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Screengrab via John Edmark/Vimeo

These trippy and stunning 3D sculptures will blow your mind

In bloom.

 

Audra Schroeder

Streaming

Posted on Jan 26, 2017   Updated on May 25, 2021, 3:12 am CDT

These days, you just a need a place online where you can go and breathe and collect your shattered brain. Like artist and designer John Edmark’s Blooms 2.

The Vimeo Staff Pick features nearly four minutes of “blooms,” or “3D-printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light,” producing something beautiful and alien:

The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5º (the angular version of phi).* Each bloom’s particular form and behavior is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome (/fī nōm/)

This isn’t the first time Edmark has experimented with blooms. He gives a tutorial here

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*First Published: Jan 26, 2017, 3:02 pm CST