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THE ZOOMQUILT

A collaborative infinitely zooming painting
Created in 2004

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A project by Nikolaus Baumgarten

Participating illustrators: Andreas Schumann, Eero Pitkänen, Florian Biege, Jann
Kerntke, Lars Götze, Luis Felipe, Marcus Blättermann, Markus Neidel, Paul
Painter, Oliver Schlemmer, Sonja Schneider, Thorsten Wolber, Tony Stanley, Ville
Vanninen

The Zoomquilt on YouTube

Read about the history of this project

Screensaver for Mac
Live Wallpaper for Android
Infinite Flowers
Arkadia
Zoomquilt 2


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ABOUT THE ZOOMQUILT

The Zoomquilt was created in 2004. The project was started by Nikolaus
Baumgarten and emerged from a scene of people creating collaborative patchwork
paintings together over the internet in the early 2000's on websites like
tiles.ice.org. It worked similiar to the surrealist drawing game Cadavre Exquis.
An artist would contribute a single tile of a patchwork painting called a
"Quilt". They would reserve a spot and get a frame with a border of the
neighboring tiles they had to blend their artwork into. The fun of it was to
pick up and transform what the other person left and see how the painting
evolved in unexpected ways.

Another inspiration for the Zoomquilt was the Gridcosm project, a similar
infinite collaborative picture started in 1997 and still ongoing. On Gridcosm,
anybody can contribute, which results in a very anarchic and chaotic picture.
The Gridcosm website wasn't animated back then and just displayed static images.
The goal of the Zoomquilt was to create a seamless animated infinite zoom
illusion. When the Zoomquilt first came out in October 2004, it immediately went
viral. The Zoomquilt was first released in Shockwave and Flash format, and
ported to modern web standarts in 2013.

In 2007 the successor Zoomquilt 2 was released. Nikolaus Baumgarten revisited
the concept again in 2015, together with Sophia Schomberg they created Arkadia,
a peaceful and lush botanical fantasy plant world. In 2022 Nikolaus Baumgarten
released a new successor Infinite Flowers.

Historically, the first infinite zoom animations can be found in the two movies
Cosmic Zoom by Eva Szasz and Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames, both 1968
and both based on the 1957 children's book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, which
deals with the relative size of things in the universe.