How much is too much?

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

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.

Strong primary colors

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

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

Carnival Lights

Accordion and calliope

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.