Circuit Explorations – Tube Visualization from evsc on Vimeo.

Far out eh?  Here’s another one…

Circuit Explorations – Pixel Visualization from evsc on Vimeo.

It’s like a little orchestra or ensemble.  Each piece adds something.  The mouse cursor is the conductor, but these musicians never make a mistake.  I like this kind of hard-core techno-art.

These three Vimeo videos were created by Eva Schindling.  Originally from Austria, Eva just recently joined The Advanced Research Technology Collaboration and Visualization Lab (ART Lab), at the Banff New Media Institute in Banff Alberta Canada (out west in the mountains).

From the About page on Eva’s website she says this about herself:

Way back when Lingo was the word, i discovered a world beyond static graphic design and since then i have been on a spin – trying to land somewhere in the gray zone between art and design. With an growing appetite for science and wild future scenarios i aim at artistic research and try to employ computational design techniques and complex system theory.

“Wild future scenarios”   “Somewhere in the gray zone between art and design”  I think she’s done that quite well.  The two videos above, and particularly the first one have that exceptional wild and futuristic quality to them.  When the colored tube starts to rotate and we look inside it, it’s as if it’s no longer a mere visualization of the sound input but actually something with a life of it’s own.  Fractal art has always been about picking up the data and admiring it for it’s own sake.  That’s why we call it art.

In the next one you’ll see an even higher level of creativity as the song Eva has chosen to visualize becomes the actual waves we see and starts to splash against itself adding a new, alien, element to the mix.  The sound now formed becomes transformed and sloshes about the way waves ought to behave.  This thing is alive and talking.  See and listen for yourself.

Rainbow Sound Collision from evsc on Vimeo.

I finally found some time to screen capture a liquid sound collision. The application is fed with the song “Singing under the Rainbow” by World’s End Girlfriend. The two stereo channels are positioned on opposite sites of the tube and cause their waves to collide. The color changes are caused manually during the process of recording.

[from the Progress page on evsc.net]

I get the feeling there’s more to these visualizations and I’ve merely scratched the surface here.  Eva works at a very technical level both with actual programming as well as with electronic components (hardware) and just as it is with fractals and fractal art, the underlying mechanisms that create the cool graphics are not so easily grasped as the imagery itself is.

Anyhow, I look forward to seeing more of Eva’s Wild Future Scenarios.  I’m sure her talent and technical skills provide a rich contribution to the other team members at ART Collaboration and Visualization Lab.

For those of you who don’t know… there’s a lot of fractal programs out there!

One the most unique is Terry Gintz’s Fractal Vizion. In fact, I’m not sure whether it was intended to be a straightforward fractal generator or some sort of desktop electronic performing arts revue. The program just seems to work differently than any other fractal program I’ve used. Behind every button on the Fractal Vizion Remote Controller is a different performer and always,  a fresh, randomly created performance. The ways in which it actually works –not just the images that it makes– are fun to watch. It’s a performance.

Now that I’ve acquired video screenshot powers I can bring these Fractal Vizion Performances to a wider audience. I’m sure that not everyone familiar with fractal art is familiar with Fractal Vizion.  Ladies and Gentlemen: Everything is authentic. Nothing has been “faked”. Try the program out for yourselves and see that you too can turn your desktop computer into a three-ring circus. Or rather, a nine-ring circus.

I’ve captured the two most interesting performers here. L-Systems and Fractal Landscapes. There’s a bunch of others that also put on a performance at the push of a button.

L-Systems are not the usual sort of thing one expects to find in a fractal program. But Terry Gintz has a flair for making programs with a much wider repertoire of computational powers than most developers would even attempt. Watch how the L-System creator works: first it draws a colored wireframe and finally it renders the finished L-system. The process and the final product are equally interesting. Most programs are not this interesting to watch while they’re rendering. It’s like watching an artist work. See for yourself…

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And now for the Fractal Landscapes.

I love these Fractal Landscapes. Every one seems to suggest a different opening scene from an old Sword and Sandal movie, a sub-genre of movies, largely Italian made from the 50s and 60s, that dealt with themes from the history and legends of the Greek and Roman classical world.

There’s probably many ways to render these sorts of images but the style that FV uses is a good example of the program’s author expressing his own artistry and artistic style. Perhaps I’m the only one obsessed with looking at these landscapes, but the slow, multicolored way they’re drawn, as if some magical curtain was being slowly pulled aside, or some ominous shadow was moving across the land and bringing forms into being, makes the final products of this process only part of the show.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the show(s). Even if you never try out the program for yourself, you’ve at least seen a little bit of the vast and varied machinery of fractal programming. Sometimes fractal art is just a program. The program draws something and then it draws something else. All you keep is the memory of what you’ve seen and the wonder.

There are Cellular Automata java applets, and then there are THESE Cellular Automata java applets!

I’m excited.  These things are pretty cool.  Some of you may have seen them before.  They’ve been online since 2002, or so.  But there’s certainly nothing passe about them.  It’s hard to see anyone passing or even matching the creativity of these applets.

They’re a little harder to link to and they’re animated, so here’s some examples to give you a taste of the feast that’s waiting for you over in Collidoscope.com’s Modern CA wonderland.  The real applets look much better than these smudgy videos, but this will give you a quick idea of how amazing they are.  They’re a bit like the old TV screen test patterns with an Art Deco style and neon coloring, but living, animated and in full color. They’re like kaleidoscoped circuit boards and things that just can’t be described.

Remember, the video quality isn’t near as good as what you’ll get from the real applets running in your web browser.  But to view these short videos you won’t need a java plugin or have to go there and search around.  Here’s four to get you started.  The first is about 15 Mb and is an embedded file I made from a video screen capture.   I think it’ll stream if you push the play button.  The next three I posted to YouTube and are more bandwidth friendly but the quality is proportionally lower as well.  I’d made a bunch more but the quality was so bad when I posted them to YouTube (they convert them to make them low bandwidth and fit in their video player) that they no longer were worth looking at; and when I embedded them directly into the blog page they wouldn’t play on Windows (although they played fine for me on Linux, which is ironic).

Collidoscope.com Modern CA Animation Theater:

The site has been around for some time but I only discovered it a week ago through a Google search on “cellular automata java applet”.  I hope the site  doesn’t disappear anytime soon because it’s got to be some of the finest generative art that I’ve ever seen.

The mandala versions are some of the best ones, they’re the ones that start off as diamonds and look kaliedoscoped.  In fact, I think they are kaliedoscoped.  Such a simple, old-fashioned trick and yet it works so well.  In fact, the kaliedoscope is probably the oldest example of algorithmic art.  It’s rather ironic to see it combined with something as space age-ish as a cellular automata applet.

I had quite a bit of trouble at first trying to capture the imagery.  I know (or that is, used to know until my recent crash course) very little about video “screenshots” and file formats.  Video is just plain complicated when compared to the relatively simple world of still images.  And then when you add in the “conversion” that YouTube does to shrink file sizes and make everything fit the aspect ratio of a movie, the confusion compounds.  It works okay for “photographic” video, but for crisp, clear, high-contrast digital art subjects, one needs to find custom solutions (and make custom mistakes).

The higher the vidoe quality, the higher the file size?  Not always.  I made a nice video capture with xvidcap using flash video (flv) that was much smaller than mpeg-2 and much clearer too.  Then I made one that looked perfect.  It ought to have looked perfect since it was a “lossless” codec.  20 seconds of a 400×400 px video was 152 MB!  But it sure looked good. Video is quite a lot more work to make and a great deal harder to present, bandwidth-wise.  Also, there doesn’t seem to be any video format equivalent to the png or gif still image formats which favor blocks of solid color instead of the smooth gradients that jpeg is better at compressing.  These CA applet images would be prime candidates for indexed gif or pngs if saved as still images (I saved one frame as a true color png and it was only 3.5k).  And since video is just a series of still images, I figured there would be a similar video codec.  Maybe there is?  Not all video is necessarily going to be photographic.  In particular, digitally created imagery is often simple blocks of color and would work much better with a codec designed for that sort of “gif or png-type” imagery.

One thing I learned right away: you can easily make a long, high quality video and still keep the file size down really low –if there’s nothing in it! Just as with still images, big blank areas make for small file sizes; file size is directly equivalent to the amount of details in the imagery.  But you can always bring the file size down if you’re willing to cut down on the quality and turn everything into melting plastic.

Back to Collidoscope.  I’m still getting oriented within the Cellular Automata (CA) world.  It’s nothing like the Fractal world; it’s much more scholarly and theoretical, which of course is what makes Collidoscope such an incredible find: I’ve never seen CA used in such a powerfully artistic way.  Most CA applets are usually illustrations or demonstrations in some scholarly discussion paper and don’t seem to have been made with any sort of artistic context in mind.  Maybe fractals were the same in the early days?  I doubt it because fractals, even the basic mandelbrot set stuff in black and white have an obvious aesthetic appeal.  CA is more text-bookish, in general.  But these applets aren’t the usual sort of CA stuff.  In fact, although I’m hardly an authority on these things, I’d say these are the most advanced CA that have been made.  And highly artistic too.

