Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor's Degree, Even

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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