Anne Sophie Legrand

These artworks are very complex pictures generated with an algorithm and engraved into 350 unique picture. They are created using iterations. This means one formula is repeated with slightly different values over and over again, taking into account the results from the previous iteration.

In nature, technology and art the most common form of regularity is REPETITION : a single element repeated many times. But another form is possible, in which smaller and smaller copies of a pattern are successively nested inside each other, so that the same intricate shapes appear no matter how much you “zoom in” to the whole. Fern leaves and Romanesco broccoli are two examples from nature.

One might have thought that such a simple and fundamental form of regularity would have been studied for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But it was not. In fact, it rose to prominence only over the past 30 or so years—almost entirely through the efforts of one man, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.