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I wrote a ray tracer. You will probably see this piece of art as a picture, but I think of it as a computer program. Think of a kaleidoscope: when you look through its window, you see but one facet, one component of the toy. The kaleidoscope's beauty is extrinsic to the picture it presents: its beauty is in how its symmetry and endless variation arises from three mirrors and a few bits of plastic. In the same way, a few lines of code can create a scene like this.
Not a spectacular picture, but I learned a lot from making it.
Tech specs. It was written in Haskell. The shader is based on the model of Ashikhmin and Shirley. I used force-directed layout to place the octahedra. Normal interpolation was used to make the octahedron faces appear slightly roundish.
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