aliot-LookingOutwards03
Tom Beddard is based in Scotland. He started his career as a laser physicist with a PhD but has since moved onto more creative endeavors. He started Hyper Digital Ltd, which produces mobile and web applications as well as explores information visualization and interactivity. The project photographed below was created with Fractal Labs, an in-browser application which allows people to create and modify 3d fractals in real time with chosen parameters. Beddard describes it as a side project. He exported some of his creations with PixelBender and QuartzComposer. Performance of the algorithm used to generate the fractals was obviously a huge concern, so many optimizations were used in his code.
What I admire most about this work was that it’s not just generative, but Beddard wanted it to be publicly accessible so that anyone can create their own fractals. I appreciate efforts in creative fields that are not exclusive and that make the process transparent. The actual making of the fractal is a nice gui– wonderful!
Beddard has balanced disorder and order in a way that greatly favors order. Every pixel has a correct color, every curve has one correct orientation; this is the inherent nature of fractals. Given that this would theoretically be a software available online, perhaps the results of many iterations by multiple users is disordered.