The designing of Indra’s Web by Rena Jones
Indra’s Web, is based on a buddhist spiritual metaphor of a web of consciousness connecting all life with each point in the web reflecting all the others. I first became aware of this concept through the book Indra’s Pearls – the vision of Felix Klein. The book uses the metaphor to describe Felix Kleins work which is somewhat difficult to understand without a decent mathematical background.
I chose to use an Apollonian gasket (which is derived from a Kleinian Group – so named after Klein of course) for the artwork for Renas CD. I took some liberties and remixed the Apollonian gasket for the CD face. The CD fits inside a perfect circle created from the same design which covers the inside three panels – this conceptually embodies the concept of the “one point containing & reflecting all others” See images below
For the cover of the cd I did a remix and created an action in photoshop and transformed the scale of the gasket dropping the transparency a little every time. I then overlaid some transparent 3D fractals I created using Xenodream.
I am going into detail because a number of people have asked me how I did this.
Below you can see the long view of the inside of the digipack containing the larger gasket which encapsulates the cd.
And finally the back cover – with the famous bubble chamber neutrino image as a background texture and a couple of images from the processing application I coded.
This article was posted
on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 4:28 pm in the category: Artwork, Nerdy Stuff.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Gorgeous work all.
I think Indra, however, is Hindu, rather than Buddhist…
Of course, these are just the illusion of separate forms
I used to play with the Mandelbrot on an Mac II back in the early 1990s.
One frame rendering would take days….
Nice to see progress!
Ciao!
PF
fraterdeus.com
slowprint.com
semiotx.com
November 14th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Thanks Peter,
I thought the concept would have been Hindu as well considering the name, but according to wikipedia – The metaphor of Indra’s net was developed by the Mahayana Buddhist school in the 3rd century scriptures of the Avatamsaka Sutra, and later by the Chinese Huayan school between the 6th and 8th century.[2]“
November 16th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] This animation represents a labor of love and of enduring patience which pushed my two computers to the limits of their computational abilities for six months (they haven’t forgiven me quite yet). We were going to sell it on Native State Digital as a music video and in a fit of altruistic goodness usually reserved for folks on NPR we decided to give it away as a gift and ask for donations. So if this video touches something in you, if you think the effort is a step in the right direction away from the standard “pay to play” model consider making a donation of any amount. – Video & downloads below as well as some information on how the video came to be. Additionally check below for more of Renas music including her new album Indra’s Web which I’ve also incorporated some fractal love into the design [...]
December 7th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Wow. I think I would buy this CD on sight just because of the artwork! Awesome.