Precedents: Fractal Art

 Fractals are an excellent example of patterns. Created with algorythms, fractals are images made up of hundreds, thousands, or even billions of repeating shapes to create beautiful pieces of art.

Excerpt from Wikipedia that can invaraibly describe the concept far better than I could:

Fractal art is a form of algorithmic art created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, and media. Fractal art is usually created indirectly with the assistance of fractal-generating software, iterating through three phases: setting parameters of appropriate fractal software; executing the possibly lengthy calculation; and evaluating the product. In some cases, other graphics programs are used to further modify the images produced. This is called post-processing.

Fractal art comes from uses fractal designs. Fractals are any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size.^[1] There are many different kinds of fractal images and can be subdivided into several groups.