Form Follows Function: a fractal art sketchbook

Hello (again) World

2010-09-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

Don't know if anybody's still out there reading, but just in case...

This was a useful sketchbook in its time, and now I'm closing it and starting some new ones. Not thinking so much about Art (which still always makes me feel like I've crawled through a sewer pipe), or even just art (which is less overwhelmingly slimy).

Instead, I've been playing with toys. Got out the remaining pieces of my old Spirograph earlier this year, messed with them for a while, was given a much more deluxe Spirograph than I'd ever had as a kid, messed with that a whole bunch, and eventually decided it was time to learn how to get things laser-cut. So then I spent a couple of months designing my own version of a spirograph. I made the pieces bigger, and fixed some small problems with pen-hole-alignment that had always bugged me with the original. The process of laser fabrication opened up lots of really cool and exciting possibilities that I hadn't been expecting when I started out, so that's been fun.

It's still a work in progress, but the first three-fifths (of stage one) are available here: Velocipede's Cycloidal Scribbling-Engine.

Some pictures, Scribbling-Engine and otherwise, are available on Tumblr: mrvelocipede.tumblr.com. I've even been doing a few fractals again lately.

So that's where I am, if anyone's wondering. Thanks for visiting, everyone!

Not known at this address

2010-02-25T09:47:00.001-08:00

...Whereupon our correspondent disappeared from the internet without a trace, and was never seen or heard from again. Poof.

A large number of real-world complications have kept me away from posting, actually. And I'm increasingly dissatisfied with both fractals and art in general, which means that I'm not likely to come back to it anytime soon. At this stage of things, I can't really tell if I've given up in disgust, and am entirely done, or if it's just that I need a serious break after the relentless grind of school and the burst of activity that followed it. So I'm telling myself that this is a sabbatical. A sabbatical of indefinite duration.

And maybe eventually I'll start making pictures again.

Hilarious is my middle name

2010-01-09T21:33:00.000-08:00

It's probably a little early in the season for this, but there keep being delays and problems with the project I've been working on, so as a short break I've added a bunch of Valentine fractals to the gallery. There were a few there already, but I've discovered that I had a surprising number from way back when. I think they were mostly made for an e-card site that a friend of mine ran for a couple of years. And then, in opening and rendering the parameter sets, of course I ended up messing with them and making a few more.

The standard Valentine heart is such an iconic shape that it's tricky to put into fractals. It doesn't take very much distortion before it turns into a liver or a spleen or something instead. And it's kind of inherently cheesy and mawkish, full of memories of grade-school Valentine parties with messily hand-glued paper doilies and those chalky, inedible conversation hearts. Or worse, the high-school version, where you might actually hope for chocolates-and-flowers romance, and of course that doesn't happen so you wear all black and spend the day being sullen and everyone makes fun of you. Ahh, nostalgia.

These days I find that I quite enjoy the campy exuberance of sticking fat red cartoony hearts into my pictures. I tell myself that it's out of character, but I think I'm probably mistaken.

This one didn't make it onto the main gallery, though, because it turned out to be a little too foil-wrapped and sticky. So it's going in the sketchbook instead.

Harlequin Valentine

A project for the new year

2010-01-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

The Professor and I have been writing code for several days now, and have gotten most of a very rough version of my Exciting Fractal Project assembled. It's almost far enough along that it could be considered alpha-test, though beta is still some ways off.

Having gotten this far, I am now reaching the stage where I start to completely panic and second-guess myself. What if this is a completely stupid idea? I ask. What if no one wants to play with my internet toy? And the huge, glaringly obvious question of How do I prevent this from turning into a ~~horrible snake pit~~ bunch of tedious longwinded squabbling?

Because the whole point of this thing I'm building is that it should be pleasantly entertaining (or indeed quite silly), and should provide a small, steady dose of interesting pictures and a small amount of feedback on same. I don't want to build it and then have it turn into either a sad ghost town or a battlefield. Neither of those is the kind of fun I'm interested in, so I'm struggling with questions of how much participation is enough for people to be interested, and how much is too much, and allows loud shouty people to just take over. I worry that what I'm planning is the equivalent of going down to the bus stop and inviting all the hobos (and that dude who appears to smoke crack every day at lunchtime) to come visit me for tea.

But at least I'm working on it! Progress is being made. This is me reminding myself to dive in, and worry about hypothetical stinging jellyfish later.

Plunge

Running out of oughts

2009-12-31T13:24:00.000-08:00

We've made it to the end of another year; time to fill the air with showers of confetti and sparks. The blue moon is already up there, quietly taking care of itself.

Blue New

It's amazing to think that's it's going to be 2010 tomorrow. When I was a kid, the idea of a year with a 2 at the beginning of it seemed impossibly far away, some kind of fantastic science-fictional future. Now that we've had ten of them, the future has become the present, and an awful lot of it is disappointingly ordinary. But then I have to remind myself that I can type things that appear on a magical glowing screen, and push a button, and then people on the other side of the world can see them more or less instantly. And if I want to, I can carry around a thing smaller than my hand, that lets me access the world's largest and most random reference library. That's pretty awesome.

Turn the crank

2009-12-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

This is a small offshoot of a project I'm working on: a distraction which turned out to be quite nice on its own.

untitled [mecha-noir]

Silent night

2009-12-25T18:33:00.000-08:00

It's been a beautiful clear day, not really cold enough to be icy, but with that perfect winter clarity of light. I love how quiet and deserted the city is on holidays: empty streets, empty parking lots, strange but restful stillness in every direction.

untitled [winterurban]

Merry Christmas to the internet, and to the internet a good night.

Happily, the snow is on the other coast

2009-12-19T22:05:00.000-08:00

Oof, I seem to have abandoned fractals lately in favor of typesetting, furniture-moving, and hibernation. This is always my least-productive time of year. I'll be awfully happy once we get past the solstice and the light starts to increase again.

Here is a picture made during some weather that seemed especially dark and inexorable.

Event Horizon

Zoomable!

2009-12-11T20:53:00.000-08:00

Finally, with some help from my able assistant (who knows how to talk to the terminal window) I've gotten the process working, and put a large zoomable fractal online. If this one seems to work out all right, and doesn't give my web host trouble, I'll do some more.

Rusting Dragon

This was one of my contest entries. I like the metallic texture that becomes visible when the picture is magnified, and I also like the sort of hunched, brooding quality of the thing. It reminds me both of the shipping cranes down in the industrial end of town, and of my cat, when she's tensely coiled and watching pigeons. Motionless, but with the sense that it might do something if you turned your back and didn't watch it too closely. Or that it's only standing still because it's been there for an enormously long time, in all sorts of weather, and all its gears and pulleys have corroded and fused themselves into immobility.

Here we are again

2009-12-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Home again, to all my favorite domestic conveniences. Here is a picture in honor of our beloved Coffee Engine (although strictly speaking, it refers equally well to tea, chocolate, or even cola).

Dark Stimulant

I'm completely torn between Pittsburgh and Seattle lately. Pittsburgh is where I grew up; it has wonderful decaying-industrial architecture, rents seem ridiculously low, and many of my favorite people live there. Seattle, on the other hand, has a huge amount of delicious local food, a lovely temperate climate (only it's cold lately!), and plants that don't make me sneeze & itch for ten months out of the year. Now that I'm done with school, it's my big chance to decide where I want to end up establishing myself, and I can't decide where I want to be. Somewhere else entirely, perhaps.

Tinsellitis

2009-12-04T19:06:00.001-08:00

All is madness and chaos. I'm slinging a couple of quick pictures onto the internet before I leave town. Man, I mostly can't stand holidays in their usual overwhelming & commercial form, but that doesn't stop me making pictures of them.

Evergreen Holiday

Aluminum Holiday

Fortunately, this upcoming trip isn't actually for the holiday. So I'll be able to get home and go back into hiding before the full onslaught hits.

Great works of art and the miserable books about them

2009-11-27T22:57:00.000-08:00

Oh man, this horrible book. I keep wishing I could somehow just sum it up in a couple of pithy, brief paragraphs, but so far it hasn't worked. And the more energy I spend thinking about it, the less I bother to make pictures, so that it threatens to cut off my productivity altogether. (Although it has also gotten me away from the computer for a bit, so maybe that's not so bad.)

I suppose the main thing that's on my mind is how much the writing reminds me of a number of troll-ish blogs I've come across over the last several years, and also the similarly troll-ish (is there an equivalent non-internet word for such behavior?) people I've had run-ins with during my time at art school. It's that what the author says he's doing and what he's actually doing are two very different things. Here are three excerpts from the preface:

"In order to make this book effective, it is necessary that some strong statements should be made, in order that certain truths should sink into the public mind. But no statement will be made merely to create a sensation; life is too short for such stupidity."

"I have no private axe to grind, no grouch to ventilate, since I am content with my modicum of success in life and art."

"I trust the public will regard as entirely unprejudiced the views I shall lay before it as to what constitutes a work of art, and what makes it truly great."

Ruckstull definitely makes strong statements. He hardly does anything else, in fact. He spends chapter after chapter repeating all the (two or three) reasons why his half-dozen least favorite artists are sadists, symbolic sadists, masochists, suffering from mental degeneration, or otherwise crazy. He has one chapter titled "The Gospel of Ugliness" in which the author is listed as "Mephistopheles," which turns the rise of "degenerate art" into some kind of epic battle of Biblical proportions. I would argue that this particular chapter is largely meant to create sensation. (I suspect it's also meant to be humorous, but mostly it just sounds like the guy is getting really carried away with his own cleverness.)

It's hard to tell whether or not he really is content with his own successes. I don't get the impression that he is. There's a chapter of biographical information at the end, in which he describes a number of ambitious sculptural projects and laments the impossibility of finding anyone to sponsor or fund them. And his writing seems full of angry bitterness at the undeserved fame and success of various Modernists, particularly his fellow sculptor, Rodin. He devotes an entire chapter ("Deformation of Form a Menace") to a lengthy discussion of Rodin's character, morals, and personal habits, and seems to have a very specific personal grudge against the man.

Given what his writing is like, it seems unlikely that the public would regard him as unprejudiced. I'm not exactly his intended audience, since I'm living in the wrong era, and since he does specifically say that the book is meant for people without formal art training, but even without that, his not-quite-logic and apparent obsessive hatred of a small number of people and specific styles does not seem unbiased or detached. He seems to have some delusions of grandeur, too. "We have no hesitancy in saying that we regard this definition of art as the most important slogan ever announced in the world of art." (p.89) I suppose it's possible that Ruckstull was famous and influential enough, in his day, to be able to make a statement like that, but even if that was the case, it seems awfully arrogant. There's a similar section (which now I can't find again) where he's really pleased with himself for being the first artist in the history of the world to have come up with some idea or other. Which is unlikely to the point of being ridiculous.

So, with all that in mind, I find it's not at all surprising to discover that the chapters of the book were originally articles in a magazine that Ruckstull founded and published himself. Aha! It's a zine, at least in the sense of being a self-published work of minority interest. And the number of subscriptions was "not sufficient to make the Magazine sustaining" (p.ix) which means he was basically a blogger with not too many readers outside his own circle of friends.

