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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXvar-4M6VA

I actually have some of this, only a small vial of it though. It does look pretty cool around a magnet, but i want a vat of the stuff and whole room full of electromagnets after watching this!

crazy stuff, have seen it before,  but have no idea how they do it, the fluid seems to be somehow magnetic :D ferrofluid ... hmmm ...

I operate an electromagnetic crane at work, it has two massive electromagnets (aprox. 0.5 ton each one) but unfortunately I don't think I could bring one home :)
Btw, when steel dust attaches to them, it forms interesting shapes...

hard workin man kali :D, lol i imagine a guy handling ton-weights and thinking about fractals! splendid!

so, to the fluid, how could i build something like that ? i need a bottle of this magnetic fluid, and then i but an electromagnet with a certain shape into it ?
would love having a spring in my room like this to play with! ... lols and i could find a use in my show as well for sure ;)

That seems to be all there is to it. I have looked into how to make ferrofluid, as it is quite expensive and even contacted the suppliers, who seem very wary about giving me the information. (Fair enough they want to protect their investment and business). But yes it seems that simply getting a lot of ferrofluid and sitting an electromagnet in it is all you have to do. Beware - I bought a small vial of this and a larger bottle for my girlfriends birthday (she is crazy about magnets!) We took some of the fluid from the larger bottle and put in a shallow tray then played with putting magnets underneath it. Very good fun until the tray got knocked over. This stuff gets everywhere and is a real pain to clear up.

Oh there actually are recepies for this kind of stuff.
Afaik it's essentially very fine iron dust in some sort of oil or variations of that.
Just google around a bit and you'll sure find some recepies.

so that's how your computer has time to render stuff.

It was quite a while ago now, so maybe there are some recipes about now. We found a few sites and got some fine iron dust, but the dust needs to be nanoscale and all completely coated in a surfactant to stop them clumping together and then suspended in a carrier fluid. We had tried a few different things, but none of them worked in the same way as the quantity I had bought. It was the lack of the surfactant that seemed to be the problem, and finding out what is used and how the particles should be coated was fruitless and so seemed pretty futile for a home brew project, so we gave up. Mind you as I said that was some time ago now so I might have to go trawl the tinterweb and hunt down this illusive surfactant.

yeah, what you can come up with on your own likely is not the same quality you could buy.
Though DIY ppl are becomming better at this and at the same time, the price to acquire a ferro-fluid should be dropping as it becomes easier to manufacture.

http://www.magnet-shop.com/Accessories/Ferrofluid-|-liquid-iron-10-ml::1160.html (http://www.magnet-shop.com/Accessories/Ferrofluid-|-liquid-iron-10-ml::1160.html)

when you buy at least 0,2l only 770,-EUR per liter. ;D