Still playing

This seems likely to turn into an actual series of related images, all sepia-toned and vignetted to indicate historic something-or-other. Or at least with suggestions of paper underlying the patterns.

Scribblings of My Misspent Youth



I've been thinking for some time about the question of whether or not fractals are really abstract. They're obviously not the same thing as a picture of, say, a person, or a still-life with fruit, but they're not just arbitrarily-placed colors and forms. Strictly speaking, I suppose a fractal is a graph of numerical data, a perfectly accurate picture of information. It's abstract the way a weather map or a stock chart is abstract—and arguably none of these things are abstract at all, being representations of real things. (Are pure numbers real? That's a still more difficult question, to which I suspect the answer is mu.)

But with the addition of the Spirograph patterns, I'm illustrating something more concrete: one of the more important influences of my childhood. And so the series of hypotrochoid fractals takes on all sorts of connotations. It's about nostalgia, and trying to recapture the good bits of one's own life. It's about how children learn the world, and find that complexity is hidden even in the things given to them as trivial toys. And it's about the tendency of adults to consistently, patronizingly, underestimate the intelligence of anyone under five feet tall.