What I really want to know, now, is how he managed to get picked up by a real publisher. My copy of the book says Garden City Publishing Company which Wikipedia says is part of Doubleday. And somebody apparently reprinted it recently enough for it to turn up on Amazon.

I think I've got most of the analysis out of my system now. Maybe soon I can go back to making pictures.

No bulbs, just flat

2009-11-18T22:28:00.000-08:00

Wow, I've finally finished reading Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great. By the end it was more like skimming than reading, and even more like picking through a sticky heap of chicken entrails in hopes of reading someone's fortune. An unpleasant bunch of prose, especially when taken in large continuous doses. I definitely have one more installment to write about the book, but I'm taking a break from it for now.

There seems to be all sorts of excitement lately about the Mandelbulb formula. Lots of interesting pictures to look at. I tried one of the formulas myself, but my computer is way too old and slow for me to do any reasonable exploring. The eighth-power bulb pictures did make me curious about what an eighth-power regular old-fashioned Mandelbrot would be like, and since I've never done much messing with higher-power Mandelbrots I thought I'd have a look.

They're less immediately satisfying to zoom into the the standard power-two image. They're so dense with little seven-lobed minibrots that there's practically no room for them to develop the intricate patterns that you usually see. But by zooming fairly deeply, some interesting forms do appear.

untitled [mandel^8]

Anarchy reigns in the world of art today*

2009-11-12T22:28:00.000-08:00

After four semesters of art history classes, one of the biggest questions I had was "Wait a minute, what exactly was such a big deal about Modernism anyway?" We had looked at a fair number of the better-known Impressionist paintings, and proceeded from there through Matisse and Mondrian and Picasso and the usual famous names, and it all seemed like just a bunch of familiar, slightly dull stuff. More dates to memorize. The teacher was telling us that it was really earth-shaking and revolutionary, but since I'd been seeing these paintings reproduced on a million coffee mugs and tote bags and umbrellas my whole life, that didn't make any sense to me at all.

(Good heavens, the ludicrous verbosity of the book I've been reading seems to have rubbed off a bit. Let me see if I can put this behind a cut.)

And then there was the question of the giant gap in the timeline: art history classes start with the caves at Lascaux, and go through the styles of Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Baroque, and then sort of skim over Neo-Classical and briefly mention Romanticism. And then all of a sudden you're elbow-deep in the beginning of the twentieth century, wondering what happened. The Impressionists were actually late nineteenth-century, but the Baroque had mostly finished by the beginning of the eighteenth century, which left about a hundred and fifty years unaccounted for. What were artists doing then, that set things up for Impressionism to be shocking? Surely the painters didn't all just decide to sit those decades out and loaf around drinking wine or something.

I was too busy and distracted to think about it much at the time, but over this past summer I found (at the Goodwill of all places!) an edition of the book that had been my art history text, only this was the first one, from 1926. Art Through the Ages, an Introduction to its History and Significance, by Helen Gardner, A. M. So I was slowly working my way through that, and finding it very gentle, pleasant reading compared to the more recent art commentary I'd had to slog through, when just a couple of weeks ago I found an even more interesting book: Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great, by F. W. Ruckstull. That's the book that's currently in the process of turning by brain completely inside out, and making more sense of the Modernist movement than any part of art school ever did.

It's an enormous volume, resembling a dictionary in size and bulk. Its stated purpose is to educate the general public in the correct methods of looking at and judging works of art. What it actually does is spend hundreds of pages shouting violently about how terribly hideous, dangerous, insane, degenerate, and wrong the Modernist movement is. Ruckstull was a sculptor, and very much a part of the old established culture of art that the current histories never mention. He accepts nothing but smoothly idealized realistic depictions of human beings and landscapes. He believes that the highest (and only appropriate) function of art is to uplift the spirit of mankind, so as to create a paradise on earth, for the greater glory of God and the human race.

At least I think that's what he's getting at. His prose isn't terribly easy to wade through. But it's clear that he feels very strongly about abstract art. On page 213 he says:

"Abstract," inscrutable, incomprehensible art, therefore, is naught but the product of artists who have gone mad, or who have turned charlatans, and are engaged in "putting over" on the public such "creations" as appeal only to abnormal morons or to speculative, gambling collectors of exotic, weird, pathological things, a class of men of whom there is, unfortunately, always a sufficient number, in the insanity breeding metropolises of the world, from Paris to Tokio and from Peking to New York, and who, sooner or later, unload their collected "creations" on other collectors, until they end by finding houseroom with some dealer in "junk," along with desiccated heads from Peru; dried starfish from China; and rotting mummies from the Nile; and, finally, pass out into oblivion!

It's quite a wonderful description, actually. I like the idea of my own abstract artwork being tucked away in some abandoned warehouse along with a bunch of dried starfish and heads and things.

But he's concerned that maybe this stuff isn't going to be as easily forgotten as he thinks it should. The art that so revolted him wasn't showing any signs of quietly, tactfully, passing into oblivion. In fact, a bit earlier in that same chapter, it was worrying him. From page 204:

This would not be so reprehensible and so dangerous socially if, in the propaganda in favor of this newest aberration, they did not try to undermine the foundations of all sane, healthy, and enduring art, by saying that "representation" has no place in art, even idealized art; that sanely stylized "representation" is totally undesirable; and that creation in art means that the abstraction from the truth of nature should be so extreme that a man is made to look like a wheelbarrow and a woman like a monkey-wrench! And this topsy-turveying is defended by such glib, metaphysical-bunco reasoning, so plausibly done, so well calculated to capture the nouveau-riches morons in the art world, and so many of them as to become dangerous, that we feel it a duty to once for all show the fallacy of the doctrine that representation should not be the basis of all art, especially since the speculators, who have loaded up a stock of this art junk, are now making herculean efforts to force our museums to buy more and more of these aberrations, to show to future generations the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, which prevailed in the world, from 1864 onward!

Horror! The public was buying it! The museums were gathering it into their collections, and corrupting themselves hopelessly thereby! In fact, the new stuff was getting way more attention than his own pure and high-minded work.

And suddenly Modernism makes much more sense to me. If Mr. Ruckstull is a representative of the art establishment of his time, I can't imagine a more perfect target for ridicule. He gets all upset over relatively minor things (like an early sculpture of Rodin's, which was the realistic portrait of a common working man, instead of an idealized god or hero), and so the obvious temptation is to do weirder and more shocking things, just to see how loud he'll squawk. Any kid who's ever dealt with a stuffy teacher or parent or sibling knows this. And of course the public was getting a lot of entertainment out of the bizarre new art, too. Not only did they have unusual new things to look at, but they got to have strong opinions of their own, for or against, and get really passionate about it. I imagine in some ways it must have been a little bit like cheering on your favorite sports team, but with added bonus points for being cultured and up-to-date.

There's lots more to say about Ruckstull. I have a theory of my own, which is that he was a sort of proto-blogger, working within the limits the available technology. And I'm not done with the book yet, so who knows what else I'll turn up. For now, I will give it a rest, pausing only briefly to point out that it might improve the field of art criticism considerably if more people employed the term "bunco."

. . . . . . . . . . .

* First sentence of the Preface.

Hmmm.

2009-11-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

I've finally had a chance to take a better look at the contest, and I find that I'm left feeling a little bit let down or disappointed. Not with any individual image, necessarily (although as several people have pointed out, a couple of them aren't even really fractal), but that this year's selections seem to be heavily weighted toward texture-fields and minimalism.

"So, which one was your favorite?"

"Oh, I liked that one that was textured all over, mostly orange and white, with just a little blue."

"Yeah, that was my favorite too. We'd better make sure it gets printed."

The thing is, out of twenty-five winners, do there really need to be three that fit this description?

With the more minimal ones, I mostly just wonder what advantage there is in printing them very large, since there's not particularly any new detail to be revealed. Graphically, they will no doubt be quite effective, but they seem to ignore the specific potential of fractals to be full of interesting surprises when magnified.

It's all gotten me started thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of fractals as a medium, and why I like them, which seems to be maybe different than why other people like them, and what the implications are for my own future work and the fractal-art world in general. It's too much for me to process! And it's all mixed up with a book I'm reading lately, written in the early 1920s and intended to explain why Modernism was (a) degenerate & evil and (b) doomed to be quickly forgotten. There seem to be some possible historical parallels, but I suspect it's going to take me some time to sort them out.

Still, it does reinforce my idea that it would be really good if there were more fractal events than just this occasional big contest. I'm beginning to wonder if I might be able to organize some kind of small-scale thing. It's an intimidating thought.

Less grit, more dissolve

2009-11-07T22:26:00.000-08:00

One more, the same flavor.

untitled [glowing phoenix]

And the contest results have been posted, so there's a big pile of new pictures to look at. Hooray!

I really do wish there were more fractal events. Not huge major contests, necessarily, but some kind of regular checking-in kind of thing. I'm not sure what format I would want it to have; the main thing is that I like when there are a whole bunch of new pictures to look at all at once, and I would be glad if it happened more often. Every so often I go look at the fractal section at DeviantArt, but it's not sorted out very well, and I get tired of wading through all the anime sketches on scanned notebook paper. And I hate the site's graphic design, so I don't go there very often in any case.

Hard gritty rainbows

2009-11-05T22:14:00.000-08:00

I think a large part of the fascination with these grainy inside fractals is how difficult I find them. The Mandelbrot set, by now, is quite familiar: I've explored it very thoroughly, and learned a lot about how its patterns fit into each other. I know it well enough that I can fairly reliably navigate to any kind of pattern I decide to look for. With coloring methods, too, many of them have become familiar enough to be very precisely controlled, which is what allows me to make those literal, illustrative images that I still can't decide whether I like or not.

But these Nova insides are unknown territory, strange and foggy, and (at least so far) nearly impossible to get a grip on. Patterns stack up on top of each other, sliding in and out of focus as the maxiter changes. It's clear that they're following some kind of deeply-structured logic, but so far I haven't been able to understand it well enough to predict what it might do in any given spot.

So working with them is hard. And it turns out that I've been somehow craving something hard, something frustrating, something impossible to understand quickly. Maybe it's because I'm free of school. School was horrible in a whole bunch of ways, but it did at least give me a fair amount of hard stuff to bash at.

I have conversations with the Professor sometimes, usually around exam time, when his students are complaining bitterly that things are too hard. And I sympathize, except that when I'm only doing easy things, it's as though I can feel my brain cells shriveling up. Doing something hard helps keep me in shape, so that I don't turn into a sad dull boring person, full of complaints about how hard everything is.

With these two images, I'm trying to see if some of my comfortable, familiar techniques (like the three-layer spectra) can be used on any of these infuriating sandy fractals.

Dragon & Phoenix Soup

Chain Reaction

Infinite exoskeletons

2009-11-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

This is really a better Halloween image than yesterday's. It's all full of centipedes and crawly wriggly things.

