Carson Baker

Recently I came across an aca­d­e­mic ref­er­ence to Clif­fard Pickover’s bio­morphs, a gen­er­a­tive fractal-​like art that resem­bles cell struc­tures. Out­side of Richard Dawkins’ famous evo­lu­tion­ary inven­tion of the same name, which is sim­i­lar in pur­pose but dif­fer­ent in design, I had never heard of Pickover’s work. Sadly I couldn’t find the orig­i­nal arti­cle for free. [Bio­morphs: Com­puter dis­plays of bio­log­i­cal forms gen­er­ated from math­e­mat­i­cal feed­back loops]

I did, how­ever, find a good overview of the sub­ject by Mad Teddy. [Explore his web­site to dis­cover why he is, in fact, quite mad.]

Ten min­utes later I gen­er­ated my own biomorph:

Down­load the source code as an Xcode project (Mac only, 51 KB). Pos­si­ble improve­ments, includ­ing ani­ma­tions, to follow.