John Edmark made some pretty things.
These 3-D printed sculptures, called blooms, are designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. The placement of the appendages is determined by the same method nature uses in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotation speed is synchronized to the strobe so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5°—the golden angle. If you count the number of spirals on any of these blooms you will find that they are always Fibonacci numbers.
For this video, rather than using a strobe, the camera was set to a very short shutter speed (1/4000 sec) in order to freeze the spinning bloom.
You can also make a bloom of your own using Edmark’s instructions.
