Blooms
John Edmark
Blooms by John Edmark | Photo by Devon Hutchins
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Blooms are 3D-printed sculptures created by artist, designer, and inventor John Edmark.
Each sculpture, or 'Bloom', is 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...). We stitch these frames together in our minds, creating the illusion of movement that isn't actually happening.
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Blooms are related to, but different from, zoetropes, in that they 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.
Blooms are based on the same geometry that nature uses in many plant forms, including artichokes, sunflowers, and pinecones, all of which share the same underlying growth pattern.
John 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.
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John Edmark is 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.
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