I’m still on the learning curve with these applets and have only just figured out what all the buttons do and what the parameters are, but I have learned that the author of all this amazing stuff is George Maydwell.  From George’s site I found some info:

Cellular automata have fascinated me ever since I read Martin Gardner’s column about Conway’s game of Life in Scientific American many moons ago. I have wasted lots of computer resources playing with cellular automata. One of my missions in life has become to inflict my unique vision of cellular automata upon the world.

I’m particularly interested in fast programmable color cellular automata. I’ve got a bunch of different web sites all devoted to cellular automata. I also have much free cellular automata software available for download. All of the software is fast and all of the cellular automata are color! As the world expert in hexagonal cellular automata rules I can show you literally dozens of hexagonal rules which are not boring. No one else in the world can do this.

By far my best site is Modern Cellular Automata – Live Color Cellular Automata which uses a small Java applet to power a plethora of live exhibitions of cellular automata. I’ve been told that this site is “amazing”. Certainly I’ve found the tools used to be the best cellular automata software I’ve ever experienced. Once you’ve played with Modern Cellular Automata software anything else (besides my other software) is just slow boring black and white cellular automata.

Conway’s Game Of Life is still one of the most popular and well known cellular automata. In spite of for the most part being bored with Game Of Life I decided I wanted to see what it looked like in color, so I set up the Color Game Of Life Visual Exhibition, using the Modern Cellular Automata Java applet. Even I have to admit that the pattern collection for Game Of Life has some very cool formations, particularly when viewed in color using a fast machine with a good Java implementation.

I even resort to stealth cellular automata. Some of my coolest cellular automata work isn’t even labelled as cellular automata! Collidoscope is a cellular automata screensaver for Windows which runs large hexagonal simulations at video refresh rates. Its way cool and far less boring than any Conway’s Game Of Life screen saver could ever be! Not only is Collidoscope a cellular automata screen saver its also a cellular automata wallpaper generator. Its so far ahead of its time that only I know just how advanced it really is.

My very first cellular automata web page is my SARCASim homepage, which has more fast free cellular automata software for Windows. Unlike current versions of Collidoscope, SARCASim is programmable. In reality I seem to be the only person ever able to program it, but at least I’ve provided a bunch of example data files which illustrate different rules. As far as I know SARCASim is the only general purpose cellular automata software powerful enough to simulate virtual ants. Papers and other stuff which doesn’t quite belong on the other sites ends up on this page.

from http://www.collidoscope.com/george/

If you check out his CA site, I would suggest (like a tour guide would) that you start with the section August Addition and in particular the page Brain 3.5 Rule Mix Lab (cool title) .

Check off the Pattern or Mandala boxes (or both) for what I think is the best viewing method and then just click on any of the variations listed.  I found lowering the rate to 30 or 15 made for better viewing because there’s just so much going on in the applets that 75 is too fast.  If you click on the applet once or twice it will restart with a new color palette.

After that check out the other August Additions pages and remember to check off the Pattern and Mandala boxes.  They look very good when checked off together.

There’s a site map page which really helps to find everything and get a grasp on what the whole site contains.  The author says a lot of complimentary things about his applets but I think he’s just being honest.  They really are remarkable and stand out from everything else that I’ve seen relating to CA.  They’re so simple (40k!) and yet the results are nothing less than hundreds of eye-popping digital animations.  That’s computational creativity for you.

Allow me to play Film Class Professor.  Before we dim the lights and roll the film I will give a short lecture which hopefully will enlighten our understanding of these short animations posted below, or, at the very least, become the price of admission you will pay to sit in a comfortable seat and watch films and get a university degree at the same time.

I went to YouTube and searched on “Apophysis Animation“.  About three hundred links came up.  I sorted them by viewer ranking (number of stars) and then shortened the list by including only those less than a month old because I was interested in seeing the more current stuff.  This came to 18 and I looked at almost all of them.  Not all of them I watched to the end, mind you.  Judging animation is more time consuming than still image art.  A better review of course would have included a much wider time frame than just the last month.  But let’s talk a bit about fractal animation and where I think it’s going and why.

Jock Cooper, a fractal animator whose work I reviewed a year ago and who had a short work that I particularly liked, in part due to it’s spectacular fractal music accompaniment (which he also composed) left a comment to my last posting on fractal animation where he said, “Yes fractal animations are basically boring. But I don’t know what can be done about it. It’s not like you can add characters and a plot.”  An artist of Jock’s stature is worth listening to and taking seriously.  If he’s not the best Ultra Fractal animator, he’s certainly one of them, as well a being a superb creator of non-animated fractal artwork.

And he’s absolutely right in what he’s said.  What can be done about it?  I salute those, who like him, have spent a good deal of time in mastering the technical complexities of Ultra Fractal animation.  If most non-animated fractal artwork had that much effort put into it, the whole genre would be that much better for it.  But fractal animation is a tough job and folks like him face some really serious challenges because you can’t simply make high tech cartoons with “characters and a plot” with fractals like you can with other forms of computerized animation.  All of the good fractal animations I’ve seen have been multimedia presentations with carefully chosen musical scores that complement the moving images.  Perhaps because fractals are so abstract, they need sound to help take up the slack that characters and a plot does in other kinds of animation.  And even creating one minute of such a combination of engaging visuals and sound is no mean feat.  It’s not something one can just pick up and play with for a few months and then win a contest create something impressive.

Part of the problem, as I’ve suggested, may be that good animation isn’t really about good graphics. What makes a short film interesting is what happens in it. It’s different than making still images which are intended to be stared at and focused upon. When someone tries to animate that in the form of a parameter sweep, deep zoom or fly-by, the viewer instinctively expects something to happen, some significant change to what they’re looking at to occur. Strangely enough then, fractals that look good as still images may not have any animation potential to them.

And still images that don’t look so great may have a lot of animation potential to them.  Daniel White’s Into the Heart of the Mandelbulb which I discussed in my last post is a typical depiction of the Mandelbulb, 3D mandelbrot formula, which really isn’t all that exciting, visually, when compared to most renderings of the common, 2D mandelbrot formula.  But what made Daniel’s short animation interesting was the sound and the sci-fi/horror theme of venturing into the unknown.  He used sound dramatically as well as editing in a dark, blacked-out segment in which to build suspense.  Those graphics wouldn’t impress too many in the fractal art world, but he used them to tell a short and simple “story”.  What looks good in animation doesn’t seem to match what looks good in still fractal artwork.

This shouldn’t be so surprising though. Consider photography. Many exciting still images are actually snapshots of athletes or other people engaged in vigorous activity frozen in time and presented in a completely different context than the moving image clip they would be a part of if they were animated, that is, presented as a short film clip.

Or how about landscape photography? How many breath taking panoramic vistas would be more appealing as short video takes from an airplane? There are some. I’ve seen some clips taken from airplanes flying low over African grasslands while herds of antelope race along or as flocks of birds take off from lakes or rivers. But the subject of interest is the movement of the antelope or the birds and not really the landscape which forms the background. The background is more photogenic as a still image than a moving one. And I think fractals are, for the most part,  more like backgrounds than animals.

I hate to say it, but I think fractal animation is going to be short-lived and merely something of a fad. Abstract animation is a hard sell to any audience and today’s audience has been spoiled by a steady diet of 21st century Hollywood CGI and computer animation. Audiences aren’t wowed by moving fractals as much as they are by a gorgeous still image of one. Fractals look best when they can be stared at and studied. That’s why people paint sunsets. They want to stop the sun right where it is and savor that moment and then be able to come back again and again to look at that perfect and unmoving sunset.

Having said all that…

Now it’s time for the fun part.  Fortunately, in this online classroom, we don’t have to wait for the lazy graduate student in the projector room to come back from his smoke break before we can get started.  We can start right away with a mouse-click.

(Apophysis Animation)  Has a nice soundtrack.  That spacey, techno-dub, drifting thing has an abstract quality that fits in well with abstract graphics.  This is not a bad music video, but that’s not saying much since most music videos incorporate imagery and music that blends together like oil and water.  This one isn’t like that at all.  I watched this one more than once.  That pretty well says it all.

(Apophysis Flying Bird Anim…) I love it.  But why do I love it?  It’s a pretty, um, elementary use of Apophysis 3D (is that 3D?).  The music is wonderfully retro, but I’m 44, so my idea of retro might not be yours.  I’m thinking old Kraftwerk.  This bird is timeless and almost a fossilized animation.  And yet it’s not terribly old is it?  It’s got a neat style to it.  A good example of how animation follows a whole different set of rules than still imagery does.  As a still image, this thing would not be too impressive, to put it politely.  The guy made the graphics and the music.  A fairly talented man, I’d say.

(Julia’s Revenge)?  Well, it’s just a title.  A few things to note.  It starts and ends nicely and not just when they music cuts out.  Again, the dreamy, spacey, driftin’ to alpha centauri on the old man river of the milky way music seems to be suited to all sorts of fractal animation sequences like this one.

I found this one to be like “geometric ballet”.  In fact, near the middle when the camera pans out over a surprisingly flat panorama and the golden bubble appears, I was reminded of ballet dancers and point shoes and some very expensive scenery changes.

(The living fractal apophysis…) Spooky music, eh?  Works nicely with the octopus-o-saurus.  Some bits were a bit jagged, at least when I viewed it on my computer, but the attempt to present an ancient sea creature swimming through a vast, dark sea came across pretty well.  Finding an animal-like image that looks good and animates well is a tricky thing, I’m sure.  At times I was confused by whether the creature was turning around or swimming backwards, or what.  But that also added some mystery to the scene.  After all, it’s supposed to be something we’ve never seen before.

(Alien Space) This one’s probably the most well executed one from a professional standpoint.  It’s got some rather good editing in it.  The author obviously has gone to some effort to make sure the graphics sync reasonably well with the changes in the music.  Once again we have the dreamy, dub-like soundtrack that fits with almost any kind of abstract animation.  The narration is an interesting aspect.  Of course, that’s all done by the musician and the animator has simply worked their stuff in around it.  Perhaps narration is a good trick to remember and even a simple voice-over by any animator describing how the imagery was made or adding in poetry or quotations would complement fractal animation as well as music seems to.

I don’t know if the Sun sequence was made in Apophysis (it looked awfully realistic) but Apophysis 3D seems to excel in making all sorts of spherical things.  There’s a lot of layering and combining of imagery in this one.

It gets a bit repetitive in spots, but then the whole thing is 9 minutes long.  9 minutes is a pretty long time to animate without repeating something.  Still, this one is very good and explains why it was so highly rated on YouTube.

(My Best Apophysis Animation Yet) Although this one probably looks a little plain after seeing some other ones like it, I think it’s not too bad since it syncs well with the soundtrack and ends (fairly) well, although a little off-time with the music.  I particularly like the laser light appearance in this one and how in one of the pans where the camera pulls off backwards into space the animation really uses the 3D architecture of the imagery to it’s greatest advantage.

(You Appearing) Hmmmnn… This posting is almost becoming a review of Apophysis music videos.  The fractured imagery in this one at the beginning blends perfectly with the reverberated piano.  Perhaps that’s what made me include this one: it’s got some very good moments in it as far as the use of fractal animation goes.  Some of the “dissolution” sequences (where the element are moved apart) really shows how complex some of the IFS imagery can be.  There’s squares, rolled up scarves, and wispy curly-cues all from the same image and each with different coloring.  It’s viewable in higher resolutions but I didn’t try it as I’ve got an 8 year old computer with a fairly basic integrated video card.  Resolution could be an important factor when viewing fractal animation I suppose, since a lot of detail is lost in the video compression used to create the lower resolution streams (smudges and stuff).  And how good would most movies look if you viewed them through a smudgy, foggy window?

(3D IFS Fractal:  Inside the Sierpinski Temple) A silent movie, for a change.  I can’t quite figure out what makes this one so appealing.  It really shouldn’t be any more impressive than any 3D environment from a video game, but it’s got a style or mood –or something– to it that makes it interesting.  There’s a simple video of the outside of the temple which although it has the same Sierpinski structure, isn’t anywhere near as interesting as this little drive around on the inside is.  Who would ever have thought the inside of a Sierpinski “temple” would be so much more interesting than the outside?  Maybe it’s the lighting and shadows that gives the impression of exploring a secret, forbidden place, flashlight in hand in the middle of the night.  Or it could just be that the Sierpinski architecture (from the inside) is of itself something of interest .  Anyhow, it’s short and silent which suggests that plain fractal animation on it’s own can still be interesting.

(Fractale) I apologize.  I threw this one in for laughs.  It’s got to be the worst fractal video I’ve ever seen.  I believe the initial cover image (which is the only good point) is by Kerry Mitchell.   I doubt he gave permission for it to be used as no self-respecting artist would allow their work to be abused like this (except for thousands of dollars, of course).  Inside there’s probably even more examples of copyright infringement.  See any else you recognize?  But worst of all it’s just a slide show.  Yaaaaaaaawn…  And the music?  Why do people even bother to make stuff like this?  Hopefully whoever made this one gave up making videos after this.  Don’t tell your friends about this one; we don’t want this sort of thing going viral.  It’s not likely to.

Well, that’s it, class.  Congratulations on finding the easiest and most agreeable way to get a course credit in your entire college career.  After viewing these examples does fractal animation have a future?   Sorry, does that sound like an exam question?  I didn’t mean to frighten you.  Come back next week when we “study” Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in cinemascope.

A few years back I was excited about the possibilities of fractal animation.  Fractal animation, as I saw it, would be literally living and moving fractals.  Fractal artists were about to become fractal film makers and the art form would take on a whole new dimension.  And after seeing a couple of very exciting algorithmic but not strictly fractal animations, I was, yes, excited.

These days I’m bored with fractal animation.  It started out with a very rapid ascent and then, equally rapidly,  reached a plateau where it is now, languishing in endless variations of  oozing parameter transforms and deep zooms into nothing and nowhere.

It’s not for lack of hard work, though.  Fractal animation takes a lot of time and processing because, in the same way as traditional films are made, the movement is produced by sequencing many still images together to give the impression of movement.  I mention that because some may think that digital animation is different.  Animation is resource hungry and multiplies the work required even to the point of making thirty images for a single second of animation.  Those brave pioneers who have been dabbling in fractal animation are hard-working and dedicated individuals.  You have to be to take on something as intensive as animation.  Fractal animation takes as much work as still image creation does as well as requiring a few things that still images don’t.

Here’s where fractal animation gets bogged down: film making is more than just a complicated, high tech  slide show.  For instance, something has to happen.  Still images only have to look good, but animation requires some sort of progression and  development of an idea.  People just look at still images and everything is all there all at once to be studied –nice and simple.  But with moving images one has to engage the audience and move them along some sort of story line without leaving them all behind or without making the message so simple as to bore them.  With more abstract content of course, the messages or ideas in the animated sequence become less of a story than simply a visual experience, but the need for some progressive, development which will engage the viewer isn’t any different than it is with producing an animated cartoon.

In short, I believe that fractal animation is just too different for the old, still image visual techniques to work.  Artists who have been successful in the still image area will not necessarily have any advantage in the area of fractal animation other than the software skills necessary to operate the program.  What looks good as a still image can easily appear flat and boring when animated because transforming the parameters of pretty graphics to make them flow between one shape and another, while it may be a good start to an animated sequence, on it’s own is really nothing more than a demonstration of animation and not the use of it.

An artist can get away with work of a purely ornamental character in the realm of still images, but with animation the lack of expression or message sticks out like a sore thumb –nothing is happening.  Instead I think animators should concentrate on simpler imagery with regard primarily to interesting shapes and structures.  It’s a different game than the still image thing; animation is all about action.

Fractal animators need to make their own rules and be prepared to pioneer their own styles.  It’s all crap right now.  So go ahead and experiment and do outrageous things that only you would do and have never been done.  Cross boundaries and mix fractal imagery with everything you’ve got in you animation spice cupboard.

And now, having said all that, here’s a cool zooming/fly-by with orchestrated soundtrack of the late, great Mandelbulb by none other than Daniel White who I now declare to be the first recipient of Orbit Trap’s Fractal Hitchcock award.  Get ready to scream…

Into the Heart of the Mandelbulb

Directed by Daniel White, Starring “The Mandelbulb”

MMX

More at TwinbeeUK’s YouTube page

Wait!  It’s not me.  And it’s got nothing to do with Orbit Trap this time either.

Curious who could be having seconds thoughts about the glorious Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 besides Orbit Trap?  Well, it’s none other than Mr. Velocipede!

Here’s what she says:

I’ve finally had a chance to take a better look at the contest, and I find that I’m left feeling a little bit let down or disappointed. Not with any individual image, necessarily (although as several people have pointed out, a couple of them aren’t even really fractal), but that this year’s selections seem to be heavily weighted toward texture-fields and minimalism.

Heavily weighted?  Actually, as we all know from the deluge of information on how the judging works (I’m being sarcastic) that the winners are whatever the judges, together, decided to chose.  And this is the first year that any of the judges have actually spoken about their selections vis a vis what they personally chose that the whole panel didn’t select.  Mark Townsend, on the UF list mentioned a few of the submissions that he thought were quite good but which didn’t get enough votes to be one of the final 25 winners.  Samuel Monnier, a former BMFAC judge also commented on what he personally thought were good images in the contest which didn’t make the final cut either.

True to her name, Velocipede moves on quickly.

…to All-out Fractal Contest Public Insurrection!  Here’s how our fractal Che Guevarra ignites the masses:

It’s all gotten me started thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of fractals as a medium, and why I like them, which seems to be maybe different than why other people like them, and what the implications are for my own future work and the fractal-art world in general. It’s too much for me to process! And it’s all mixed up with a book I’m reading lately, written in the early 1920s and intended to explain why Modernism was (a) degenerate & evil and (b) doomed to be quickly forgotten. There seem to be some possible historical parallels, but I suspect it’s going to take me some time to sort them out.

Still, it does reinforce my idea that it would be really good if there were more fractal events than just this occasional big contest. I’m beginning to wonder if I might be able to organize some kind of small-scale thing. It’s an intimidating thought.

Sorry, excuse me.  I just have to laugh now. (cough! choke! sputter!)

Sounds like she’s arguing for a wider range of criticism and opinion and not just a single fleeting and transitory annual event.  Would a blog do the trick?  Like Orbit Trap, or probably something much less destructive to the fractal art community.  But don’t you laugh; a fellow revolutionary has already heeded the call.

Orbit Trap has criticized the large image size requirements of the BMFAC.  We thought it would prevent smaller and non-UF works from being included as well as simply being a pointless restriction.  Velocipede adds something new to this and has a very sound art-based argument for it, too.

With the more minimal ones, I mostly just wonder what advantage there is in printing them very large, since there’s not particularly any new detail to be revealed. Graphically, they will no doubt be quite effective, but they seem to ignore the specific potential of fractals to be full of interesting surprises when magnified.

Anyhow, check out the three texture field images she’s referring to, as well as the four minimal images she suggests which don’t need such a large canvas size due to their lack of detail.  You have to click on each-word-in-the-phrase which she has linked.  That’s cute.  I’ve never seen anyone else do that.  I thought it was a mistake at first.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, digital art, art contests, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009,

I got a couple of comments to my previous post, Art, Craft and Fractals, which raised an issue which I think needs to be clarified.  The term, Craft, is used in many ways and most of them are probably derogatory in the context of art.  But it’s not my intention to bad-mouth craft, only to show it for what it is and what it is not.

Craft is not immature art or the product of an art form in its early stages of evolutionary development: Craft is imagery that’s fun to look at.  Craft is not imagery that’s thought provoking or which expresses ideas or feelings.  Fractal Craft is simply fractals for the sake of fractals.  It’s people who love fractal imagery cooking up and mixing together new recipes of fractals that scratch our itchy eyeballs –itching for cool, new, exotic fractals.

This sort of thing doesn’t lead to art or create the foundation for a bold new skyscraper of art to be built upon.  It creates delicious taste sensations set out for our consumption and gobbled up before they have time to cool off.  It’s visual hedonism: pleasing, pleasant and pacifying.  Craft doesn’t upset people because it’s silent and anonymous like a decoration or ornamental table leg.  Craft doesn’t express opinions or even suggest opinions or anything complicated like that.  Craft is simply what it looks like: ornamental.

Fractal art might be young as an art form (although I don’t think it is) but that’s different than being juvenile.  Fractal art is the domain of craft because that’s what its practitioners pursue and set out to create.  It’s the intent of fractal artists to produce slick, multi-layered, eye-popping work.  I really have no problem with that because I see craft as a normal pursuit and a perfectly healthy one.  I have a problem with people trying to pawn off their craft as art, but that’s just my own critical disposition.  I like craft, but I like art more.  I’d like to see more art made, but if there’s more craft made as well, who cares?  Who cares? is the long term response to craft anyhow.  It has a fleeting glory and only briefly holds its audience’s attention.  Craft doesn’t enter our long term memory, but exists and is replaced by another shiny icon.

My definition of art and by consequence, craft, is functional.  Craft performs a singular function: ornamentation.  Specifically, in the context of fractals, craft is work that performs that function.  It’s not a matter of what people say it is, it’s a matter of what the experience the viewer has.  If you, the viewer, find some of the works in the BMFAC to be thought provoking or expressive in mood, emotion, idea, whatever, then it’s just as valid for you to defend them as art as it is for me to classify them as craft, according to my functional definition.

I don’t know, is this functional approach new and different?  The obvious corollary is that art is subjective since it may function differently for different people.

Another thing, craft isn’t junk.  I used an illustration of rather “domestic” hand made Christmas ornaments as a somewhat flavorful example of craft, but probably every winning entry in the BMFAC was rather skillfully made and represents artists at the top of the fractal art world.  Perhaps people assume that craft is junk is because in an art context, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, craft is used as a label for amateur, cheesy, folksy, primitive, cliche kind of work.  But for me craft is used purely to denote a type of function the work performs and particularly in the fractal art world, craft is often professional, tasteful, complex and utilizing the latest, cutting-edge techniques.  That’s why artists consider it to be a real feather in their cap when they win something like the BMFAC or the (now defunct) Fractal Universe Calendar contest.  Their peers are saying they make good stuff –like their peers do.

I would prefer to make art instead though.  I don’t get as big a Wow! out of just looking at fractals as I did when I first discovered them.  I’m looking for something that’s different and appeals a wider area of my brain than simply that sugar cubed sized lump that neuro-scientists refer to as the fractal sugar center.  Why any of you professional craftspeople care what I think is odd, really.  Am I not a loser in your opinion?  I make junk, I like junk, and I write junk.  I don’t see what we have in common.

The whole art and craft “dichotomy” just explains what it’s all about perfectly.  Two different types of people whose different intentions lead to artwork that performs different functions.  One doesn’t grow or mature into the other; fractal craft has already grown up, blossomed and gone to seed.  Fractals, the medium, is what we have in common.  Not art.

Art is a term that is used very loosely these days.  I happen to think that this casual application of the label, “art” to everything graphical has produced some confusion in the digital art world and obscured what has traditionally been known as Fine Art, submerging it beneath a flood of what I think is best described as Craft.

So, under the general label entitled, “Art”, I separate out two categories of graphical works: art, and craft.  There’s nothing new to such a division and we’ve probably all heard these terms before, but I’ve resurrected this old-fashioned and contentious division because I think it’s fundamental to understanding any art form, but especially any of our 21st century computerized art forms such as fractal art.  I would say that you can not begin to understand fractal art and the people who are involved in it unless you fully comprehend the difference between art and craft as well as the corresponding differences between artists and craftsman.  Art and craft are very different things and find their origins in their differing, and sometimes conflicting, outlooks on Art itself.  I would say that every art form, not just fractal art, possesses a deceptive appearance of unity and commonality among its practitioners because they all share an interest in a common medium.  The common “medium” in fractal art being fractal imagery.  However, if one takes a closer examination of the actual artwork being produced under what appears to be the common banner of “fractal art” there will appear, as will appear in every art form I believe, two very distinct and independent activities going on under that common label of the art form and it’s medium; that being the pursuit of craft and also the pursuit of art.

Art and Craft Defined
Perhaps not the customary dictionary type of definition, but I prefer more practical definitions to the stiff, technical ones.  Craft is visually exciting graphical work.  Art, on the other hand is all about expression.  Craft is “cool graphics” and “awesome 3D rendering”.  Craft has immediate appeal and makes a good impression with a wide audience.  Art is thought provoking and oriented around ideas and triggers some deeper experience in the mind of the audience.  Art is sometimes hard to understand or relate to at first, and subsequent to this, the audience’s impression is more unpredictable and contingent on their intellectual connection with what the work is about or expresses.  All those factors work, ironically, both to increase the impact of art on its audience and also to limit the size of that audience.  Craft is nice to look at; richly ornamental; variations on a common theme or style.  Art is sometimes unpleasant to look at; suggestive of some idea or feeling; difficult to compare.

Similarly, craftsmen pursue common themes and styles and focus on the visual novelty of their art form while artists share little interest with each other in terms of the techniques and methods of their medium, as the focus of their work is what it says or the thoughts it provokes and for that reason the medium is merely a tool for expressing these things just as pen and paper are tools for writers to express themselves and not issues of great importance.  For artists, the medium is secondary; for craftsmen the medium is primary and their only interest.

Image by divadea

Why Art and Craft are so different
The reasons for these differences between craft and art come from their differing levels of complexity and intellectual involvement.  While it’s easy to say that craft is simple and decorative and art is complex and intellectual, I believe the difference is more accurately described from what attracts my attention when I’m looking at these two categories of art.  Craft attracts my visual interest in the medium, while art attracts my interest to what the medium is being used to express or convey.  Craft is rooted in the medium itself, while art is rooted in the use of the medium to present some mentally engaging experience.

And it’s all about experience, essentially.  Someone once defined art as an experience.  I think this perspective is much better because it zeros in on the common factor in all art –the viewer’s mind.  In this way, craft is a comforting and soothing experience which comes from looking at things which are pleasing to the eye.  Art is a much more varied experience and sometimes the complete opposite of that triggered by craft.  Art is sometimes unpleasant to look at and provokes feelings of disgust and fear.  Who wants to make or look at art like that?  Yes, good question.  I think you’re beginning to see how important –and divisive– the categories of art and craft really are.

Craft is the novelty of a medium
And Art is the novelty of the ideas expressed with the medium. The ramifications of all this for fractal art are enormous.  But then, they’re enormous for every art form.  Every art form has its artists and its craftsmen; every art form has its art and its craft.  Take portrait painting for instance: the Mona Lisa can be described as art because the expression on the subject’s face evokes strange and mysterious interpretations and corresponding thoughts –mentally engaging imagery.  The average portrait painted in oil paints is purely descriptive of the subject and while it may be quite life-like and have required a good deal of skill to produce, it’s really nothing more than a photograph rendered in a very expensive medium by hand.  What excites one about such a portrait is the medium; it’s a portrait “in oils”.  People are impressed with a life-like rendering of someone they know in oil paints because it’s hard to make or because it looks expensive.  It’s the craft they’re interested in, the oil paint medium.  But the Mona Lisa is admired today not because it’s a nice portrait, but because because it’s art.

Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure), by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

Woe to you! Makers of Craft…
In the fractal art world today, most artwork is really the sort of thing I’m describing as craft.  It’s exciting to look at and appeals to most people who see it, but it’s purely one-dimensional and attracts the attention of people who are merely looking for rich, ornamental work that is comforting to the eye.  From an art perspective such work is an empty experience and trivial.  In fact, zooming around in a simple, single-layer fractal program is probably more of an art experience than looking at the latest crop of winners from the BMFAC, the fractal art world’s annual craft show.

While the Ultra Fractal Guild may not incorporate all the high school kids from Renderosity and Deviant Art, it by far encompasses the greater majority of fractal artists today and these people are strictly pursuing the creation of craft, not art.  This is not to say they’re making bad fractal art.  Craft is not bad art; craft is merely flat, one-dimensional, “awesome” art.  The UFG is almost exclusively making works that are purely ornamental, pretty pictures, as someone said, and not work that is thought-provoking or expressive, the attributes by which real art has traditionally been defined.  It’s art, not craft, and they’re craftsmen, not artists because their work is limited to just displaying the cool graphics of the medium and doesn’t use the medium to express anything more intelligent than the latest 3D technique or layering trick.

But fractal art isn’t like those other art forms, is it?
It’s not because fractals aren’t capable of the realistic or figurative imagery that painting, drawing and sculpture have traditionally employed via creative human hands that fractal art today is largely composed of craft and lacking in art.  Abstract art lacks realistic and figurative imagery and yet is still capable of expressing moods, thoughts and ideas, albeit of a much more generic, abstract sort.  And fractals are just like photography in the sense that one captures rather than creates the imagery they use.  If abstract imagery and photography can produce real art and not exclusively craft, then there’s no reason fractals can’t be used to make art because fractals are essentially abstract photography.  Fractals have the potential to be more than just pretty pictures that are sold as decorations at craft shows; they can be art too.

The notion that fractals are not art, or incapable of being art, and are exclusively the domain of craft, is merely the by-product of the current fractal art scene’s own narrow interest in pretty pictures as well as it’s popular annual events like the Fractal Universe Calendar and the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest.  More than anything else, those two public events have spread the popular impression that fractal art is exclusively the preserve of the rich, ornamental craftwork they regularly present, applaud and award.  But it’s to be expected that when craftsmen get together to create a contest that they will end up producing an exhibition of craft and not art.  Art is not their pursuit or their interest –craft is.

When will the revolution come?
I don’t expect to see much change anytime soon.  Most fractal “artists” are dedicated craftspeople because that’s their thing.  They’re never going to make real art because they have no urge to do so.  Some of them are extremely good at what they do and I’m sure we’ll see the results of more newly discovered techniques and methods each and every year displayed at the BMFAC craft show.  The Ultra Fractal Guild is all about craft and art is something they’re heading away from, not heading towards or traveling parallel to.  Which is why I said that the sloppy way we use the term, Art, today obscures the divisions in an art form like fractal art and deceives one into thinking that fractal art is one single thing when in fact it’s two things: the traditional pursuit of art; and the much more popular pursuit of producing craft.  Real art has barely begun to be made in the fractal world because there are very few artists.  There’s plenty of craftsmen working away in their fractal woodworking shops and producing “cool graphics” and “awesome 3D effects” but that’s not art.  It’s great craftsmanship and very popular and probably sells well too, but in the long run such works become trivial and insignificant because they lack the substance that real artwork has.

Do I expect this to have much influence on the fractal art world?  Not likely.  But again, that’s to be expected because most of them are crafters and they’re immune and indifferent to issues relating to art.  But for me this idea of art vs. craft is cataclysmic; breaking the continent of fractal art in two and revealing two unconnected domains from what was previously assumed to be one.  And the art domain is by far the larger one in terms of creative potential and significance, although it is relatively unpopulated in comparison to the much more popular and populous, craft domain.  Craft, as in all art forms whether it be painting, drawing, sculpture or photography, is always the more common type of work because it’s merely variations on a theme.  But art revolves around creative thinking and expression, and that’s always a scarce resource.  No finer example of this exists than the fractal art world today.

Technorati Tags: fractals, fractal art, digital art, art vs. craft, art, craft, art criticism,

“I had to stand up for myself alone, and you saw what they did to me…
Until all men can stand up for what they believe in, THE SAME DAMN THING CAN HAPPEN TO ANY ONE OF YOU!”
– Sheriff Buford Pusser, 1977, Walking Tall: Final Chapter

Okay, I think I’ve got it all figured out now, how the whole fractal art scene/community/world works.  Let me just put down my cudgel for a second because it’s hard to type with.  For mental navigational purposes, let me say this: I will start with listing what I personally consider to be the main characteristics of the online fractal world, some of which have puzzled me for years, and then go on to explain what I think the source of those features and mysteries are –why the fractal world is the way it is. Keep your shoes on, there’s broken a lot of broken glass around.

A few enduring (stubborn?) aspects to the online fractal art world:

• Conservative tastes in art
• Little interest in avant garde, radical ideas
• Little reference and connection to the larger art world
• Concentration on a single program and style of work
• Lots of people actively engaged and producing artwork
• Very stable and established community and leadership
• Skill-based, not artwork based status (eg. Rocket Scientists)
• Seniority based authority is generally accepted

And here’s what I think explains all that:

The interest that most people have in fractal art is the pursuit of rich, ornamental imagery... These people have been drawn to the program Ultra Fractal, because that’s the most effective tool for making that type of artwork. The internet enables these people to network with each other and they’ve gradually established, over the years, a large but informal organization revolving around their mutual interest in UF. I’ll call it the UF Guild; UFG. The higher skill level and greater experience of the older users along with their continued leadership in the development of UF resources justifies their higher status and authority in the eyes of newer members, who also value those things and want to pursue them like the older members have. People who lack such similar interests gain little from their association with the UFG and having little attachment to it, drift away. Over the years, the UFG has increased in size and in the support of its members to the point where it’s now able to convincingly present itself and its art to people outside the fractal art world as the contemporary standard in fractal art.  It would not be a great exaggeration to say that the UFG has become the fractal art world.

Are the contests public or private? Universal or Specialized?
Their annual contests, administered by senior members have become annual awards ceremonies establishing the reputation and talents of newer members while perpetuating those of the older ones. The defence that such contests are private events and shouldn’t be compared with contests that are public where contestants commonly expect judging to follow the customs of fairplay and impartiality is paradoxicly both a reasonable one and not. It’s reasonable in the sense that the UFG is an exclusive, but voluntary, association of artists with a demonstrated preferences and bias for the rich, ornamental artwork that is almost exclusively made with UF.  And yet the UFG has also come to incorporate the majority of what would be considered the fractal art world, or fractal “public”, and in such a “public” setting, the status that so many senior members have as judges and the personal connections they have with each other would be seen as unprofessional because in a public setting such conflicts of interest in judging generally lead to suspicions of abuse even when abuse does not actually occur. But, among the members of the UFG, there is no weakening of their confidence in the judging because they already know these people and trust them to behave in a way which benefits the UFG as they’ve already done for years. There is artistic bias among the judges and in the restrictions placed on submissions, but this “bias” is shared by almost all of the fractal art community, whom, as I’ve mentioned, pretty well make up the UFG itself these days.

