Burning down/out ?

The fall semester is over, hooray. I started this term with the idea that I would try to incorporate some fractals into the things I was doing at school, and did, in some small ways, succeed at this. But somehow I'm still unhappy about the whole question of fractals, and I still haven't quite put my finger on why.

They do always have a certain sameness, and that's part of my dissatisfaction. But I think the real difficulty is larger and wider-ranging and also more nebulous than the simple fact of fractals being computer-generated and therefore predictable. There's the question of what they mean. Are they abstract? Well, not exactly. They're a completely accurate picture of a very complicated and tedious bit of math. Even if I were to post-process the original image, all the filters are still algorithmic in nature, so the end product is a sort of insanely complicated and glorified graph. These I find pleasing (sometimes), but they're tough to explain to an audience of math-phobic or math-bored artists, or to the general public.

Then there's the larger question of whether art even has to mean something. I don't have a good answer for that one. Not even a definite personal philosophy, really. I could argue it either way.

A lot of the fractals I make are pretty, too. Hell, a lot of the non-fractal art I make is pretty. One of my final critiques this semester was that the installation I'd made looked like it could be a Christmas decoration. Pretty still seems to be a bad word in the current art scene. Or maybe it's just at my school. In any case, it leaves me at a certain disadvantage. I'm not much interested in the sentimental kinds of prettiness associated with, say, Disney or Hallmark, but I definitely prefer harmonious color combinations to harsh jarring ones. I like subtlety. I'd rather be calmed or inspired by art than confronted with hostility. And all of that stuff shows up in the things I make. I hope for strength in my work, but not brute force.

Now that I think about it, maybe it's the brute force aspect of fractals I do dislike. All those calculations are right there in your face, reminding you that you're not a computer or rendering engine, but just another human being trying to make sense of the world.

For the Solstice, I made a cake shaped like a Yule log. Tonight, I've made a fractal that looks like the burnt remains.

Embers



I'm almost tempted to call my semester's experiment a failure, and decide that I'm just done with fractals. Let them go, let them be simply a part of my past. But maybe there's something more I need to try. I will have to consider the possibilities, before the new semester starts.