Medusa

I'm still wandering around the extra-relaxed, exponentially-smoothed insides; this one's a PhoenixDoubleNova. They're so incredibly full of detail that framing an image becomes very difficult. There's stuff everywhere, and in a lot of areas the density is fairly uniform, so there's nothing to act as a focal point. Not very many coloring methods work well on the insides of sets, either, so there aren't too many options for getting variety in the layers. It becomes more a matter of changing the gradient density and the maximum iterations, and then just a lot of exploring to find good places.

I seem to remember reading once that astronauts wanting to take pictures from space ran into similar difficulties. When you're in orbit around the earth, it doesn't matter which direction you point a camera, because there's always something spectacular. Foreground, background, everywhere, all around. Sometimes working with fractals feels that way too.

All Hallows' Eve

2009-10-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

Bonfire Sparks

Another Double Nova inside image. This one is mostly Pseudo Lyapunov instead of Exponential Smoothing.

Following Columbus in a rowboat

2009-10-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

Aha! I think maybe I am starting to get the hang of this a bit.

Mysteries

And all I had to do was take a small wrench to the Exponential Smoothing. It's always pleasing when that works.

Lightbending

2009-10-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

I've been working on uploading fractals from 2002 to my gallery, and finding many that are full of rainbows. That must have been when I first started experimenting with my three-layer technique. I remember being all interested in atmospheric optics around that time, so probably that was what inspired me to try making pictures with that kind of look.

And it also reminded me that I've been meaning to write a page about how to put spectra into fractals, and now I have. I hope somebody out there may find it useful.

Here's a new fractal that I made while I was messing with some of the tutorial images.

Glass Rings

Quantum effects

2009-10-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

Today I came across an interesting page about aliasing artifacts, and it got me thinking about artifact patterns as applied to fractal art. Where does this op-art, moiré effect come from? Well, it's all because of quantum, you see. Writers of popular fiction like to use quantum as a sort of shorthand for stuff that's way too scientific and complicated for us to explain or you to understand, but it's actually quite simple when you remember that quantum has to do with quantity. A quantum is a small discrete unit of something. In physics, the something is physical matter or maybe energy, and the weirdness associated with the word comes from the fairly weird behavior of tiny discrete particles (or maybe waves) of energy (or maybe matter). Really, it's probably too scientific and complicated for me to explain.

But in thinking about on-screen digital images, the quantum is the perfectly familiar and understandable pixel, the small discrete dots of light that make up the picture. And the weirdness comes from the inability of computers to display any details smaller than will fit into one pixel. If the image has some black and white stripes that get smaller than one pixel wide, the computer will use various methods to guess whether any given pixel (which really contains part of a black stripe and part of a white stripe) should be all-black or all-white. This means that the patterns are completely scale-dependent: if you add more pixels, more detail will fit; the computer's guesses change, and the pattern changes also. Maybe it resolves into lots of parallel fine lines, or nested concentric circles. Whatever happens, the original effect is altered or lost.

The (im)practical result of all this is that if you've made some interesting image full of aliasing artifacts, you can't print it at any size larger than a postage stamp. Or can you? I started wondering how it might be possible.

First I made this picture:

Quantum 400x400

Then I rendered it as a 1600x1600 Photoshop document in layers, leaving out the one with the aliased pattern. The pattern layer I exported as a separate file, 400x400 pixels, which I then re-sized without resampling, so as not to let it get all blurred. I dropped that into the appropriate place in the layered document, did a bit of tweaking and tidying, and got this:

Quantum 1600x1600

That seemed to work well, so I tried it again at 2400x2400, big enough to print an 8" square at 300dpi.

Quantum, printed

There doesn't seem to be any particular reason that the technique wouldn't work at even bigger sizes, although with any large file you do eventually run into the limits of your computer's memory. And there's the difficulty of merge modes. Ultra Fractal has some merges available that Photoshop doesn't, so some effects can't be duplicated precisely. For some kinds of images, it would be easier to render a single layer and simply scale it up. The large pixelation would lend itself well to some interesting non-computer interpretations, too: I can imagine amazing woodcuts, or intricate careful drawings on graph paper, or brilliant neo-pointillist gouaches. The thing I like about today's experiments, though, is that it combines the blocky old-school computerized look with the infinite fractal detail available. The gradients around the disc are smooth, the line of wavy blobs has its proper intricate edge, and there's some subtle texture in the inside region that shows up on the print.

Old Favorites

2009-10-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

The new fractal gallery is up and running, in a small way. If everything is working right, it won't look too enormously different than the old version, but the navigation and inner workings are substantially changed. Right now, what's in it are pictures from the first year and a half (or so) that I was making fractals. I have one or two small things to smooth out still, and then I'll be adding more pictures. So far I'm very pleased about how it's working; it's very easy to add new stuff. (And the stylesheets don't render properly in Internet Explorer 6! Of course! Bah phooey. No one should be using IE6 anymore anyway. This means you, Mom.)

It's been a little strange, going through all my archives of ancient fractals. I'm a little taken aback by the simplicity of color, the frequent clumsiness, the obvious lack of knowledge about the program. But at the same time, they have a kind of raw direct energy that seems good. And in some cases, I've been interested to see the beginnings of ideas that I now have spent many years developing in all sorts of directions. It's a sort of cross between archaeology and navel-gazing, and probably of no interest to anyone but myself.

This picture was made after I'd been using Ultra Fractal for less than a month, I think.

Chebyshev Avocado

Before UF, I'd spent a couple of months messing with Fractint, and the sharp-edged areas of bold color give the UF image a similar style.

So now I just have another eight years' worth of parameters to sort through, and decide what else to include. And a small amount of code still to tweak. I will probably need to make more tea.

How to shuffle the pictures

2009-10-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

And then there's my poor neglected website, which I've been feeling guilty about since before I started my senior year at Cornish. All summer I've been telling myself I need to add some new stuff to it, and I keep putting it off and not doing it.

Eventually I realized that I'm not updating it because it's a complete drag to update: I have to gather together some small collection of maybe-related images, arrange them in some suitable order, write a new HTML page (or at least dump them into the template), update links, etc. I practically always post things on this weblog instead, because it's much simpler and requires less thought.

I started thinking, "What I need is a gallery that works more like the rest of the internet. It can be more interactive, more content-driven, it can have an interface that's more responsive to the user." And then I said "Ew, you're thinking like a horrible graphic-designer marketing wonk. Stop that."

What it really needs to be is fun to play with. If it's fun to play with, I'll play with it, and so will my prospective audience. I can scrape off the clinging shreds of my graphic-design training, stop thinking like a damned artist, and just make internet time-waster toys instead.

So I've been turning my fractal gallery into a thing you can play with. It's nearly done. Tonight ~~it had a brief round of beta-testing~~ I sent the test-link to my mom and she said it was wonderful. So it will probably go officially live pretty soon.

Hooray!

Flame on

2009-10-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

Following the example of a couple of people on the UF mailing list, I wanted to try using an Apophysis-generated flame as an imported image. Flames, being of course fractal, tuck themselves rather neatly into the overall composition, and function more or less as texture. It seems like a good way to add a certain depth and complexity of color without piling up an unwieldy number of layers or adding a lot of slow-rendering distortion algorithms to the basic trap.

Gosh, this means I'm going to have to open up Apophysis again, and try to remember which bits I'd worked out how to use, and make some stuff to use as components. That would solve one of my ongoing difficulties with flame fractals, actually, which is that I'm never able to decide how they should be cropped, or how much of the edges should be visible. As a finished image, a flame often looks a little isolated and weird when the entire form is surrounded by an area of solid color. But zooming them is problematic, and I'm always sad to lose the overall shape of the thing; they have a kind of satisfying completeness when you can see how all the parts fit together into a coherent entity. As a plugged-in image trap, that wholeness would be an advantage.

untitled [flame trap test]

The flame I used in this one was almost perfectly circular, so it's not actually all that useful a test. But I didn't have one with a more irregular shape handy, because all my existing renders are too carefully cropped and zoomed. That'll teach me to try and frame things artistically.

How much is too much?

2009-10-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

My misgivings about the potential uses of the image importer are sorting themselves into two basic categories, thusly:

1. It's too easy.
2. It's too hard.

Unhelpful, that. The easiness is simply that once you learn the basic technique, there's nothing at all to stop you from dropping any image, or dozen images, into any fractal. This results in both a sort of whee, fun! effect, and the usual vague disquiet common to fractal art, the part that says this is way too easy and fun; I'm just sitting here pushing buttons, it can't possibly count as anything serious.

The hard part, though, is that you have to be careful about which pictures you use. They need to be fairly high resolution, even for a smallish screen-sized render, because the distortions introduced by the orbit trapping tend to magnify certain bits enormously, and the resulting pixelation can be quite noticeable. Once you have your high-resolution image, it has to be very carefully cleaned up in Photoshop (or equivalent) to get the alpha channel tidy. Even if the pixelation isn't a problem in the main part of the imported image, the edges can start looking ragged very quickly.

So in addition to needing some substantial background in using Ultra Fractal, you also need a reasonable familiarity with some graphics editor. And this is even before getting into questions of the aesthetic merit of the resulting conglomerations. Fractals are inherently complex things, and adding photographs to them is a whole new and different kind of complexity. A photograph of a single-colored object is never a single color; it has highlights and shadows and reflected colors from the surrounding environment, it has variations introduced by the lighting and noise from the film grain or CCD. It's made up of hundreds or even thousands of variations on the general palette, in shadings that may or may not be smooth. By comparison with photographs, I've been finding it kind of amazing to realize just how smooth and orderly fractals really are. In trying to combine the two, keeping the look and feel of the whole image consistent becomes more difficult because the intrinsic textures are so dissimilar.

I worry that the easy factors combined with the hard factors will produce an end result of many pictures made with little attention to the technical details. Heh, and having typed that, I realize that it's a perfectly good description of all fractal art, and indeed most digital art in general. Easy to do, not necessarily easy to do justice to. I should probably stop worrying about it, and just keep experimenting. Because, hey, whee fun!

I can follow up yesterday's introductory noisemaker with a full orchestral performance on the

Illuminated Musical Contraption

It may be worth pointing out that I have actually kept this one quite controlled. The color palette is restricted to a blue-orange-yellow split complement, and the overall composition is structured around a couple of major vertical arcs. However, in spite of my attempts at restraint, the effect is more or less completely ZOWIE BLAMMO, and the thing looks it should play a selection of Raymond Scott's greatest hits.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

2009-10-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

NOW APPEARING!

* The Wonderful Fractalodeon *
in full life-like color

The Like of Which has Never Previously Been Displayed.

Flourish

Baffles even the most learned
Professors
&
Men of Science.
Actually it seems to have put the Professor to sleep. Probably I should give the ballyhoo a rest, too. I am indebted to Wikipedia for the use of their French horn.