If the contest wants to represent all of fractal art, then it needs to become more inclusive and adopt policies that will give every contestant a reasonable degree of confidence in the judging. If however, the contest wants to focus on UF style artwork and artists, then there is little reason to change anything as this is the way the UFG has smoothly operated for years and only UFG members will want to enter anyway.  With the exception of Orbit Trap’s two editors and maybe a few other individuals, there are no serious objections from the fractal art community in how the contest is designed, run, or the final selections it makes.  And this is the conundrum: The UFG has grown to include the majority of fractal artists and has redefined what fractal art is –for most people.  And that is artwork which can be described as rich and ornamental, made in the multi-layered and multi-talented program, Ultra Fractal.  When one speaks of the “fractal art community” they’re really talking about the UFG, whether they’re aware of it or not.  I said similar things two and a half years ago here.

Orbit Trap and the Clash of Fractal Civilizations
This is where Orbit Trap entered the scene. I think you can see better (I can) where the huge differences in perspective on the contests came from. Damien Jones, the organizer of the BMFAC has argued that the contest is not a community event, by which I believe he’s trying to say, it’s a really a special event with “special” rules and practices. He also repeatedly used the defence that the contest’s rules and selection panel were clear and obvious to anyone entering the contest and since no one has to pay an entrance fee or has any reason to enter the contest other than having their work judged by the selection panel there’s really nothing anyone has to complain about. His efforts made the contest a reality and yes his friends make up almost all of the judges and there is definitely a bias toward UF and that kind of artwork, but as I’ve mentioned, it’s a bias shared by most members of the fractal art world, so he could say it’s a very popular “bias” or just business as usual in the UFG.  If the organizer himself was to be replaced with a randomly selected member of the fractal art world with adequate ability, I believe the contest would remain pretty much the same as it is because a blind hand reaching into the fractal art world would probably pick up another UFG member, who has the same perspective.

It ain’t just the fractal art world that’s like this…
It’s these things about the fractal art world that my theory of the Ultra Fractal Guild is an attempt to explain. How well my theory fits the facts as other people see them is another matter. The online world can have a lot of blanks and explaining what goes on there and especially why it goes on, can require a lot of filling in because finding out isn’t often possible. Members of this “alleged” UFG have access to information that I don’t and I’m sure my theory will be greeted with suspicion by most of them (assuming they’re reading it) because I think I’m regarded as a “hostile witness”, as they say on TV. It’s not my intention or desire to pass judgment on the UFG as to whether it’s a good thing or whatever, but just to describe it for those who might be interested in how the fractal art world is composed and how it functions. I find it all rather interesting because I think the UFG exists in similar forms in other online digital art venues because the context I’m sure must be pretty much the same. I think the growth and development of the UFG is a natural one, given the type of interests it revolves around and the type of people attracted to those sorts of things. That’s why I compare it to a guild; an ancient and universal social group, because people tend to cluster and form these sorts of organizations out of mutual benefit in many social contexts in an almost spontaneous way.

Next Part: Continental Drift in the Fractal World: Art and Craft don’t eat together.
Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, digital art, online groups, art groups, online socialization, art criticism, art vs. craft,

In Part 1 I had said that Part 2 would be the Guild in action, but I think I need to clarify this whole notion of a Fractal Art Guild a bit better before going on.  I really think most of the fractal art world functions like a large association of craftsmen whose closest analogy would be a medieval guild.  I emphasize the world “functions” because the members of this guild do not formally identify with such an association.  In fact, the idea that they’re all part of some guild-like structure probably sounds semi-insane to them or conspiratorial.  But that’s because the 21st century online world has changed the way people associate and similarly changes the appearance of such associations that they often aren’t recognized as formal associations even thought that’s exactly how they function.

The Fractal Art Guild is informal.  One’s membership is really nothing more that an attitude of cooperation and agreement. This shared interest in the things of the Guild is the only thing that defines it in the online context. But that’s all it really needs because ultimately the Guild is a collection of like-minded people, not an ideology or constitution. Membership is dedication to the group and this sort of friendship association appeals very much to people today and functions easily in an online context of email, chat, forums, and mailing lists. It’s the daily or regular online interaction with the Guild which serves to initiate, maintain and renew one’s membership in the Guild as well as to foster it’s development taking eager members to higher levels. The online environment creates a sort of dynamic, living association which makes the traditional, formal indicators of membership: applications; membership cards; meetings; newsletters; and annual dinners look trivial and superficial –mere tokens of membership. In the online environment where people network on a daily or even hourly basis, membership is proven and demonstrated (or disproven and betrayed) in a much more meaningful way that it is in offline groups where interaction between most members is remote and occasional.

I said, the things of the Guild, I should explain that.  The interests of the Guild, as I see it (am I the only one who sees it?), are:

• Producing fractal art of high complexity and graphical sophistication
• Ultra Fractal and all things UF-related (to put it bluntly)
• Promoting the mastery of UF
• Showing respect for UF Master Craftsmen and trying to learn from them
• Promoting the use of UF as the apex in fractal art software
• Defending the reputation of UF and it’s Master Craftsmen (post Orbit Trap)
• If you’ve got a problem, just leave, don’t make a scene
• Anyone can join

I know, maybe it sounds like another one of my anti-UF diatribes…  But it’s not.  It’s more complex than that.  It’s not “us vs. them”.  Remember how I said, “One’s membership is really nothing more that an attitude of cooperation and agreement” ?  A number of the Master Craftsmen of the Guild made Ultra Fractal (contributed in some way, large or small) and they promote it’s use and try to aid others in learning how to use it better because that’s the sort of tool they admire.  They like fractal art that is complex and very, very graphically refined and sophisticated –slick and professional.  It’s purely a matter of personal preference and that’s the kind of art they prefer and the kind of software needed to make it.  The Guild thinks that the best fractal art –the most impressive fractal art– is the kind that the Master Craftsmen in the Guild make.  It’s this sort of common cause and shared interest that holds them together and attracts apprentices (newcomers of similar bent) to them.  Like-mindedness is what it’s all about, not coercion or intimidation.

I know it’s a lot to swallow all at once.  It took me a few years, so I don’t expect to hear others shouting “Eureka!” right away.  In fact, I suspect most fractal artists don’t really care about these “online social structures” at all.  But they will when they read the next part, Part 3.

You may have noticed my heavy use of the term, “Craft”.  Sharp members of the audience will suspect I’ve got a reason for not using the more common expression, Art or Artist.  You see the Guild structure isn’t just about building up a community of artists around the use of UF and supporting the attempt of others to develop their mastery of it.  The type of hegemonic and class-based organization that all guilds have, along with it’s amazing stability, is a direct result of their common pursuit of craft as opposed to art.  Art is too much of a hot potato for any big group to handle for very long without self-destructing.  The Guild members, from the smallest to the greatest, all have the heart of a craftsman.  Not surprisingly, they also have the minds and values of craftsmen too.  And what’s that?  It’s coming up next…

Part 3: Artists and Craftsmen: What’s the Difference?

Technorati Tags: fractal art, online guilds, digital art guild, digital art, social networking,

In order to understand the current fractal art world you need only to learn a bit about the concept called a guild.  I believe the majority of fractal artists are members of a rather pervasive fractal art guild.  In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that almost all of the angst expressed by members of the fractal art community towards the criticisms Orbit Trap has made regarding the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests and the Fractal Universe Calendar can be simply explained as two very different groups misunderstanding each other.  (Not all the angst, just most of it.)

But first, let’s look at what a guild is.  “A guild is an association of craftsmen in a particular trade” according to the Wikipedia page.  It’s people who have some activity in common coming together.  And guilds (according to the Wikipedia article) existed almost wherever you had skilled tradespeople; not just medieval Europe but on every continent and civilization.  It seems to me that craftsmen forming associations was an almost innate, natural and universal characteristic of skilled people throughout history.

But in human history these “craftsmen associations” had some other more specific characteristics in common:

• Well defined hierarchy of membership in which leaders arise gradually from promotion within the guild
• Extensive apprenticeship training period in which younger members acquired skills and proved their loyalty to the guild
• Secrets of the trade restricted to guild members only and therefore the exclusive property of the guild itself
• Leaders govern by virtue of their status and not by adherence to a constitution or written laws

A couple relevant quotes from the Wikipedia page (incidentally, from a section without references or sources…)

The guild was made up by experienced and confirmed experts in their field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen. Before a new employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through a schooling period during which he was first called an apprentice. After this period he could rise to the level of journeyman. Apprentices would typically not learn more than the most basic techniques until they were trusted by their peers to keep the guild’s or company’s secrets.

[…]

After this journey and several years of experience, a journeyman could be received as master craftsman, though in some guilds this step could be made straight from apprentice. This would typically require the approval of all masters of a guild, a donation of money and other goods (often omitted for sons of existing members), and the production of a so-called masterpiece, which would illustrate the abilities of the aspiring master craftsman; this was often retained by the guild.

I think you get the idea.  The fractal art guild isn’t exactly like this, but generally speaking, there are a number of characteristics of the current fractal art scene which suggest it operates just like a traditional guild did.  There is no formal, Fractal Art Guild, but that’s because such formality has never been necessary.  In today’s online communities, there is enough communication and interaction for fractal artists to easily learn the rules of the game and to see these unwritten rules in action.  In fact, the contests, the BMFAC and the Calendar, are clear examples of the Guild in action.

