Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Rainbows are also easy, unicorns less so

On the same general principles as my recent valentine-ish thing, another single-layer Mandelbrot zoom.

untitled [hearts mandala]



This one may get photo-etched and added to the series, or it may not. I haven't decided whether or not I want to explicitly include any imagery of the hearts-and-flowers variety. Is that what makes fractals so difficult to take seriously? That they're really good at making groovy flowers and rainbows and such? That once you dig deeply enough into the giant pile of numbers, you start finding cute?

And indeed, they are remarkably bad at conveying the kinds of social issues that are currently considered important. I would no doubt find it quite difficult to construct a fractal that would clearly convey the idea of "contested election" or "housing market crash" or even "walk/don't walk." Probably it could be done, but it would take some serious mangling, and maybe even something really unnatural like imported images. It would lack the simplicity of pattern that these one-layer zooms have.

Bah, I suppose there's more to it than that.

No comments: