The Fabulous Fractal Lasercut Creations of Brent Thorne

What could you do with stacks of 5mm plywood and exhaustive knowledge of Latin, iambic pentameter, gear ratios, Turing machines and the mechanized inner workings of computer systems? Anything you want, but mostly you would build amazing kinetic sculptures capable of computing and endless variety of data, be it fractals or the eternal bond of love. It’s exactly what Brent Thorne does and he’s created some of the most incredible looking lasercut calculating devices you will ever splinter your eyes upon.

Wooden Fractal Computer

Brent Thorne is a San Francisco based computer scientist and kinetic artist who has a taste for machine languages and making. These wood gear fractal computers are examples of his ongoing project to create a computer system complete with the discs, drives and core. He has an incredible understanding of symbolic logic (and how turtles relate to this and likely initiated such things.) Brent filled us in on his process.

My development cycle starts with a sketch on paper, mainly free-body diagrams with arrows. Numerical simulation is done on a Linux host using Octave, Python, and C. A bespoke compiler generates the coefficients for the encoded tables. The tables, gears and gear trains are drawn using SVG extensions to Inkscape. The scale is a determined by the material, 5mm plywood, the cheapest workable material from the lumberyard. The final “full scale” version will be built to the sub-millimeter scale.

Keep an eye on Brent’s blog for more interesting experiments, videos of the sculptures and announcement of, yes, a Kickstarter campaign where you’ll may be able to get a wooden fractal computer of your own.