisioned by Terrence Mckenna and John C Lilly while musing on solid state intelligence and ultra complex machine planet ecologies.
Related:
aDiatomea – Sonically Superformed Micro-organisms
Year of the Radiolarian
