It feels like there's been a particular surge lately of quality digital art hyperlinks, which make the cut over on my twitter/delicious feeds but I don't quite have time to blog about. To save them from the abyss of social network ephemerality, here's a digest of the highlights.

• The Mandelbulb, breathtaking renderings of 3D fractal forms - frightening in their organicness. Eerily reminiscent of the Romanesco cauliflower.
• Jonathan Zawada is an Australian designer and illustrator, incorporating influences both psychedelic and mathematical. He also makes the masterly move of explicitly acknowledging these influences in his "cliffnotes" sidebar. Win!
• Osmos is a really, really sexy-looking ambient game based on particle interactions. Soundtracked by Loscil, Gas, Biosphere and more.
• When naming the mascot for their much-vaunted Go language, Google obviously weren't aware of 1980s UK kids TV. Compare: Gordon the Gopher vs Gordon the Gopher. Oops.
• The parallax-glitch interface to Daniel Leyva's portfolio needs to be experienced. Great concept, and executed with no use of Flash whatsoever.
• Continuing the psychedelia note, Fred Tomaselli creates explosions of colour and multiplicity which threaten to do strange things to your consciousness. Really want to see these paintaings in the flesh.

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German scholar, priest, inventor and polymath, whose life was spent harvesting the world's knowledge and republishing prodigious amounts of texts on his research (in total, 44 books and countless other manuscripts). When not designing early machines, theorizing the existence of disease-causing micro-organisms or lowering himself down into active volcanos, he could be found producing magnificently detailed and beautiful illustrations of his ideas.

One such idea was the notion of a parabolic horn which could amplify sound waves for the enjoyment of listeners - a thought which eventually proved exceedingly popular.

A collection of Kircher's illustrations has recently been published in beautiful hardback form. Online, Stanford offer a huge archive of his works; unfortunately, it's locked away in the widely unsupported DjVu format, with buggy browser plugins not helping proceedings. Better is this Flickr stream, which collects a great deal of images in decent resolution.

Until recently, there existed an Athanasius Kircher Society, which collected together esoterica of Kircher's ilk. Now defunct, a new and equally exciting endeavour has risen in its place: Atlas Obscura, a compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica. Kind of like a geographical Taryn Simon, it's a distributed, visually rich investigation into weird locations around the world.