Space Truffle

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

One of the perils of spending most of the summer away from blogging, I suppose, is that it's so easy to miss interesting projects. Something that made the rounds several weeks ago, and that seemed worth re-posting here anyway is this incredible series of images exploring "Fabergé fractals" by digital artist Tom Beddard.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

It's not the sci-fi stoner appeal of the fractals themselves that is so interesting about the images, however, but rather the notion of a 3D object so dense and so complicated with internal surfaces, rings of growth, and convolutedly compressed whorls that you could cut an endless array of millimeter-thin slices from it and each one would always reveal something different. A different texture, a different marbling of colors, a different and effectively unpredictable internal geometry.

[Images: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

You could slice new gems from this thing forever—carving down from every side, milling from every possible angle—and always find some strange new object there before you, one that changes through reduction, always offering, no matter how small the object eventually gets, all but infinite surface area to explore.

Architecturally speaking, it would be internally infinite in plan, internally infinite in section.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

It's like a truffle—

[Images: Sliced truffles, randomly found via Google].

—a space truffle that could be whittled and shaved down, shaped, sanded, and cut, eternally different from what it used to be at every stage of this spatial surgery.

[Image: From Fabergé Fractals by Tom Beddard].

(Via but does it float).