A light bulb

2009-10-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

Today I tried using the image import feature, for the first time since my couple of brief experiments when UF5 first came out. I'm still substantially intimidated by it, mainly because it adds such a large new dimension of possibilities to an already overwhelming number of choices. How in the world can I ever manage to decide what pictures I need infinitely many of?

I've gotten used to the idea of fractals being, for the most part, purely abstract. They don't necessarily need to mean anything, they just need to be arranged in pleasing compositions of color and shape. The thing about importing images is that it instantly changes the picture from abstract and non-threatening to concrete, specific, nailed-down and potentially fraught with meaning. Suddenly I have to think about concept, which I am exceedingly wary of. It's the sort of thing required by art school, and beloved of the kinds of artists I really dislike. I don't want my stuff to turn into Political!Art! all full of sleek graphical representations of talking-heads-of-state or Hitler's brain on drugs or what have you.

Except that I've also spent a fair amount of time in the last several months making fractals that are definitely illustrations, and approach something like recognizable. Sometimes I even have a concept in mind, much as I might hate to admit it.

So I figured it was time to drag out some of my favorite recurring motifs, the ones I'm comfortable with, and put them into fractals to see what they do. I started with this light bulb.

A Light Bulb

A Julia set introduced some nice distortions, making the shape more globe-like. But it's still quite recognizable, and not terribly interesting except that it makes kind of a good dark/light pattern.

Julia Bulbs

I had another fractal window open, with a different picture I'd been working on, an Ikenaga Roots-Mandel. So I tried pasting the image trap into one of the layers, and ended up with something like a steam-powered carpet slipper.

Brass Slippers

This one seems cheerfully bizarre enough that I'd like to pursue it further, and maybe add some layers with more images: say, a tuba or something. It would be fun to see if I could make some really ridiculous fractal contraptions. Or, y'know, talking-heads-of-state.

It's all done with mirrors

2009-10-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

...whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature...
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III scene ii

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Universe—some information to help you live in it.
1 AREA: Infinite.
...
6 ART: None.
The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn't a mirror big enough—see point one.
—Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Holding a Mirror Up

I still don't really know what the point of art is, or if it has a point, or if in fact there's any such thing at all. I also suspect that the above image owes something to the work of Olafur Eliasson, in addition to the quoted authors.

Strong primary colors

2009-10-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

Train of thought, only loosely connected:

Stripes -> Circus -> Calder's Circus -> Alexander Calder. It occurs to me that Calder's mobiles are about physics and gravity in the same way that fractals are about math. The underlying science or algorithm is a lot of what makes the effect of the thing work, but the resulting piece of art goes much deeper than a simple set of equations.

I remember looking up Calder in one of my art history textbooks, and being completely annoyed that he had been left out. Since then, it has been a small secret ambition of mine to get just famous enough that some future student is offended that I've been left out of their history book. I figure the chances are pretty slim, but it's good to have goals.

Small Universe (after Calder)

I'm not dancing here tonight

2009-09-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

Also I've been listening to a fair amount of Tom Waits lately.

Carnival Lights

Accordion and calliope

2009-09-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

Still thinking about the intersection of archaic and modern, wondering how the mathematical regularity of computed pattern relates to earlier forms of art and artifact. While I was out of town this past weekend, I spent some time in a store full of interesting antique furniture and salvaged things. They had a couple of small toy theater sets, for puppets or maybe marionettes, made of crumbling cardboard and decorated in the style of Italian opera: beautiful Commedia dell'Arte designs.

I love those kinds of things, all crammed full of more florid unnecessary ornamentation than the entire twentieth century ever produced. And it's that quality that appeals to me about fractals, too. If I were a better (and more patient) draftsman, I would make drawings or paintings in that style, but fractals are the medium I'm good at, and in which I have enough experience and practice to make my ideas manifest.

So this one is about old theater, and also some kinds of current theater. It's about brilliant silk and layers of lace and bright paint and striped socks. It's about making the surroundings at least as worthy of attention as the spectacle they enclose. And it's also about the resources I have right now, in the year 2009, that allow me to put together an image using precise calculation, so that every piece is exactly where it belongs. The composition is one of the two that I think of as being most typically fractal: the "One Big Spiral" motif. (The other one is of course the minibrot, which is arguably as classic a theme as the still life with flowers.)

The Old and the New

Perhaps I can think of fractals as being similar to an instrument, such as an accordion. Even if most of the general public thinks of an accordion only in terms of Lawrence Welk oompah, it can also be used for anything from tango to zydeco to Michael Jackson parody. And fractals, likewise, are capable of a much wider range than they're usually given credit for.

Something old, something new

2009-09-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

I've just come home after a weekend trip to go to my cousin's wedding. It was quite good, as these things go, and besides the usual festivities it was a chance to see one of my favorite uncles. This particular uncle is one of the coolest people I know (although it's true that I'm a really introverted geeky person, and therefore my ideas about 'cool' are probably suspect). He lives in a house of some historical significance, which he keeps in immaculate condition. He collects Japanese prints and other art. He spends some of his time building and restoring things like harpsichords and antique clocks.

My uncle thinks fractals are incredibly stupid.

I am somewhat distressed by this, but it's understandable. He's lived in Silicon Valley since he was at Stanford in (I think) the mid-'70s. He was therefore perfectly placed to be right in the middle of the grooviest, most psychedelic, overwhelming onslaught of fractals that ever happened anywhere. He's a guy who really understands about beautifully-crafted things that have been made by skilled human hands, and is quite rightly suspicious about crude bright show-offy art spit out of a computer.

So I find myself wondering, would it be at all possible to interest someone like my uncle in the kinds of pictures I've been making? Or is it simply foolish of me to even consider it? For that matter, I'm still struggling to reconcile my own fondness for archaic mechanical technologies (like letterpress printing) with my continuing interest in all this pixelated mathematics.

It has given me some new, possibly difficult things to think about. Who is my audience, really? What might they like, besides fractals?

Here's a spiral with Spirograph patterns. It's either festively pensive, or pensively festive, and it suits my present mood.

untitled [traditional spirograph julia]

Little & fiddly as eXtreme sport

2009-09-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple of days looking at the incredibly detailed images made by Dan Wills, and trying (with only minimal success) to make some similar ones of my own. I haven't really done much exploring of the inside areas of fractals before now, and I'm finding them both fascinating and frustrating.

So far, I've had the best luck with the PhoenixDoubleNova formula. When the inside is colored with exponential smoothing, it makes a mass of gritty particles, in which can be distinguished vague mandelbrot-ish shapes and other color zoning. Adjusting the maximum iterations seems to change how much shape is visible through the speckly stuff. Trying to zoom in on interesting shapes is a little like blundering around in a sandstorm.

Like so.

Which would be no fun at all, except that when the fractal is rendered and anti-aliased, an amazing amount of tiny detail appears. Any fractal has an infinite amount of detail, of course, because that's what makes it a fractal. But with these nova-style inside images, the mind-bending infinitude is really there, present in a way that I find very compelling.

Even after anti-aliasing, enough texture remains that the pictures seem a little like grainy photographs—they don't have that perfectly-clean smoothness that many computer-generated things have. And every one of those little specks of color-shift is another infinite stack of interlocking spirals, all in perfect array.

Skywatching

This is a kind of thing I'd love to see printed big (BIG! Four or five or ten feet across kind of big), because its visual effect would change drastically when it was viewed at various distances. From far away, you'd get the overall effect of the colors and shapes in the composition, from medium-far it would be textured and complex, and from right up close your entire field of view would be full of tiny repeating shapes that reflected the larger whole. A perfect illustration of what fractals are all about.

Remember the time you said you'd give me a dollar?

2009-09-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, this one is definitely a Bennie. Although you'd have to zoom in a bit to see the minibrot in the middle.

In theory, this series should be worth an infinite amount of money, right?

Unnatural uses for plane tilings

2009-09-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

Oh, say. I've just realized that Samuel Monnier's wallpaper tiling plug-in can be used as a trap shape. This means there are an overwhelming number of texturing things I need to try doing. Here's a simple honeycomb background, as a first quick test.

Hive

(How did I manage to not figure out about doing this months ago? There are places I definitely could have used it. Time to re-work some old parameters, probably.)

Timelines and epicycles

2009-09-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

Today's image is (a) directly stolen from the Spirograph instruction book I used to have, back in the day; (b) a companion piece to this one; (c) ludicrously slow to render.

A Modern Universe (for the City of the Future)

The pure-white background is disconcerting for me to look at. I rarely make anything so undiluted. But I wanted it to reflect the clean white sleek look of Modern design. All it needs is a bit of really geometric sans-serif type, a single word maybe, placed so as to provide the maximum amount of dynamic balance.

I very much want to make a big print of this one. The pattern-doubling repetitions around the minibrots are amazingly intricate, and would probably be worth examining more closely.

Still playing

2009-09-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Playing

2009-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

Last night, quite late, I finally took a few deep breaths and gave myself a quick pep talk, and uploaded my first Ultra Fractal coloring method to the official database. It even has a handy help file or reference guide.

Probably, for someone who's a programmer, writing a coloring algorithm isn't too much of a big deal. But I'm definitely not a programmer, and so this feels like an accomplishment to me. It works, and it does exactly what I want it to do, and it didn't exist until I made it. Somehow that's more satisfying than any of the art I've made in the last five years. (I'm not sure how much that's also to do with the important fact that it wasn't for school.)

I've been messing with versions of this coloring method for years, off and on, and so to a certain extent I've been using it all this time, but when I was working on the help file I realized that I had never really tried making anything that referred specifically back to the Spirograph that had inspired it. So for a couple of days now I've been making pictures that make me feel like I'm a kid with a bunch of plastic gears and multicolored ballpoint pens. It makes me laugh to realize how little my aesthetic approach has changed since I was about seven years old. But at the same time, it all fits in beautifully with the things I was doing at the end of my last year of school: art inspired by games and toys, which had in turn been inspired by math. Tangrams. Sculptures with superballs. Vending machines full of word permutations (which the Professor assures me is a branch of mathematics called "combinatorics").

It is weirdly satisfying to be able to recreate the particular Spirograph that I always used to think of as "the hard one," and not worry about whether the pen was going to slip just as I finished drawing the next-to-last loop.

Nostalgia

On the other hand, I really liked my collection of different-colored pens. I wonder if my mom still has my old Spirograph stashed in her attic somewhere.

Alternating or direct currency

2009-09-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

As a matter of fact, it probably is all about the Pentiums. Although I haven't been keeping track; there's probably some much better/cooler/geekier kind of processor available by now. Bah, and I can't even say this is a Benoit and call it a Bennie, because it's actually a Julia. Oh well.

Now that this is rendered, I'm wondering if it needs some kind of a border.

untitled [illegal tender]

Early scientific psychedelia is the best kind

2009-09-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered the animations of one John Whitney, who built an amazing analog computer and used it to make moving geometric patterns. When digital computers started to become available, he used those as well.

