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.

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.