And when I say “the Guild”, I’m not just talking about the leadership, I’m also talking about the lesser membership.  Traditionally, apprentices were not considered members of the guild, per se, but I include them as such because they are part –a very important part– of the whole guild structure.  The guild-like behavior of the contests’ leadership is further expanded upon and confirmed by the guild-like behavior of the apprentices.  In fact, it wasn’t until I began to ruminate on the behavior of the rank and file membership of the Guild that I actually began to realize that there was a guild at all.  A privileged elite does not constitute a guild.  It’s only when a large, underprivileged class desperately wants to join and serve that elite that a Guild is born.  Ironically, 21st century digital art guilds are grassroots movements; bottom-up movements.  One or two sharp individuals who are shrewd enough to know which way the crowd is heading get out and run in front of them until the herd comes to see them as leading and they subsequently are seen as leaders.

That pretty much describes how the Fractal Art Guild was born.

Part 2: The Guild in action — “The contest is not a community event!”

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Fractals, Guilds, Online Guilds, 21st Century Guilds, Online Societies, Social Commentary,

Yes, the winners of the Benoit Mandelbrot 2009 Fractal Art Contest are now out (and this time it’s final).  I’m skipping the usual clever art critic review for now because there’s something that’s just too outrageous not to comment on right off the bat.  If you’ve seen the 2009 winners page you might have missed it –unless you were able to read between the initials!

First off, Joseph Presley has done a nice job on his winning entry, so don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing about the quality of the work that would exclude it from the winner’s circle at any BMFAC for that reason.  I might even go so far as to say I rather like this one somewhat and that Joe has used his multi-faceted image style very effectively once again.  As many of you will know from reading this blog, I’m not a big fan of the heavy and complicated layering that most Ultra Fractal artists use, but Joe has managed to preserve the image’s interesting fractal structures while doing a lot of surface texturing at the same time.  He’s enhanced the image tastefully, not layered it into some monstrosity.

But giving it the title, “Tribute to Janet Parke”?  That’s too much.  Surely even you dyed in wool BMFAC zealots will have to admit that naming your entry a “Tribute” to one of the judges is going just a little too far?

Oh, yes.  You’re right.  Sorry.  He’s changed the name to a very cryptic and obscure set of initials, “JP”.  Hmmn.. Why, come to think of it, that could even be interpreted as “Tribute to Joseph Presley“!  I guess I must be jumping to conclusions again, or reading sinister motives into innocent mistakes or computer glitches.  Sure.  Except there’s a bit more to this “JP-thing” than what the contest site tells you.

For those of you who lack internet access, I have made this screenshot of a gallery page from Joseph Presley’s Renderosity gallery.  Why a screenshot?  Well, because I know from past reporting on events in the fractal art world that these sorts of pages have a tendency to go offline whenever I comment on them.  It wouldn’t surprise me if this one becomes a similar embarrassment to the BMFAC and gets “adjusted” accordingly.  Here it is, if you want to check it for yourself.

There’s more.  In case you can’t read the fine print, here’s what it says beneath the image:

Created w/ UF4 for my friend Janet Parke.

Janet Parke is one of my personal favorites for sure. Not only is her artwork fantastically beautiful, she contributes to the fractal community as an instructor, sharing her time and knowledge with the fractal world. She has been a mentor to me and I find her talents truly inspirational. She has also been a friend to me, offering assistance and great advise anytime I’ve needed it. Last year I had the wonderful opportunity of meeting her in person and found her to be most friendly, intelligent and very fun to chat with.

Check out her galleries at www.infinite-art.com

Thank you Janet, for everything! I think you are fabulous.

Joseph Presley

But you know, maybe none of the judges saw this before the judging took place and if they took my advice and concluded that “JP” was the initials for the artist and not the judge, Janet Parke, then everything’s fine and all’s well in the land.  But it’s been up on Renderosity since August 25, 2008.  That’s 2008.  It’s been up for a year and two months.  And there’s two pages of gushing comments hanging down like ancient stalactites from it.

Which brings me to another thing: the rules for the BMFAC 2009 state:

3.6. Existing Works: We would prefer you create new artwork for this contest. Existing works may also be submitted, but we are more likely to select artwork that is new and fresh.

Is this one too old?  It was made after the last BMFAC in 2007, but almost a year before the call for submissions to the 2009 contest was made.  I’m sure other artists have submitted work more than a year old and maybe even won, but this one’s made the rounds at Renderosity and was featured in the special Fractal Window Weekly #200.  Joe’s a well-known fractal artist, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the contestants as well as the judges had seen this image before it became an entry to the BMFAC.  Not a big deal, really, but the rules state they want “fresh” stuff, and why would they say that unless they want fresh stuff?

Hey, he gave it a fresh title.  There you go.  And sometimes a title can really change people’s interpretation of fractal art.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 Winners, Joe Presley, Janet Parke, Art Titles, Art Contests, Tribute to Janet Parke,

Chapter One:  From Kumbaya to Pitchforks

Although Orbit Trap is really nothing more than a niche blog that publishes once or twice a week, and I don’t see anything in the future likely to change that, three years is a long time on the internet and I thought some of our readers might find a brief recounting of its history to be of interest, as small and trivial as it might seem in the context of the Blogosphere and the Internet in general.

Sometime in the summer of 2006 Tim Hodkinson (that’s me), and Terry Wright wanted to create some sort of online presence that would bring together and generate fresh ideas and perspectives on fractal art and to serve as a sort of online showcase for them, both to fractal artists themselves and to the fractal art interested public as well.  Our hope was to stimulate, or at the very least, suggest more progressive and innovative directions in fractal art.

A blog wasn’t our first choice.  In fact, our first idea was a “Best Of” fractal art gallery.  We thought this would be a good way to bring good ideas in fractal art to greater attention and hopefully greater use; showcase the best artwork in one place.  But the more we considered the difficulties of getting “The Best” artists to allow us to showcase their work, made difficult by painful past experiences with other similar online projects, and also the difficulty in actually finding more progressive and innovative fractal art works to start with — we thought something more along the lines of a community forum, discussion, brainstorming kind of thing would be better.

A forum, despite its apparent ability and intended design to bring together many people and enable them to exchange ideas, was quickly tossed out as they tend, in practice, to become shout-fests and verbal, team wrestling events.  That is, when they’re not being derailed by some total neophyte who wants to jump into the thread without even having read the previous postings. Besides, there had been plenty of forums in the past (and there still are) but they haven’t really brought about any sort of artistic awakening among those who participate in them.  Forums seem to end up serving a small number of specialized social functions.  But aside from that, a forum was too wide open and chaotic for the sort of progressive online thing we were looking to make.

I guess a blog was our last choice.  But we thought that if we could get many other people from the fractal world to join it then it would have a chance at being the sort of collective, all-inclusive and importantly, intelligent venue for fresh ideas in fractal art.  A blog posting was a nice way for someone to say something or propose some alternative point of view without being drowned out or “anonymized” in a forum thread.  Blogging puts the emphasis on the initial posting while comments, like footnotes, are there for those who want to add something or go deeper if they care to.  We really had faith in the community to generate innovative ideas and styles if only someone could find a way to get it all started.  It had all the optimism of the original builders of the Tower of Babel and almost the same results.

We tried it out in August of 2006 by sending invitations out to about 20 or 30 of the most prominent people involved in fractal art at the time.  They weren’t just artists, they were anyone who we thought might have something relevant to add to the great online meeting of minds.  Programmers, of course, and also other people who’d shown a thoughtful interest in fractal art in the past.  Even folks whose interests were more strictly in the area of algorithmic art, but were still relevant to fractal art and bordered on it.

Not everyone was interested.  Many had misgivings about having to produce some sort of written article for a posting once a month.  (That was a foreshadowing of the collapse of Orbit Trap as a community project to come.)  Most were excited simply to be part of the next new thing in the fractal art world.  You can go and see all those community postings over at the Blogger site.

I mentioned that contributors had to post once a month?  Well, what do you do when they don’t?  How do you approach someone, someone prominent in fractal art world, who’s “delinquent” in their postings and who was enticed to join the blog when you told them it would be easy?  I’m not talking about lazy people, either.  I’m talking about people who were very busy with their own work, the sort of work that brought them to our attention in the first place and made us think, “So and so’s knowledge and skill would make them a great contribution to the blog”.

After sending out two of these “reminder notices” we decided we had to rethink things.  On the one hand, the blog would end up being written by just the both of us if no one else posted anything; on the other hand, hassling people to do something they otherwise wouldn’t do was rather distasteful –for both parties.