Of the movies I've seen so far, I think Permutations is my favorite. It looks like it's made of hypocycloids, which is exactly what I've been tinkering with myself, all summer, so it has a pleasing familiarity. I'm making a mental note that I need to start learning how to make animations. And also a quick sketch, because those are more easily remembered than mental notes.

untitled [after John Whitney]

Dull statistical analysis!

2009-09-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

This is my antidote to too much art-making: I wasted half a day writing down data about the 2007 Fractal Art Contest, and did a little bit of number-crunching.

The first thing I found was that it's nearly impossible to accurately figure out which fractal-generating program has been used to make which image. There are certain kinds of effects that seem typical of Ultra Fractal, and Xenodream is pretty recognizable because it makes 3-D things (but then what about POV-Ray and other raytracers?), and flames might be Apophysis or they might be any one of half-a-dozen other options. It's entirely possible that there are people out there who are writing their own custom code, which isn't available to the public at all. No information at all is provided with the entry images, so if bias is going to be introduced on the basis of which program was used, the judges are all going to have to be clairvoyant so they can know which pictures to be biased in favor of.

So my statistics are highly speculative, and are based purely on guesswork and my own familiarity with the programs in question.

Out of 344 total entries, I found anywhere from 175 to 244 that looked like they could have been made with Ultra Fractal. Apophysis and other flames accounted for 51 images. 8 pictures looked like Xenodream, leaving 41 unidentifiable. There were a handful that could have been made in Fractint, and a few that had coloring I associate with the Tiera-Zon/Sterlingware/Flarium family of programs. Several appeared to have been made or significantly altered in some other graphics program, like Photoshop.

Total Entries
Ultra Fractal 71%
Apophysis 15%
Xenodream 2%
Other 12%

There were 15 winning entries, of which (again, guessing) 10 were Ultra Fractal, 3 were Apophysis, and 2 were Xenodream.

Winners
Ultra Fractal 67%
Apophysis 20%
Xenodream 13%

Possible conclusions:

There is no way to be sure of which program was used, short of contacting all the entrants individually and pestering them for information.
Winning spots are being stolen from users of less-popular fractal generators because of bias in favor of Apo and XD!!!1!
All the images are being made in UF, because it's flexible enough to imitate all competing programs.
Actually, the numbers look pretty normal, and there's no reason to suspect major bias or conspiracy or anything like that.

Free bonus conclusion:
Possibly, the people who have paid money for their fractal generators are more motivated to learn how to use them to make pleasing and effective images, such as might win contests. The more casual user, who downloads a free program and doesn't use it as often, has less experience and therefore is less likely to make a really impressive image. Better tools don't guarantee better results, but they do make some aspects of the process easier. I know for an absolute fact that I would have given up on fractal art years ago if I hadn't had access to UF's precise color controls.

Free bonus fruitcake conclusion:
If you think there's bias against non-UF images, you should see the bias against anything with mirror or kaleidoscopic symmetry. Seriously. It's crazy, man.

Out of character, out of time, out of cheese error

2009-08-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

Wow, I can't believe it's the end of August already. That means I've survived NaArMaMo! I did manage to make something nearly every day, and I posted something every day, even if the thing I posted wasn't necessarily the thing I made. I will therefore confer upon myself the Award of Reasonable Successfulness.

As a final end-of-August outburst, I'm posting another limerick and its accompanying fractal. I have to say, the picture really never worked quite right until I added the neon stars.

When out on the town acting girly,
Fair Julia sometimes grows surly,
And I strongly suppose
The chief cause of her woe's
That her beaux always bail out too early.

Party Girl

On the principle that all art is to a certain extent self-portraiture, I begin to worry a bit about my character, morals, habits, and color sense. Maybe I'm just feeling over-exuberant because I'm done with my enforced month of art.

Now I think I'm probably going to give myself a short break from art-making. But I'm actually quite happy to have had a reason to get back into the habit of writing regularly; I don't think I've been such a dedicated blogger in years. I should try to keep it up, if I can.

Go faster!

2009-08-30T21:58:00.000-07:00

I've done some further investigation of yesterday's excruciatingly slow fractal, and discovered that in setting it to render larger, it had indeed gone into arbitrary precision, which accounts for some of the slowness. I also figured out that I could switch to the associated Julia set and get an almost identical effect without having to zoom so deeply. So I've got a different version rendering now, and it says it has a mere three hours to go. Hooray!

Some tinkering with a nearby Mandelbrot region, and some nice quick simple orbit trap coloring, has given me an idea for a possible label design. I'm not sure about the color. It seems somewhat too dark.

Somewhat less than one pixel per second

2009-08-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

I remember when I got my first computer, and I downloaded Fractint and would sit and watch as it rendered images, one slow line at a time. And I remember my early days of using Ultra Fractal, when new coloring methods would be written, some of them were ridiculously complicated and would render one slow line at a time.

Over the years, technology has advanced, processors have gotten faster, and I can open up some of those old parameters and have them appear in a few quick seconds. But somehow, I always still seem to end up staring at my monitor, transfixed, as an image appears one slow pixel at a time. Sometimes it's because I'm doing deep zooms, that get into arbitrary precision. Sometimes it's lots of layers. Sometimes it's ever-more elaborate coloring methods.

This tiny snippet is probably the slowest combination of things I've tried so far. It's a Mandelbrot zoom, with Extended Precision, fairly close to the boundary (so needing lots of iterations to avoid blank gaps), and with my own parametric coloring in a particularly slow configuration. At 400 x 400 pixels, this took four hours to render. I wanted to do a test of whether it would look like I expected, so as to be used in a larger, several-layered image. Unrendered, it dissolves into a mass of crunchy pixels.

So now I'm wondering, is it worth doing the somewhat larger render of the image that this is a component of? It looks like the guilloche-pattern effect is working the way it's supposed to. If I go by my on-screen working version, the colors and layers are okay. Render time estimate is somewhere between 850 and 900 hours. That's more than a month, assuming it doesn't slow down a lot when it gets near the minibrot in the middle.

Well, I've started it. It can mutter away in the background while I'm thinking of other things.

Hey, where did the texture go?

2009-08-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

I suppose I have to give NaArMaMo some credit for kicking me in directions that are somewhat different than usual. I'm not necessarily convinced they're good directions, but it's interesting to see what falls out of my brain after I'm way past being out of ideas. This one is basically the result of me pushing the 'pretty' button* over and over and over until something happened.

untitled [hex-star-chain]

There's something about it that reminds me vaguely of anime. It's partly the color, I think, and partly that some of the shapes look like puffy cartoon clouds.

. . . . . . . . . . .

* This only comes with the super-secret hax0red version of the program, of course.

I don't know if I mean disco or Dante's

2009-08-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

There's not much excuse for this one, but I made it today and so up it goes. Isn't August over yet? I don't know how people survive the novel-writing thing in November.

Julia Inferno

In which art-making grinds to a halt

2009-08-26T21:36:00.001-07:00

Portfolio still needs work.
Label still needs work.
Help file for coloring method still needs work.
Spent all day in semi-comatose state. Art is basically not happening today.

However, the UF mailing list has unexpectedly broken out in fractal humor, which is exactly like you'd expect: it's funny only to an infinitesimally small segment of the population, and arguably not even funny to them. It gives me an excuse, though, to post limericks. So here is one.

A volatile fractal geometer
Saw an insect, and hurled a small bomb at her:
"The chaotic effect
Of that butterfly wrecked
My picnic, and broke my barometer!"

And an old fractal, by way of illustration. This one's from early 2003.

Monarch

Too much like last time

2009-08-25T22:20:00.000-07:00

Current problem: I want to make a label for my binder-portfolio-thing, so that I will have something to put in the complicated window. Six years ago, I made such a label, and I'm finding that the process of making a new one has me all horribly tied in knots. I wasn't expecting that. I thought most of the old bad stuff had been adequately dealt with, but evidently it hasn't.

So I've been all stuck, and finally decided to see if I still had the parameters for the old label. They should have gotten the full napalm treatment, but no, they're still moldering away in some of my archives. And now that I've rendered them again, they look a little flat. A little dull. Some of that, I remember, was fixed by a suitable application of typography, but the colors are more monochrome than I might like.

At least that solves the problem of wondering whether I should just re-use the thing as it is. It would definitely need some tweaking. And I think maybe I will scrap my more recent attempts, because they look too similar, and try to figure out some different approach entirely.

Petroleum by-products

2009-08-24T22:02:00.000-07:00

Arrgh, I'm up to my elbows in a project that has reminded me of all the reasons why I don't like bookbinding very much. This thing (if I ever get it finished) is in some senses nothing more than an oversized, glorified, three-ring binder. But I'm covering it in iridescent bookcloth, and giving it a small business-card-sized window on the front, which is incredibly slow and fiddly to construct.

According to my plan, if it all works out right, this will become a portfolio for the transportation and display of fractal prints. Hooray. But at the moment, I'm hating the stupid thing.

In between changing my exacto blade and picking glue off my fingers, I'm continuing to tinker with the hypocycloids. This particular experiment ended up looking somehow toxic and ominous. Because of that, and because it's fairly closely related to my recent money-ish image, I'm calling it

Big Oil

More self-promotion

2009-08-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm back to working on a couple of real-world projects, so I don't have a new fractal to post. Instead, here is a link to a page that may or may not become the new splash page on my website.

morgan bell
digital & analog artist

Even if I don't use it for that, I'm happy to have made the silly thing. It makes me laugh. Also, it makes me wonder if it might be fun to use the a and the E to design a logo.

Time to build the Identity Crisis Booth

2009-08-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

Today I read two articles on the New York Times website, one a complaint about some art being unsuitable for children, the other a description of a work of (performance?) art in which coffee was given away. Between the two articles, I've been reminded of a whole bunch of things in the current state of the art world that make me unhappy enough to deny that I am an artist at all. Really, I wish there was some better word to describe what it it I am, and what it is I do, because "art" doesn't seem to have anything much to do with it.

First, there is the kind of art that is supposed to be shocking. It isn't, anymore, but people keep making the stuff and insisting that it challenges people. As far as I can tell, the only challenge involved is trying to find something to say about it other than "Bah, another one about bodily fluids." If there is still any shock value to be had, it's limited to unsuspecting parents suddenly realizing that their afternoon's outing with the kids is going to involve a lot more explanation (and teachable moments—ugh, what a horrible phrase) than they had planned.

The difficulty with this over-saturation in shock art is that eventually it reaches a stage where if you're making something that isn't pornographic, or woven out of your dead grandfather's armpit hair, or saturated in your own menstrual blood, no one is willing to admit that it might be art. It will be dismissed as mere decoration, pretty-making, inconsequential, something to hang over the couch. It isn't art; it doesn't count. I really hate that particular aspect, mainly because it means it's hard for me to be taken seriously (hey, my stuff's often pretty!), but also because it's incredibly narrow and limited. It means there's not much out there that I want to look at, or be curious about, or be inspired by.

The coffee thing is much simpler to explain, I think. If people can't tell whether a thing is supposed to be art or not, and if when they're told it is art, they only become more confused, that work of art has failed. Yeah, there are artists out there who will say that the point of their art is to produce bafflement and to make people question their entire view of the world, and their place in it, and art's relation to them, and blah blah blah. As far as I can tell, that kind of art mainly produces irritation rather than insight, and as such, is completely full of shit.

