The original Mandelbrot is an amazing object that has captured the public's imagination for 30 years with its cascading patterns and hypnotically colourful detail. It's known as a 'fractal' - a type of shape that yields (sometimes elaborate) detail forever, no matter how far you 'zoom' into it (think of the trunk of a tree sprouting branches, which in turn split off into smaller branches, which themselves yield twigs etc.).
It's found by following a relatively simple math formula. But in the end, it's still only 2D and flat - there's no depth, shadows, perspective, or light sourcing. What we have featured in this article is a potential 3D version of the same fractal.
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For the Goethe Institut, we designed a version in DIN A0 size (33.1 in × 46.8 in) of our graphic »German spoken«. But, instead of using the 700 words we processed in the earlier version for Vanity Fair (issue 11/2007), we used about 2,000 of 2,500 terms in this new king-sized »emigrated words« poster. The Institute collected them in an initiative from all over the world.