Blooms
John Edmark
Blooms by John Edmark | Photo by Devon Hutchins
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Blooms are 3D-printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The rotational speed and the strobe light frequency are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5 degrees--the angular version of the golden ratio (0.618...).
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Blooms are based on the same geometry nature uses in many plant forms, including artichokes, sunflowers, and pinecones, all of which share the same underlying growth pattern.
Blooms are related to, but different from, zoetropes. Both use strobe lights and spinning to achieve the illusion of movement. But with a zoetrope, the illusion produced is a ring of separate animating objects, whereas with a bloom, the illusion created is a single animating sculpture.
The artist, John Edmark, designs the blooms by writing computer code in Python, a high-level programming language. This allows him to create the precise geometric relationships necessary to achieve the desired effects.
John does not consider himself a sculptor. He thinks of his works as instruments that amplify our awareness of the sometimes tenuous relationship between facts and perception.
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John is as an artist, designer, and inventor. Through kinetic sculptures and transformable objects, he seeks to create surprising structures that manifest unusual behaviors. His background is in architecture, computer science and product design. He is currently a lecturer in design at Stanford University.
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John Edmark | Photo courtesy of the artist