Maybe I should write a manifesto.

Anyway, the image I'm posting today is only tangentially related to all this. Mainly it was an exercise in applying some of yesterday's shapes to an actual fractal. Arguably, it's also related to my recent letterpress License to Print Money.

Economic Debacle or Hardly Currency

Technical interlude

2009-08-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

I accidentally made a useful discovery about this parametric-curves coloring method I've been working on. It's nearly done, and I've been working on writing a help file, but of course mostly I just spend time playing with it.

Originally, it made dotted shapes, like these.

Then just recently, I had some help, and got it to do joined lines, as well.

It turns out, if you type the wrong thing in certain parameters, it can also do things like this.

Click on the pictures for bigger versions, especially the last batch—they look really cool when you can see all the fine lines.

And then all these can be mapped onto fractals, exactly like any other orbit trap. Those last complicated ones become fairly slow to calculate, but no worse than some of the other coloring methods out there. I have a number of potential-images-in-progress using some of this stuff. They're fiddly to work with, because their geometry is extremely non-fractal, and so it's easy to end up with a kind of awful jarring mismatch of styles. But I think I'm starting to find ways of integrating them into compositions with reasonably good effect.

Am I still here?

2009-08-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

Carrying on regardless, and trying to remind myself that there are always possibilities. Even if some of those possibilities aren't quite what I was hoping for.

(The World is) Your Questionable Mollusc

Through the meat-grinder & onto the scrap-heap

2009-08-19T20:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed about my first visit to Seattle. The weather was stunningly wonderful, all flawless blue skies and painfully brilliant sunlight and impossibly clear air. That was several years ago, now: probably the last time in my life I was ever purely, perfectly happy.

The weather was like that again today; it hurt my eyes to look at it, and hurt the rest of me to remember. I'm hitting a point of saturation and disgust, with fractals, with myself. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to keep doing this post-a-day for much longer.

untitled [to hell with pretty spirals]

Pretty flowers

2009-08-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

Something suitable for late summer:

Queen Anne's Lace

Some kind of force-field

2009-08-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

Today was a day of tentative experiments, frustrating dead-ends, mysterious errors, and general malaise. Nothing I've done is in any condition to be shown to the world. So instead, I'm posting another of my weird-old-sci-fi images.

untitled [suspension]

A long title for a long picture

2009-08-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

I finally got all my printed-out panels mounted to foamcore and stuck to the wall, via a precarious arrangement of magnets. A number of them got dinged up during the process of figuring out how to get them to stick properly, but this isn't a huge problem because I've been thinking of this installation more or less as a maquette.

It would be fun to use the large-format printer to make an even bigger version, mounted on wood or something reasonably permanent, instead of foamcore. Of course, then I'd have to figure out yet another different system of attachment, since the magnets wouldn't hold the additional weight. So it goes.

A Medieval Conception of the History & Development of the Cosmos

Twelve panels, inkjet print on photo paper, 8 inches high by 10 feet long.

I seem to be making a theme of these long, narrow, hallway-running printed things. There was that scrolling map thing I made in my sophomore year, and the tangram sequence at my BFA show, and now this silly fractal. I suppose they all have a sort of vague narrative-sequence effect, which means they're somewhat related to my interest in books. The fractal, if read from left to right, ends with a minibrot.

The photograph doesn't show it very well, of course, so here's a link to a digital version, 500 pixels high and 7500 wide.

Nickel-iron, stony-iron

2009-08-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

Man, I totally missed the meteor shower. It was cloudy here. I like meteor showers, both as an astronomical phenomenon and a sort of metaphor: periodically we cross paths with something that fills the sky with sparkly interestingness. Sometimes life is full of more than the usual amount of extraneous particles, which can be pretty and make us go "Ooh, ahh!" or occasionally be big enough to hit something and really put it out of whack.

Lately, I've been feeling like I could do with a bit more sparkly and a bit less reduction-to-smoldering-heaps.

Meteoroids

Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor's Degree, Even

2009-08-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

I've spent way too much time this evening reading about Marcel Duchamp, and trying to write down some of my own ideas about the things he did and why they're important. It's bizarre; it feels like I'm writing another paper for art history, and I'm having to grapple with some of my own lingering difficulties with school and with the art world in general.

Duchamp is one of those legendary people I've admired for as long as I can remember. I don't know how old I was when I first heard of Dada, but I was instantly a fan. It seemed so beautifully strange, so full of random oddness and cool typography. I loved how the Dadaists played with images and language and life itself. Duchamp has definitely influenced me in a number of ways. I didn't really think about it at the time, but I suspect the very existence of Mr. Velocipede has something to do with the Bicycle Wheel.

When I finally found myself in a real art college, I was somewhat taken aback at how much everybody seemed to take it all really seriously. There was a certain period of time when I hated Duchamp and everything he had inspired, and was disgusted with myself for having liked him. Eventually, I decided that I didn't necessarily need to agree with all of the things I heard in class, and that I still thought Duchamp had been brilliant—it was just some of his fans I didn't like. I do sometimes wish that more artists were willing to look at the strange sad wonderful world, and turn all the good and bad bits of it into surreal jokes.

In my early fractalling days, I had an work-in-progress that was a little like Nude Descending A Staircase. I later deleted the parameter files in the Great Purge of Ought-Four, but I think if I'd managed to finish the image, it would have looked something like this:

Dude Falling Down A Staircase

The first one-third

2009-08-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of absolutely terrible photographs of the multi-panel thing I'm working on. I wouldn't post them at all, but I know Chronographia will be checking to see if I'm keeping up with NaNaHeyHey.

The prints have been mounted on black foamcore, and precariously balanced on magnets stuck to thumbtacks. I was fairly surprised that I got them to stay up long enough to take the picture.

When the whole thing is done, there will be twelve panels, for a total of ten running feet. I'm still not sure how I'm going to do the actual attaching-to-the-wall part. It will probably involve more magnets, stuck to the back of the foamcore somehow.

Getting away from the computer screen

2009-08-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

This is the second night in a row that I've gone to an art opening event; it seems like they all decided to gang up on me at once. So now I'm absolutely brain-fried, and glad of the chance to go back into my anti-social hermit-like existence, wherein I only communicate with the outside world via the internet.

It's disconcerting (in a sort of nice way) to see some of my stuff hanging up in real places, outside of school. It made me a little sorry that I hadn't been brave enough to submit a fractal, but I reminded myself that at the time they were taking delivery of stuff, I didn't have any fractals that were suitable—nothing very current, and nothing printed large enough. So it was a woodcut instead, and I flatter myself that it looked pretty good in amongst all the other artwork.

Besides the art-going, I've got a project started. So far it seems to be working the way it's supposed to.

My light-cycle is out of photons again

2009-08-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Evidently they're making a sequel to Tron. It looks all dark and dystopian. You know what happens when you cross Tron with dystopia, right?

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Ha ha ha ha ha. And I'm an idiot.

Altogether too conscious

2009-08-10T22:48:00.000-07:00

Insomnia has been hitting me hard, these last several nights, and inspiration and productivity are suffering as a result. I wish I knew of some reliable way of persuading my system to get enough rest.

Down the Dream Staircase

We passed up the future years ago

2009-08-09T22:30:00.001-07:00

The stuff I've been working on today isn't even to the point where I want to do screen-sized test renders, so it's definitely not ready for posting. Instead, here is something from the Year 2000. The future! Does anybody remember Y2K anymore?

Dada Vu

Not really NaArMaMoArt

2009-08-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

The thing about Art-Making Month is that it's supposed to encourage participants to make art, by giving them a theoretical audience who looks to see what they've been doing. And today I've made a whole ridiculous bunch of proto-art, but now that the fractal contest is happening I'm all tied in knots wondering what I should enter in it, and so all the things I've been working on today are currently in the pile of "Don't show anybody, because these are Not Done Yet, but some later derivative of them might turn out to be Contest Entry Material." So I don't want to post any of the things I've got.

However, I do also have a folder full of "Hmm, these aren't too bad, maybe I should post them someday, if nothing better turns up." This might be the time to start digging through that collection.

Here's one that I must have made when I was watching a bunch of old Star Trek, or possibly reading pulpy implausible paperbacks from the fifty-cent pile at the used bookstore. It's from sometime in 2006, probably late summer.

untitled [encounter]

Ticky box!

2009-08-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

Oh hey, I've just discovered that you can add little response checkboxes, for the benefit of people who don't want to take a bunch of time typing a comment. And you get to customize what they say, which is a delightful source of amusement. I wonder how many they let you add. I've picked three possible options to cover a range of likely reactions, and if anybody feels there are more choices that should be made available, let me know.

Back to mono

2009-08-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've left out an obvious step in my variations on a psychedelic spiral: that epitome of elegant artiness, black-and-white. If fully saturated colors are the sign of vulgar hallucinatory kitsch, then surely removing all traces of hue will render any image artistically significant, or at least tasteful.

I suspect this view is the result of the progression of technology; when photography was a brand-new thing, black-and-white was the only option. Color happened later, and was simultaneously exciting and a sort of aesthetic equivalent of being nouveau-riche. There is a reverence for age among some of the cultural elite. Things that are old, traditional, inherited, or archaic, are seen as being in some way better than things that haven't been around long enough to prove themselves.

If that's the case, though, it means fractals are at an enormous disadvantage no matter what colors they are or aren't. Even though the mathematical ideas are something like a century old, and even though iterated patterns have been around in some form since the beginning of the universe, the technology of computer-generated fractal pictures is still in its infancy, or perhaps now young childhood. So I suspect that draining away the color in an effort to lend this youthful art form a silver-haired aura of respectability will not, in fact, fool anyone.

Still, it's worth a shot.

Chain mail? Lace?

Ooh, film noir. Vertigo.

. . . . . . . . . . .

I seem to have only achieved a sort of premature adolescence. A tendency towards goth (emo?), and a slightly edgy and dizzying effect that seems reminiscent of beatnik-era movies.

Why is this still occupying my mind

2009-08-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I will try not to think too much about the complaints of others. If nothing else, it maybe counts as a slight change from the endless

Fractal Universe Calendar Kvetching

. . .

Right. Time to go do something else for a while.

Low-hanging fruit

2009-08-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

Hey cool, the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 is happening. I am filled with anticipation.

I note (with a small sigh and a derisive shake of the head) that the usual complaints are already making an appearance. I suppose it must be frustrating to have photoshop-filter art so continually ignored in fractal-art contests.

However, this has given me an idea for a quick illustration of an old story.

Sour

Perhaps, if the grapes are stomped into the ground hard enough, they'll turn into a fine whine with which to drown one's sorrows.

(Mostly) completely different

2009-08-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

And now for something...

Softer. Dreamier. Pearly, swirly, bubbly, girly.

