Beneath the Threadbare Star — Falling Through the Celtic Mandelbrot [Meditation]

Falling forever into the edge of the Celtic Mandelbrot. 5:35 of continuous fractal zoom with an original generative score. THE FRACTAL z → |Re(z^2)| + i*Im(z^2) + c, which folds the set into knotwork. THE ZOOM IS REAL This is not one image being scaled up. Every frame is computed from the definition of the set at the magnification you are looking at, so the detail arriving at the end of the video was never in the first frame in any form — it is being discovered, not enlarged. The total magnification here is about 1e86, which is far past any comparison with anything physical. Past about 1e13 that stops being possible with ordinary double-precision arithmetic: the numbers involved run out of digits, and a naive renderer returns a flat grey field. This one gets around that with perturbation theory. A single reference point is iterated in arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and every pixel is then computed as a small offset from it, which keeps the enormous numbers and the tiny ones from ever having to be added together. The depth limit becomes an iteration budget rather than a wall. The destination is found rather than chosen. The renderer starts with the whole set in view and repeatedly re-centres on a point at the edge of it that takes a very long time to escape — which is, necessarily, a point a hair from the boundary. About fifty of those steps land somewhere that has never been looked at, and almost certainly never will be again. THE SCORE Also generated, also original: psychedelic rock / tribal house, G Phrygian, 119 BPM. The Shepard tone underneath is the same illusion as the picture, in sound. It is built from octave-spaced partials sliding under a fixed spectral envelope, so the pitch appears to fall continuously and forever without ever getting lower — as one partial fades out of the top, another fades in at the bottom, and the ear declines to notice. It falls when the camera falls. Headphones do something here that speakers cannot. THIS VIDEO Fractal: the Celtic Mandelbrot. Palette: near-monochrome rose. Mood: restless and highly coloured. Depth: 160 doublings at 2 seconds each. Seed: 883982392. Every video on this channel picks a different fractal, a different destination, a different colouring and a different score, so no two descents go the same way. Full screen, lights off, headphones on. Everything — the maths, the music, the edit, the upload — is produced automatically with no human in the loop. #fractal #celticfractal #infinitezoom #ambient #meditation