Painting math on the wall

June 8, 2016 4:44 PM

Painting math on the wall
I spent the last few days hand-painting a couple of fractal images—a Menger sponge and a Cantor set—on the wall of my home office. This is a writeup of how and why I did it, with some bonus thoughts on the weird nature of the fractal series behind the images.

Role: draftsman, painter, person with a very sore neck

posted by cortex (11 comments total)

goddamn dude
posted by griphus at 6:29 PM on June 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's awesome! My daughter and I painted a large fractal tree a while back, but now I want a Menger sponge.
posted by klausman at 11:50 PM on June 8, 2016

That is so pretty! I absolutely love it.
posted by xingcat at 6:16 AM on June 9, 2016

I liked the picture with only the black paint applied. My mind's eye keeps switching between the "regular" view (i.e. like the finished product, with the black face of the cube toward the viewer) and a view where the the black face was sort of lying down with the other bits floating above it like they were being projected in 3D.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:40 AM on June 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Actually, come to think of it, I can do that mental shift with the white paint applied too - a white back-wall, a black carpet, and the rest of the implied cube all little floaty bits in space. Cool stuff.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:43 AM on June 9, 2016

...or, reading further, what you said yourself in the article. :-/
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:45 AM on June 9, 2016

Heh. Yeah, it's a nice feature of this sort of thing. An interesting detail there is if you play around with seeing the innie-instead-of-outie perspective of it the "interior" bits all get sorta horribly weird because they don't "flip" with the correct symmetry, so doing the macro switching-back-and-forth thing works fine on the brain but then the micro stuff is just like NO THIS IS WRONG in an unsettling way in its own right.
posted by cortex at 8:57 AM on June 9, 2016

This is awesome!
posted by ellieBOA at 9:13 AM on June 9, 2016

"and fills the space well" -- no, that's a different object. ;)

(Pretty; thanks for sharing.)
posted by solitary dancer at 9:23 AM on June 9, 2016

Oh my god. I am so impressed and also so jealous. Such beautiful work.
posted by the webmistress at 6:56 PM on June 9, 2016

Did a little 6x6 riff on the sponge as well, have put up a blog post about it with some details and pictures.
posted by cortex at 12:10 PM on June 21, 2016