I really don't know what to say about this version, except that if I were to wash the sticky eye-candy out of my brain with soap, this is what the suds would probably look like.

This NaArMaMo thing is hard. Soon, though, I'm going to be done with my variations on this particular spiral, and drag some Chebyshev formulas out of the vaults or something.

That authentic antique patina

2009-08-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

Moving on from complete psychedelia, I will try some experiments to see how close I can get to "tasteful." This is a highly subjective term, of course. Full-spectrum rainbow colors are not generally put into the category, in my experience, so the first thing I'll try is skewing the color palette substantially. While I'm at it, I'll mess with the layers a bit, just to further muddy things up.

Well, now the colors are closer to ones you might find in certain kinds of painting: fox-hunters riding out onto ye olde estates, a still-life with fruit and cheese, or some rustic scene by Winslow Homer. But it's still disconcertingly metallic, and it's still overwhelmingly fractal. I think you'd have to hang it in a really dark corner of the drawing-room, where the door casts a shadow, so the visiting Duchess won't notice it, and faint from the shock.

I do think, though, that it would hold its own against an elaborate gilded picture-frame quite nicely.

A moderate resemblance to scarab beetles

2009-08-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Today I have once again taken my hapless spiral and covered it with intense colors. This time there's more going on: each repeated shape is many colors, with changes of hue and with tertiary tints and shades to provide the illusion of depth. I've decided to make all the iterations visible, instead of having them overlap and block each other, so the self-similarity is very pronounced.

The result is, if anything, even more psychedelic than yesterday's images. It still has those computerish colors, in gradients that include pretty much the full spectrum. The smaller copies of the spiral structure reflect the larger image, while being made of still smaller copies of themselves: it doesn't take too much thinking before you get to infinity, and then an infinity of infinities. It's really complicated, in all the ways that attracted me to fractals in the first place, however many years ago.

This, then, is a version of psychedelia I quite enjoy. It's all about math and pattern and growth, and the color is complex enough to be interesting instead of flat.

Whatever its good points, though, it's certainly garish. It's not bad on-screen, but rendered large, and printed out, it would be awfully assertive.

De re psychedelia

2009-08-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of NaArMaMo, I'm going to try to post something every day during August. In that same spirit, there are no guarantees that any of it will be any good. My plan is to start with some discussion about psychedelic art, which I've had rattling around in my head ever since the local art critic came to talk to our senior class about the BFA show, and decided that was what category my stuff belonged in, because it included some fractals. A reasonable assumption, given the minuscule amount of evidence available to her, but definitely not how I think of myself. Psychedelia is strongly associated with certain kinds of counter-culture politics and philosophy, which I mostly don't find interesting, even though I sometimes enjoy the aesthetic effect.

There is no question that fractal forms are well suited to psychedelic imagery. Repeating geometric patterns are well-known features of the poster art of the '60s, and spirals are always a recurring motif. Computer monitors, with their pure RBG emitted light, are a perfect medium for anything that uses brilliant saturated colors. It's ridiculously easy to make bright groovy pictures with a fractal generator.

A quick bit of explanation about color theory: In the usual systems, there are three primary colors. Subtractive mixing, as with paint, ink, or other pigments or dyes, has magenta, cyan, and yellow as its primaries. As colors are combined, wavelengths of light are absorbed by each of them, and subtracted from the mix. Less light is reflected, the combined colors get darker, and if all three primaries are mixed in the correct proportions, the result approaches black. With additive mixing, as on a computer monitor or other illuminated screen, the primaries are red, green, and blue. When these colors of light are combined together, the wavelengths are added to each other: more light, and the color gets brighter and approaches white.

Different sources vary in their use of the words "secondary" and "tertiary" to describe colors. According to some systems, the secondary colors are defined as only the ones which combine two primaries in equal proportion—those which fall exactly half-way between the primaries on a color wheel. Therefore there are only three secondary colors, and the tertiary colors are all the rest of the hues around the circumference of the color wheel, with maximum saturation. Colors with added white or black are called tints or shades.

The other way to define secondary and tertiary is that secondary colors combine two primaries, while tertiaries combine all three. The resulting color depends on the proportion of each primary, and can range from almost complete saturation to quite neutral. I find this second system more useful, mainly because it seems more descriptive of how the color-mixing process works. It means that when I'm adjusting the coloring of a fractal, and maybe it seems too bright and harsh, I know that I can desaturate it to take the edge off a little. And desaturating a color can be as simple as adding more of whichever primary there's the least of.

Anyway, the point of all this digression is that if I'm talking about a secondary color, it means one that's composed of only two primaries and is completely saturated, and not just one of the three in-between hues.

So, given all this color stuff, I'm going to find a nice eye-sucking spiral and blow its mind. Here's a good one, from the Julia set with seed (-0.732261, 0.225087).

There's something about this that reminds me of certain kinds of neo-baroque wallpaper. A bit stuffy, perhaps. But not to worry! Just eat/drink/sniff/snort/dissolve-under-the-tongue/otherwise ingest this. Zowie.

Ouch. My eyeballs feel funny. Can we mellow it out a little?

Hm. Well, maybe it has a little bit of a Peter Max vibe. "It looks like kindergarten," says my (relatively sober) outside observer. And that's a reasonable observation, because what's going on here is that the colors are very simple and unsophisticated. Absolutely pure primaries and secondaries are the quickest way to make something look like a blacklight poster. But it's a pretty cheap trick, and lacks any subtlety. I plan to remedy that tomorrow, after the walls stop pulsing and oozing like that.

Time-and-motion studies

2009-07-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

...Or I could get completely sucked into Apophysis (and also distracted by side projects in mold-making), and not post anything for weeks on end. Bah, phooey.

Apophysis really is nicer to use than the last time I tried it. I've been using the 2.08 3-D Hack version, and it's now to a point where I feel like I'm starting to have some control over the image, and can start thinking about things like composition and framing and color placement, instead of just blindly pushing triangles around, hoping something good will happen.

The nature of flame fractals is such that once you've made a good image, the obvious thing to do is make many small adjustments, to generate more good images. It often doesn't take much adjustment of a transform-triangle to change the image quite a lot. So you can quickly end up with a whole series of related things. Changing the color palette also has a surprisingly large effect, and pretty soon the whole evening has gone by and the hard drive has filled up with a ridiculous number of pictures.

This has got me thinking about the question of How long does art take? For some reason, this is one of the most frequent queries about a given work of art: "How long did that take?" The possible answers are as infinitely variable as fractals themselves.

  "About fifteen minutes."
  "About fifteen minutes, plus an hour of render time."
  "A week of preliminary sketches, plus fifteen minutes and an hour of render time."
  "A couple of years learning to use the program, a week of preliminary sketches, fifteen minutes, and an hour of render time."
  "A decade of studying fractal mathematics, a couple of years to learn the program, a week of sketches, fifteen minutes, and an hour of render time."

...And a partridge in a pear tree.

To which the response is often something like "What the hell? Fifteen minutes? And you think this thrown-together crap is worth something? You're an idiot. And a fraud."

And I don't know. Sometimes I feel like a fraud. But then I think about photography, in which the actual image-capturing part takes a fraction of a second. Or those beautiful Japanese paintings done in ink on silk, that happen so quickly and fluidly, and are breathtaking.

Flame fractals make really lovely elegant curves. I find many of them aesthetically pleasing. And I'm even starting to have enough control over what I'm doing that I think it counts as intentional. But somehow, it still seems too easy and quick. Is it art? I have absolutely no idea.

Ink in Water by mrvelocipede on deviantART

It's not that kind of contest

2009-07-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've been frustrated lately with the internet, and with fractals. I keep wishing there was some good source for news or commentary or criticism about fractal art. Once in a while, the Orbit Trap guys have a review of somebody's pictures (they even mentioned my stuff once), but too often the result of their writing is that people are irritated and the whole business degenerates into pointless fights. I really don't know what their intentions may be, so I suppose it's possible that they are genuinely trying to be interesting and/or useful, but they don't seem to have had much success generating an atmosphere of friendly exchange.

And maybe it's just that there aren't any current events to be interested in. The last major contest was years ago. There's apparently a steady flow of new stuff onto Renderosity and DeviantArt and such, but the balance of stuff posted vs. comments on same is lousy.

There are some specific reasons that fractal art is difficult to talk sensibly about. It lends itself well to the category of things generally referred to (derisively, dismissively) as "decorative arts." The current fashion in art and architecture is to leave most decoration out entirely, but even in times when everything was heavily decorated, there wasn't a lot of critique for that aspect. "Say, Joe, those are some totally sweet acanthus leaves on the third column from the left." It also seems like the vast majority of fractal art looks quite similar, so it's tough to come up with any comment beyond "Nice colors on that spiral." I'm all in favor of nicely-colored spirals, but I find myself longing for something with more depth, more intention, more layers of meaning, maybe some entertaining allusions to classical motifs or mythological themes or popular culture.

I've been largely ignoring the fractal world for the last five years while I concentrated on school, and now that I'm back, and all ready to be interested and enthusiastic, I'm finding there isn't any there there. So I'm thinking about giving myself the assignment of writing a brief essay every so often, to talk about fractals and art and decoration and color theory and whatever else seems like it might be worth thinking about. I would love for there to be responses, if anyone else out there is interested as well. I would also love for it not to turn into the kind of nit-picking, side-taking, back-biting tedium that Orbit Trap so often generates.

For now, here's some more Apophysis.

Prizes Will Be Awarded

Apophysis Now

2009-06-17T00:09:00.000-07:00

I'm trying Apophysis again, for the first time in many years. I think the last time I used it, it was more of a small utility program meant to work with Ultra Fractal. Now there's a version with a lot more options, and some 3-D features that are fun to tinker with.

This time around, I've managed to make some flame fractals that seem almost like finished images to me, instead of just components to be used in some larger conglomeration. There's still something a little thin and insubstantial about them, but I can see some potential.

untitled [dewy moss]

It's weird and a little frustrating to be using a program I'm not very familiar with. I feel awkward, pushing around the triangles and adjusting parameters without having much idea of what they might affect. I'm used to much more control. But it's probably good for me to get knocked out of my element for a while.

Ok, you're a cab

2009-06-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

Some months ago on the Ultra Fractal mailing list, Kerry Mitchell posted a lovely example of phyllotaxis patterns around a minibrot. I've had the idea for this image rattling around my head ever since.

Phyllo Taxis

Or should that be "File o' Taxis"?

Way too shiny

2009-06-09T22:47:00.000-07:00

I now have a set of two coloring formulas that can work together. There's the object-oriented version, that goes with UF5's plug-in system, and there's a regular self-contained version that can be used with older versions of Ultra Fractal. They're each a little different, but if I've got everything wired up correctly, you can give both of them the same basic shape parameters and they will make identical shapes. The practical benefit of this is that you can use both of them in the same image, and have the benefits of either set of options, and the layers will match up precisely.

I'm all nervous about it, because it seems to be working right, only I've thought that so many times before that I don't trust it. I keep expecting to stumble onto some unfortunate combination of parameters and discover that the whole thing is screwed up in a way that's un-fixable. But so far it all seems good.

