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.

Rainbows are also easy, unicorns less so

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

untitled [hearts mandala]



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

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

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

Lo-res revisited

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

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

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

Happy Solstice!

Yule Trees



Tent Julia formula, festively decorated with excessive goop.

Reasons to stay inside

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.