JOHN EDMARK: I am sometimes asked, why am I so
intrigued with spirals?
What is it about spirals?
And I think part of the answer is that I just
find them beautiful.
But I think spirals also make reference to the fact
that you can never return to the same place again,
that nothing ever does truly repeat.
It goes infinitely small, and it goes infinitely large.
It's endless.
And we don't know where we came from.
And we don't know where we're going.
And we're just sort of this piece of that larger picture.
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I'm john Edmark.
I'm an artist, designer, and inventor.
And I teach at Stanford University.
I don't think of myself as a sculptor.
Clearly, the works are sculptures of sorts.
But in a sense, that's a coincidence.
They're just a medium that I'm using
to ask and answer questions that I am interested in.
The driving motivation of my work
is a search for unusual behaviors,
things that are non-intuitive, that maybe seem impossible.
Math has a kind of precision and a way
of clarifying relationships that allows
me to achieve some of these behaviors and patterns
that I'm trying to create.
I was working with essentially flat puzzles.
I noticed that that perimeter never changed shape.
It just changed in scale as you added or moved pieces.
And that then led to the notion of stacking these one on top
of the other and rotating them relative to each other
to cause these patterns to appear
in the form of plateaus that can move up and down the tower.
And I'm rotating it.
Each time, I'm rotating it 137.5 degrees,
the golden angle, which is based on the golden ratio.
The golden ratio is the ratio where
the smaller is to the larger, as the larger is to the whole.
And it ends up, this is a very powerful generative ratio.
Anytime you create a pattern using the golden angle,
you're going to end up with spirals appearing.
And it's actually been shown mathematically
to be the best way to distribute leaves
on a stem to minimize overlap.
Let's say a leaf, or a petal, of a seed gets put out here,
the next one will get put out 137 degrees around over here.
And the next one then gets put out 137 degrees over here,
and around, and around, and around, placing
these, and placing these.
And when that's done in that fashion,
you end up getting these kinds of very evenly distributed seed
heads.
But the spirals are actually a symptom
of this process of placing each bud 137 degrees around
from the previous but.
When I was wanting to demonstrate
this transforming nature of the towers,
I decided to animate them.
And when I animated it, I was surprised to discover that,
not only did it show plateaus appearing and disappearing,
but there was this very strong sense
of continuity of the plateaus moving down the tower
or up the tower.
About five years later, I suddenly
realized, oh, what if I just keep
on rotating the entire tower, not just the next level.
And in fact, blooms are a direct descendant
of a multi-year-long sequence and explorations
on these golden angle, spiral geometry studies.
I call them blooms because they tend
to have a sense of blossoming, opening, and expanding
to them as they animate.
When a bloom is animating, it's endless.
If a plant could grow forever, it
would kind be doing that blooming behavior forever.
The first thing I do is I have to create the structure for it.
And that is, of course, based on using the golden angle.
So I place where the elements are going to be.
And then I shape those elements.
Depending on what I want the behavior to be,
I will then animate them, making them expand,
making them rotate.
Blooms can be filmed in two ways.
You can actually run a strobe that is synchronized
to the camera's film rate.
Or, if you set the camera to use a very short shutter speed,
it will behave, effectively, like a strobe.
Because the elements of the bloom
are essentially frames of an animation.
If the frames aren't exactly aligned,
you're going to get a non-smooth flow.
The kind of the distortions and warpings that you see happening
are a result of me slightly breaking the rule of rotating
by the golden angle.
And so they're moving back and forth
in terms of hovering around that angle.
And that causes them to have this kind
of warped distorted effect.
I think my work is most successful when
it evokes a sense of wonder, when
it sort of seems to be magical.
What I'm trying to achieve in my work
is something that will evoke that in somebody else,
that they'll say Wow.
What's going on there?
How is that possible?
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