John Edmark

John Edmark

Stanford Professor is Fusing Math and Nature to Create Art

Written by Nathan Zanon

Photography by Daniel Garcia

John Edmark’s career has taken him on a winding path from architecture to computer animation to product design, but he’s making waves on the internet with his beautiful video works that animate three-dimensional objects using math derived from Mother Nature herself. He describes himself as an artist, designer, and inventor, and his lifelong passion for the mathematics behind the beauty in our world has fueled a career of artistic investigation.

The recent studies Edmark has been fabricating are what he calls “blooms.” Part stop-motion animated sculpture and part video art, blooms are generated by aligning a camera’s frame rate to a rotating object that turns at exactly 137.5 degrees per frame. This angle, known as the “golden angle,” mimics the rotation of growth outward from the stem seen in many plants—from the leaves on vines to the petals on flowers to the bracts of an artichoke.

“Each petal, each leaf, has a unique birthday, and each one had its own moment when it came out,” Edmark explains. “Surprisingly, this simple algorithm of rotating the object 137.5 degrees leads to these very symmetrical, circular forms; and it’s been shown mathematically that this is the optimal method for placing leaves or elements such that they overlap the least possible amount. That’s the system that nature uses; it’s the system that I co-opt in order to create the blooms. What happens is that it reiterates the growth process. What you see is the objects seem to grow without growing.”

After years of research, he was able to create visual representations of this growth as infinitely animated loops by syncing the frame speed with the rotation. The result is a series of mesmerizing videos using both actual plants and manmade geometric objects created with 3D printers and laser cutters.

“The fact that something like an artichoke or a pinecone or some cacti—the fact that they are intrinsically animatable natural sculptures was my discovery,” he points out. “Nobody knew that. We’ve had strobe lights and turntables for a hundred years, and nobody knew they had that animatability. And I’m very grateful that I got to be the one to discover that.”

Before unearthing artistic secrets hidden in plain sight in the natural world, Edmark imagined he would become an architect. After growing up in the Northeast, he went to school for architecture—but soon became impatient with the career opportunities in the field and bounced around to several other areas of study, finally finding his way to the product design program at Stanford. His product portfolio includes designs for items in the home, a polarizing camera lens filter, and even a new take on the Rubik’s Cube. The mathematical precision of nature’s shapes are incorporated into many of these items as well as his artistic studies, creating complex forms that are beautiful, functional, and surprising.

“Besides enjoying teaching, I’ve enjoyed being at Stanford and being around people doing interesting things—and having access to the facilities that allow me to work on my projects, which require precise tools. The exactness of it is very appealing, and it allows me to explore things that it wouldn’t be pos-

sible to explore if you had to handcraft things in the right shapes. In my case, those relationships are critical to the studies and sculptures doing what I want them to do.”

For many years, Edmark’s work was largely confined to the Stanford laboratories, where he has been a professor since 2003. But more recently, his videos have been discovered on the internet, garnering him newfound attention. He was invited to serve as an artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Autodesk facility and also served a residency at the Exploratorium, where he created a kaleidoscope installation. Early in 2017, his work was featured on NPR’s Science Friday in a video that has garnered nearly a million YouTube views.

“It’s tremendously gratifying,” he admits. “I’ve basically been working alone, without a peer group doing the kinds of things that I was doing. I definitely had times where I was like, why am I doing this? I enjoy it, but nobody knows I’m doing it. So that’s why it’s gratifying to have the work get out there and find that I’m not the only one who finds the results interesting.”

With his growing exposure, Edmark has made an increasing number of appearances at galleries and festivals—including an installation called Shadow Play at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2014, a showcase at the Future Fires festival in San Francisco, and a piece in a traveling show called WonderWorks. These exhibitions have given him an opportunity to expand his work to different areas of interest. The SJMA installation, for example, allowed him to

play with multiple projectors using different colors of light in order to create the illusion of motion in an otherwise stationary hanging mobile (Alexander Calder’s 1959 work Big Red). This remarkable intervention presented yet another way math and nature come together in beautiful ways. “Color and light are actually of great interest to me,” says Edmark, while conceding that most of his bloom videos are monochromatic. “This allowed me to explore [color] in interesting ways.”

Going forward, he would love to find opportunities to expand his body of work to more galleries and exhibitions. “I’m basically unknown in the art world. I certainly enjoy sharing the work. It’s fun to share it with people and see their surprise and delight. I’m very happy to have more people see the work.”

Until then, fans of optical illusions, stop-motion animation, and even believers in sacred geometry can take meditative pleasure in watching the videos on his website.

johnedmark.com

Instagram: john.edmark

Facebook: johnedmarkart

Vimeo: johnedmark

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