TonttuSETI
TonttuSETI 🌌
We are listening for other Tonttu out there...
A nightly broadcast from a small Finnish forest, painted in fractals, tuned by the sky.
What is TonttuSETI?
TonttuSETI is a generative art project. On a quiet desk somewhere in the Finnish woods, a small computer reads the sky and turns it into a five-minute hypnotic fractal video.
It listens to:
🌞 The Sun — solar flares, coronal mass ejections, sunspot count 🌍 The Earth — geomagnetic storms and the Schumann resonance, our planet's electromagnetic heartbeat 🌙 The Moon — phase, illumination, distance 📡 SETI sky-survey targets — random stellar coordinates currently being listened to for signs of life elsewhere
These numbers become the parameters of an evolving 3D fractal tunnel. The Sun's mood paints the highlights. The Moon tints the sky. Earth's pulse breathes the fog. A SETI target points the camera at a fresh corner of the universe.
No two days produce the same video.
Why "SETI"?
SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — points big radio dishes at the sky and listens patiently for signals from somewhere else.
TonttuSETI flips the antenna around. It is a small, slow, quiet broadcast. If any other Tonttu — gnome, kindred consciousness, fellow daydreamer — happens to be tuned to the same frequency, the signal is on the air.
Ant cannot see the elephant — TonttuSETI imagines that other Tonttu might exist on other planets, around other suns — and that fractal mathematics might be the common language between us. Numbers do not need translation. A spiral is a spiral everywhere.
What does it look like?
Each daily render is:
🎞️ Five minutes long — about 7,000 frames at HD resolution 🎨 Built from one of four rotating 3D fractal formulas — Mandelbulb, Mandelbox-Collatz hybrid, Aexion, and a benchmark hybrid ✨ Crossfaded together as 37 short sequences, each a different journey 🌌 Always a tunnel. Always moving. Always different.
Visual mood follows the day's data:
| Sky condition | Visual signature |
|---|---|
| ☀️ Quiet sun, new moon | Deep blues, soft fog, slow fly-throughs |
| 🔥 Solar flare, full moon | Warm amber sky, bright highlights, dense atmosphere |
| ⚡ High geomagnetic activity | Denser, more chaotic fractal structures |
| 🌐 Strong Schumann resonance | Wider glow, thicker volumetric fog |
The fractals themselves are not random — they are the same four mathematical objects that have been studied by the fractal art community for two decades. What changes daily is how the camera moves through them, and what the universe is doing while it does.
A note on the Schumann resonance
Between the Earth's surface and the lower edge of the ionosphere, lightning strikes excite a standing electromagnetic wave at roughly 7.83 Hz — the so-called Schumann resonance. It's been called "Earth's heartbeat", though more honestly it's the Earth thinking out loud during thunderstorms.
In TonttuSETI, this number breathes the fog. When the Earth is electromagnetically lively, the fractal atmosphere thickens. When the Earth is quiet, the camera flies through clearer space.
🔗 More about the Schumann resonance — Wikipedia
How to watch
Currently TonttuSETI plays as a private installation — projected on the wall of a Finnish forest cabin, accompanied by ambient sound, watched by passing Tonttu (and the occasional human visitor).
A sample reel and selected daily renders may be published here from time to time. If you find yourself watching one and feel something looking back — that's the point. 👁️
Tech, lightly
TonttuSETI is built entirely on open-source software running on a self-hosted Linux machine in a private home network. No cloud. No subscriptions. No telemetry.
🐍 Custom Python pipeline orchestrating data fetch, parameter mapping, frame generation, and video assembly 🎨 Mandelbulber2 — open-source 3D fractal renderer, GPU-accelerated 🎬 FFmpeg — frame sequence assembly and crossfade encoding 🛰️ Public open data only — NASA, SIDC, astropy, SETI sky targets
All output is open formats (MP4 / H.264). All source data is publicly available. Anyone with patience and a Linux box could build their own variant — and is warmly invited to.
Data sources & credits
| Source | Provides | Link |
|---|---|---|
| NASA DONKI | Solar flares, CMEs, geomagnetic storm index | 🔗 kauai.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/DONKI |
| SIDC (Royal Observatory of Belgium) | Monthly sunspot number | 🔗 sidc.be |
| astropy | Lunar ephemerides, illumination, phase | 🔗 astropy.org |
| SETI Institute | Observation context | 🔗 seti.org |
| Mandelbulber | 3D fractal rendering engine | 🔗 mandelbulber.com |
| FFmpeg | Video encoding | 🔗 ffmpeg.org |
🙏 With deep gratitude to the open-source communities behind each of the projects above, and to the public researchers who keep cosmic data freely available to all.
The bigger idea
TonttuSETI is a project to combine art and science — two languages, art and mathematics, used to listen to the language of the cosmos. It is a search for other Tonttu beyond time and space.
It is one node of TonttuWEB — a network of like-minded Tonttu, scattered across the universe, known and unknown. 🌌
If that resonates — welcome, tonttutoveri. 🌲