The Zoomquilt was originally released in Macromedia Shockwave and Flash format, and ported to modern web standarts in 2013 by Nikolaus Baumgarten. Historically, the first infinite zoom animations can be found in the two movies Cosmic Zoom by Eva Szasz and Powers of Ten by Ray and Charles Eames, both 1968 and both based on the 1957 children's book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, which deals with the relative size of things in the universe. Nikolaus Baumgarten revisited the concept again in 2015, together with Sophia Schomberg they created Arkadia, a peaceful and lush botanical fantasy plant world. In 2007 the successor Zoomquilt II was released. When the Zoomquilt first came out in 2004, it immediately went viral. The goal of the Zoomquilt was to create a seamlessly animated and coherent illusion. The viewer of Gridcosm also wasn't animated back then. On Gridcosm, anybody can contribute, which results in a very anarchic and chaotic picture.

One direct inspiration for the Zoomquilt was the Gridcosm project, a similar infinite collaborative picture started in 1997 and still ongoing. The fun of it was to pick up and transform what the other person left and see how the painting evolved in unexpected ways. They would reserve a spot and get a frame with a border of the neighboring tiles they had to blend their artwork into. An artist would contribute a single tile of a patchwork painting called a 'Quilt'. It worked similiar to the surrealist drawing game Cadavre Exquis. On the platform people would collaborate on digital paintings.

The project was started by Nikolaus Baumgarten and emerged from a scene of people creating collaborative artworks over the internet in the early 2000's surrounding the digital art group iCE.

Zoom app images