Spiral Fractal
There is a small lake near the house where we live in the Yukon. On a sunny summer day, the colours of the lake look almost like the Caribbean sea (not so much the case on a sunny spring day when sheets of ice float gently by).
While the lake bottom may look like sand from afar, it is actually a mixture of calcium carbonate and crushed snail shells which create a very cloudy underwater fog when disturbed. Before realizing what it would be like to try to create something in the water, I had the idea to design a simple stone spiral on the lake bottom, a fractal of sorts of the thousands of loosely coiled valve snails that populate the lake. Collecting the stones and laying them by the lake, I thought this would be a fairly quick and easy project to execute. I soon discovered it required a lot of patience because no matter how gently I laid each stone on the lake’s bottom, this happened:
This is a good example of how some land art creations look quick and easy to execute but in reality are either deceptively time consuming or complex to work out.
