Time-and-motion studies

...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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

untitled [emotional roller coaster]

More science fiction

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

untitled [borg bubbles]

Oh maybe just one more

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

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

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

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.