I’m not making this up.  I went surfing about to see what I could find in the fractal world and lo and behold at Flickr, a couple of pages into a search on the term “fractal”, I saw wires, boards and strange, curly burn patterns.

photo by Aether

Photo caption from Aether’s Flickr page:

did some experiments last night: wood + saline + high voltage supply + variac = fractal burn patterns. tried different kinds of wood with various effects. unfortunately my recollection of which types of wood are displayed are spotty. will update later. stay tuned for photos of my fractal wood burning coat rack. **Update: there’s a lot of interest here about how to do this. I will either an instructable, more detailed flickr feed, or youtube myself in the next few weeks.**

Here’s Aether’s YouTube video of the electric woodburning process in action :

Here’s another example, with more colorful commentary.  The YouTube description for it says “Jerry Rutherford of Robomo during a build session showing us a technique of using a neon sign transformer to create patterns of conductivity across a board.” Among other things, the video is tagged “fractal”.

If I heard correctly, in the video Jerry Rutherford says “Sometimes you get ugly… and sometimes you get these really cool patterns”.

Doesn’t that sum up this whole fractal art thing?