Wednesday, December 19, 2007


Spirals: Geometry Of Awareness

If you have visited my website http://www.karmatetra.com/ you may have noticed that I am fond of spirals. What is it about spirals that evokes the imagination? The Golden Spiral has inspired philosophers, poets, architects, physicists, astronomers and biologists. We see spirals in nature; from the recorded trails of exotic subatomic particles, to flowers and galaxies. Spirals are everywhere.

Recently, I have been exploring spirals on the surface of spheres. I have published a study on generating these spirals on my website. See Spheriphor Study 03 for details and images. As far as I know this is the only spiral of its kind. There must be other people who have created a geometric design where spirals symmetrically cover the surface of a sphere - so if the reader knows of any, please comment here and let me know where they can be found.

I do a lot of my work in POV-Ray. I have provided sample code on my website for generating some of the images. I even provide information on how to run the code. If the reader is willing to follow a few step-by-step instructions, then it should be fairly simple to reproduce the images.

The image shown in the beginning of this post is titled Golden Spiral Sunset Sailing. It is a 3D rendering of a series of rectangles arranged whimsically in the space above a tranquil body of water. A spiral reminiscent of the Golden Spiral flows through the rectangular structure like the sails of a fanciful sailboat. More spiral digital art to come in future posts ...

No comments: