These Gosper Fish are schooling, and in their frenzy form a special formation. The fish, which come in two forms, create two interlocking figures, dark and light - the Gosper Flowsnake. The fish have a golden lateral line, this line traces out the Gosper curve, from the lower left to the lower right. The fish inhabit a watery universe which has two flows of dark water and light water, the dark and light figures grow out of these bodies of water.
The Gosper curve is a space filling curve discovered by William Gosper (1943-), an American computer scientist in 1973, and was introduced by Martin Gardner (1914- 2010) in 1976 in his column in Scientific American. I first made it into the tessellation that eventually became CONFLUENCE II, but I was keen to make a new version where the design of the tessellation could express the tiling with the minimum of means. This is the result of that brief, two fish, their lateral line to denoting the path, their direction matching the direction of the path. They swim head to tail, their shading picking up the interlocking motif of the fractal when seen from a distance, but up close the colouring feels natural to the fish.
This aluminium version is FlowFish III, the paper version in greens and blues is FlowFish II while FlowFish I is a gilded version in red and blue.