Bah, and then sometimes I ask myself, "Why does the world need yet another coloring algorithm or orbit trap shape? It just makes the same old bright shiny pictures, and they look just like fractals. No one can tell that anything different is going on." Oh well.

untitled [pretty beads]

untitled [quatrefoil candies]

Cue the Sousa march

2009-06-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I have too much time on my hands these days. This is really not much of an effort; the lighting on the hardware is all wrong, but I need to stop tweaking it and go do something more productive.

A Political Fractal

By way of technical notes, I will merely say that it's all about the Orbit Traps.

Now with more bells & whistles

2009-06-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

Ooh, I've got more of it working. Now I can try things like this:

untitled [angle to dots]

Or this:

untitled [antique buttons]

Ha ha ha ha wheeeeee!

Pretzels and other loopy knots

2009-06-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

I do this every summer. After a couple of weeks of post-school decompression, I drag out the couple of coloring algorithms I've been bashing at for the last several years, and get them a little closer to what I want. This year, the process is complicated (and also simplified) by the new object-oriented systems in UF5.

My biggest difficulty is that I am not in any sense a programmer; I've worked with fractal colorings enough to understand the logic in a sort of abstract way, and I know exactly what behaviors and effects I'd like to make possible, but there are huge categories of basic programming experience that I don't have, and so sometimes the answer to "Why isn't this doing what I think it should?" is "Because it doesn't work that way, you dope. This is where the semicolon goes!"

So I take apart bits of code that other people have written, and try to see what's going on inside them, and I also pester anyone around me who I even vaguely suspect of knowing how to write code, and I make slow progress. With a substantial amount of help from the Professor (my constant—though sometimes reluctant—ally), I was able to get a basic plug-in working in less than a day. Adding some of the more complicated bells and whistles turns out to be fiddly, and in the meantime I've also figured out some ways of improving the old-school non-object-oriented version. So now I have two different coloring methods that each do about seventy-five percent of what I want, but not the same seventy-five percent.

It's nice when there are brief glimmers of illumination.

Wire Lanterns

But mostly it just ties my brain in knots like little pretzels.

Pretzel Logic

It's giving me that look again

2009-06-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Gosh, it seems like it's been a long time since I messed with any of this stuff. Maybe now that I'm done with school, I'll have some time to get back into fractaling.

untitled [argus julia]

This one is just a bunch of stacked-up orbit traps on a Julia set. Kind of like an exercise in playing scales, or chord progessions. A warm-up.

Purely symbolic & arbitrary, but a victory nevertheless

2009-05-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

The fractal world is full of people who say "Well, I don't have any formal art training, but..." in a sort of apologetic fashion. There seems to be very little overlap between the categories of "art education" and "fractal imagery."

Today, I got my BFA. Walked across the stage all proper, shook hands with the department chair and the provost and the president, and was handed the stupid fake-leather folder thing. It's been a long ~~four~~ five years, what with the cross-continent move and the changing departments halfway through and all the many varied difficulties along the way.

But now I can finally say to the world, "As a matter of fact, I do have formal art training. Would you like to see my fractals?"

Two orange ones

2009-02-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Not my usual colors, really, but I can never resist an excuse to play with color. Fractals and printmaking have this in common: any image can be any color, and you could theoretically spend an entire career remaking a single plate or parameter set over and over and over, with infinite variations. Yesterday I started a few tentative experiments inking the fractal halftone plates in various colors, but I haven't gotten far enough to decide which color works best with any particular plate. Digital files are certainly faster.

untitled [orange star/rose]

untitled [red curtain]

The jpg compression has made the reds and oranges somewhat more murky than they ought to be. Saturated warm colors are particularly problematic in jpgs. There, I think, ink on paper probably wins out.

Enough already

2009-02-24T23:05:00.000-08:00

Arrgh, brain, will you stop generating this kind of stuff already. What's up with that?

untitled [emotional roller coaster]

More science fiction

2009-02-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

I've been watching too much Star Trek again. You can tell, can't you?

untitled [borg bubbles]

Oh maybe just one more

2009-02-15T22:48:00.000-08:00

Too late now for Valentine's Day, but I have this one last silly heart image I wanted to upload. I spent an awful lot of time trying to get a better heart-shape using the various new knob-twiddles available in orbit traps coloring. There have been a couple of heart-shaped traps in the standard formula library for ages, but I always think they look a little clunky. So now I've proved to myself that I can get the kind of reflexive curve I'd rather have, if I'm willing to waste an hour or so on it.

untitled [cardioneon]

Image à trois

2009-02-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

Whee, it's Friday the 13th! Pretty soon I'll be able to give this Valentine theme a rest. This one is only very loosely connected to it anyway.

Bizarre Love Triangle

It's a single-layer mandelbrot cubed. It turns out to be a lot harder to make bilaterally-symmetrical things (like hearts) when the geometry is pulling in three directions at once, so the little blobs aren't very heart-like. I liked the colors, though, and the way the three pairs spin out from the chaotic center.

Now in full lurid color

2009-02-10T11:49:00.000-08:00

I've added the color back to the black-and-white-ized version of this one. I think it ended up with only one layer ultimately being the same as the fractal I'd started with. I still can't decide whether it's any good or not, but it will have to do for now.

Clockwork Heart (in color!)

I still might turn the greyscale version into a printing plate. So much to do this week!

Reversion to type

2009-02-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

It's another heart. But to prove I'm still me, it has gears in.

Clockwork Heart

The basic form was from a fairly old parameter set, which was in color, but which had never quite worked. I tried making it greyscale and tweaking it a bunch, adjusting contrast and adding the gears, and now I think maybe it does work after all. And because I'm still in photo-etching mode, I'm wondering if maybe I should try this one as a plate. There's too much detail for it to be as small a plate as my previous ones, so I may have to be brave and sacrifice a big chunk of copper on the experiment.

Rainbows are also easy, unicorns less so

2009-02-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Lo-res revisited

2009-02-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

I've been trying a new photo-etching process at school, and it's working better than I ever expected. With the preliminary experiments looking good, I'm starting on a series of quite small prints, to be dispensed from a flat-vending machine of the sort normally used for stickers or temporary tattoos. These two images are photo-etched copper plates, printed relief. The image size is 2" x 2", and the paper is 3" x 4".

Coriolis

Inflatable Cartoon Universe

If you click on them, and view the largest size, you can see the halftoning. It's a nice effect.

Buried under layers of gloom and cynicism

2009-01-29T23:23:00.000-08:00

Things have been pretty grim around here lately, what with the weather and the economy and the beginnings of the worst final grind at school. But in the middle of all of it, I find that I'm making pictures with hearts in them. I don't quite know where that's coming from.

Several of them are deep-ish Mandelbrot zooms, which I have been finding interesting again. I seem to go through these spells where I want to go digging around in familiar places to see if anything new turns up, exploring the distortions of pattern around the minibrot molecules. So here's a simple, single-layer image, just a bit too early for February.

Valentine Rising

Don't get too close

2008-12-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

I was tinkering with the picture of trees, adjusting some details. I made a copy of the whole thing and then zoomed into part of it, to see how some of the layers were working. This is something I often do when fine-tuning a fractal image: work with greatly enlarged copies to try and get the colors to work better. It's always disappointing when I make a large print-sized render and discover that there are weird orange blobs or grey halos or something appearing in places which were formerly sub-pixel specks.

At any rate, after I'd gotten my gradients all tweaked into place, I decided I liked the zoomed version of the image enough to make it into its own thing. Though obviously based on the same elements, it's a contrast in many ways to the parent image; instead of being settled and serene, with an expanse of dark sky, it's focused on the frenetic commercial center of the holiday season. Things blink and spin and explode. It has a kind of relentless energy, like the Muzak that fills the stores and the insistently cheery well-wishers who won't leave you alone. Buy! Smile! Feel that Hallmark-approved glow! Buy some more! It resembles an advertisement gone wrong, and in the dizzy confusion all you can do is try to dodge the shards of mirrored glass as they orbit past.

Consumer Incentives

A useful reminder to myself, perhaps, that it's not a great idea to look too closely at the holidays. Better to admire the glitter from a distance, and try to hang onto whatever serenity is available.

Longest night

2008-12-21T20:12:00.000-08:00

Happy Solstice!

Yule Trees

Tent Julia formula, festively decorated with excessive goop.

Reasons to stay inside

2008-12-20T19:32:00.000-08:00

My semester is finally over (hooray!) and so I have a little time to think about fractals again. I expect it will take me a while to get back up to speed again.

This weekend we're getting a whole bunch of unusually wintery weather, so I dug up a very old image that I've always liked, but that somehow never made it as far as any of my various gallery pages.

Snowbound

When I first made this one, in early 2001, I remember being annoyed by how slowly it rendered. That was at least two processors ago, and now it takes less than a minute for a decent screen preview, and about twelve minutes for a 1600x1200 disk render, which seems much better.

Beats two pairs

2008-09-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

My current project is a woodblock printed over a series of inkjet-printed fractals. The woodcut is a portrait of Gaston Julia, adapted from the couple of pictures I was able to find online.

Gaston Julia

Sosaku-hanga woodblock print using sumi ink on kitakata paper, 8" x 10". Artist's proof.

The fractals are Julia sets, of course, and I've been experimenting with how to best take advantage of their natural symmetry. The end result is a little bit like a playing card.

Three Julias

Sosaku-hanga woodblock prints using sumi ink over digital inkjet prints on kitakata paper, 9" x 20.5" each.

I still have some more fractals I need to render and print. I suppose I'll eventually end up with enough slightly creepy copies of Gaston to wallpaper a room or something.

Heat & light

2008-09-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I miss Pittsburgh, in spite of everything. It had some really nice old industrial buildings. So did Providence, for that matter. Lately I've been wondering if maybe I should move back to the eastern half of the continent once I finish school, but then I remember how miserable the climate is there during about two-thirds of the year.

Still, decaying urban squalor has its appeal.

Foundry

The formula is Newton-ish and embossed. That's all I remember without re-opening the parameters.

Fewmets: put 'em in the blender

2008-09-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

Ugh, school is completely kicking my ass. I do have some fractal-related projects in the works, but it's going to be several weeks, probably, before any of them are far enough along to be worth looking at.

I've been trying to keep up with the digital end of things in a small way, by following the challenges posted to the Ultra Fractal mailing list. On my second go-round with Challenge #2, I was thinking about school, and about the people I was spending time with in my very first couple of semesters. One of the long-term effects of that association is that now I get very angry and upset when I come across any references to dragons, particularly in a fantasy-novel or comic book or role-playing game kind of thing. (Fortunately, I never had all that much interest in those particular entertainments. Still, it's an annoying sort of neurosis to have.)

This image is therefore dedicated to —— and —— and their drawings of cute goo-eyed dragons. Thanks for the lingering bitterness, you jerks.

Dragon Pureé

Man oh man, I sure do get cranky and irritable when I'm in school.