Am I still here?

Carrying on regardless, and trying to remind myself that there are always possibilities. Even if some of those possibilities aren't quite what I was hoping for.

(The World is) Your Questionable Mollusc

Through the meat-grinder & onto the scrap-heap

Last night I dreamed about my first visit to Seattle. The weather was stunningly wonderful, all flawless blue skies and painfully brilliant sunlight and impossibly clear air. That was several years ago, now: probably the last time in my life I was ever purely, perfectly happy.

The weather was like that again today; it hurt my eyes to look at it, and hurt the rest of me to remember. I'm hitting a point of saturation and disgust, with fractals, with myself. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to keep doing this post-a-day for much longer.

untitled [to hell with pretty spirals]

Pretty flowers

Something suitable for late summer:

Queen Anne's Lace

Some kind of force-field

Today was a day of tentative experiments, frustrating dead-ends, mysterious errors, and general malaise. Nothing I've done is in any condition to be shown to the world. So instead, I'm posting another of my weird-old-sci-fi images.

untitled [suspension]

A long title for a long picture

I finally got all my printed-out panels mounted to foamcore and stuck to the wall, via a precarious arrangement of magnets. A number of them got dinged up during the process of figuring out how to get them to stick properly, but this isn't a huge problem because I've been thinking of this installation more or less as a maquette.

It would be fun to use the large-format printer to make an even bigger version, mounted on wood or something reasonably permanent, instead of foamcore. Of course, then I'd have to figure out yet another different system of attachment, since the magnets wouldn't hold the additional weight. So it goes.

A Medieval Conception of the History & Development of the Cosmos



Twelve panels, inkjet print on photo paper, 8 inches high by 10 feet long.

I seem to be making a theme of these long, narrow, hallway-running printed things. There was that scrolling map thing I made in my sophomore year, and the tangram sequence at my BFA show, and now this silly fractal. I suppose they all have a sort of vague narrative-sequence effect, which means they're somewhat related to my interest in books. The fractal, if read from left to right, ends with a minibrot.

The photograph doesn't show it very well, of course, so here's a link to a digital version, 500 pixels high and 7500 wide.

Nickel-iron, stony-iron

Man, I totally missed the meteor shower. It was cloudy here. I like meteor showers, both as an astronomical phenomenon and a sort of metaphor: periodically we cross paths with something that fills the sky with sparkly interestingness. Sometimes life is full of more than the usual amount of extraneous particles, which can be pretty and make us go "Ooh, ahh!" or occasionally be big enough to hit something and really put it out of whack.

Lately, I've been feeling like I could do with a bit more sparkly and a bit less reduction-to-smoldering-heaps.

Meteoroids

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.