We changed the one post a month rule to once every three months around October and started sending out more invitations hoping that we’d eventually have enough postings guarantee enough content to keep our readers interested.  We eventually we had to change the rule to post whenever you get around to it (or else start the hassling all over again) and then waited to see if that easy-going, relaxed atmosphere helped the situation.  It didn’t.  About six months into the life of the blog, a drought set in and stayed.  We had enough contributors still hanging on to keep going, but for the most part they only posted their once a month requirement, and with so few others it was too sporadic and thin to keep an audience much less attract one.  Readers would drop in because of the prestigious contributor list we had in the sidebar of the blog, but there was no growth in readership.

Around June of 2007, despite the fact that most contributors, for all intents and purposes, had drifted away we still clung to the notion of a big community discussion about fractal art issues fueled by blog postings made by a diverse number of people.  It just seemed to be such a good idea; so much talent and experience all in one place.  We couldn’t figure out why in such a fertile environment of fractal artistry such a drought in content was occurring.  But now a new problem was arising.  And this time it ate at the core of the whole project: our own apathy.

You see, it sounds great to include everyone in a project and for sure, on the surface, it looks like the United Nations of the fractal art world; but the effect of such group projects isn’t creative thinking and innovation, it’s a crippling atmosphere of political correctness and general mental inhibition where every radical thought is met with “I can’t say that” and “People will take it the wrong way”.  No one wants to offend anyone.  And it affected us most of all since we were the ones managing the blog and placed in the role of trying to nudge people into speaking their mind and at the same time protect them from the resulting backlash when they expressed ideas about fractal art that clashed with the status quo.

Status quo.  That’s the very thing we wanted to break up in order to see artists be more creative and take more chances with their work rather than sit on their thrones.  But in the end, the group blog thing just became part of all that and now even we found the blog had become pointless, irrelevant and worst of all –boring.  But there were issues that needed to be dealt with; things that needed to be said; and ideas that needed to receive greater attention.  What never seemed to occur to either of us was that we should have just started a blog and written about those things ourselves and not involved all those other people whose forte and interests where in other areas of fractal art and not in the more journalistic pursuits like art criticism and community politics, like ours were.

So in late June of 2007 we began to post on what we thought were serious, meaningful and relevant topics in the fractal art world and if anyone got upset and left the blog, so be it.  And a few people did leave, most did so through the back door, but a few took the venue we had given them for intelligent commentary, to whine and complain about what jerks we were, and use it to make a public announcement that they were thoroughly disgusted with us and were now leaving the blog.   Terry’s web host even booted him off his server with the excuse that Terry had become a madman and that he feared for the safety of his server and all his (many, many) web clients on it.  This was the same man who had “kindly” offered to host the blog, for free, back in July of 2006 when we let him into our plans to launch a group fractal blog.  Good thing for Orbit Trap that we passed on that “kind offer”.

I think I got the ball rolling with my post about why I don’t use Ultra Fractal.  After the dust settled, Terry ignited an inferno by merely questioning, in the comments section of another posting, if fractal art contests were run ethically, considering the obvious conflicts of interest they contained in the way they were judged.  This was the beginning of many inquiries into the fractal art aristocracies known to most people as the Fractal Universe Calendar and the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest.  We pretty quickly became pariahs and those contributors who still hung on focused on their displeasure with Orbit Trap’s two moderators and their opinions.  Not one responded with a single intelligent response to the issues we’d actually raised.  But they did make clear how great their opposition was to frank and honest discussion of anything that involved themselves.  I was beginning to see for myself why the fractal art world was such a backward place.  The group blog idea was now actually a hindrance to serious commentary on fractal art issues and we finally put an end to that phase of Orbit Trap after those ather tumultuous three months, in mid-September of 2007, little more than a year from the date Orbit Trap was started.

Of course, we didn’t really have to “kick” anyone off.  By September of 2007 the vast majority hadn’t posted anything for months and, like I said, had drifted off to pursue other things after posting once or twice; they didn’t care for blogging.  The others only “got the muse” to write when we became the object of official outrage and an offense to all those who worshiped the fractal aristocrats or when they stuck to safe and harmless topics that made everyone relax and the readers go to sleep.  They used the comments section to ply their old online forum debating tricks and sabotaged the blog with their own inactivity or used it to proclaim their righteous departure.  I believe they truly thought that without their august presence the blog would surely wither and die.  They hated our criticism of the fractal art world and were probably
happy to be finished with Orbit Trap which was acquiring a somewhat
sinister reputation in fractal land.  If it were a Gothic horror movie, we would have been chased off by a pitchfork wielding mob bearing flaming torches and shouting, “The Monster!  The Monster!”

Actually the mob wouldn’t have been that big because (did I mention this?) most contributors simply lost interest in writing about fractal art and just silently returned to what they were doing before Orbit Trap came along.  I’ve come to realize that only a few people actually find blogging to be fun.  Similarly, there’s always a good sized audience for those who are inclined to do this sort of thing because there’s very little commentary on these sorts of cultural niche things like fractal art.  There’s no money in it, or anything like that, but if you enjoy the verbal sport itself, then there’s almost the same level of motivation as if you were being paid.  Maybe even more.

Most fractal art blogs are photo-blogs.  They’re the author’s own work and if there is any commentary to go with it it’s usually about how the artwork was made or named.  Nobody writes about fractal art in a broader, more theoretical or holistic way, except occasionally.  But it’s not that way with most other art forms.  In the area of photography, painting or sculpture there’s plenty of bloggers engaging in criticism and commentary –it’s a normal thing in the larger art world.  The fractal world just needs to come out of the dark ages it’s in.

But going back to our original intentions, we wanted to talk about fractal art itself, and not just about fractal artwork.  We wanted to create a venue that would engage in serious commentary and criticism of fractal art in general, things that were of significance to the entire genre.  We had a broader perspective on fractal art and wanted to see those sorts of issues expressed because it was absent.  But whenever we commented on the bigger picture: contests; web-rings; styles; Ultra Fractal; well-known people; there would always be a contributor who’d “go tribal” and leap up to defend their group against us.  Not against what we’d said, mind you, just against us personally; some sour, disgusted response complaining that we were complaining.  Not all were so primitive, some were very clever and careful, but always dodging the issues we’d raise.  There was never any honest dialogue.  Just posturing, of an extreme contortionist bent.  A good mascot for the fractal art community back then would have been one of those rubber figures with wires inside and bendable into any position imaginable.

Once we dispensed with all that community town hall meeting nonsense Orbit Trap really begin to pick up speed and sail away.  But we had to scrape those barnacles off or we’d end up abandoning the ship ourselves.  So in September of 2007 we got down to serious work and writing about important things without fear of being attacked and ridiculed from within our own ranks.  The problem with the contests being run entirely by insiders who used them to promote themselves cut to the core of what was wrong in the fractal world with respect to community politics.  The other problem with the contests of course was that they promoted a rather narrow view of fractal art that served the interests of the oligarchs but bored anyone who had an interest in real art.  The contests were a microcosm of the whole fractal art world: inbred and imitative.  The tight little groups that ran them gave them a correspondingly narrow perspective on fractal art.  I might have had some sympathy for these monopolists if they’d managed to actually produce a collection of artwork that was impressive.  As it was, their medieval guild mentality of entitlement produced calendars and contest exhibitions that were almost entirely filled with junk –and much of it was their own work!

If you check out the posting numbers on the original Blogger site where the archives are listed, you’ll see the trends I was talking about.  Big excitement in the first few months shown by the large number of postings and then a sudden and continued drought.  The numbers don’t show the whole picture though, you have to take a look at the postings and see how short most of them were.  Like I’ve said, most contributors were enticed to join the blog on the understanding that they’d give it a try and see how it went.  They gave it a try, but blogging wasn’t their thing.  And for those few that did continue to post, commentary and criticism was definitely not something they wanted to engage in –or even be connected with.  Fair enough, I thank them for coming out of their “comfort zone” and trying something new, but it became obvious by the end of the first year, in September of 2007, that only Terry and I were interested in pursuing this sort of fractal “journalism”.  It also became apparent that fractal journalism was what our readers were primarily interested in also.

Like most bloggers, we kept an eye on our web stats and feed subscription numbers using various methods.   When Orbit Trap started to address controversial issues like the dominance of Ultra Fractal and the aristocratic nature of the fractal community’s contests, more readers started tuning in and staying tuned in.  When we left the group format it became obvious that fresh criticism and commentary were what our readers where interested in even if our former contributors weren’t.  Back-slapping and endless hollow compliments were the hallmarks of artistic criticism in the fractal world up until that time.  People were clearly ready for something else.  I guess we should have started with that “something else” right from the start.  But I am thankful for the opportunity to have met so many big names in the fractal world –especially since now most of them would probably never want to meet me again.

Chapter Two:  Dark Lords of the Fractal Kingdom…

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, Orbit Trap, art blogging, blogging, art criticism, digital art,

OrbitTrap.ca is our new address. Update your bookmarks and check out the new site! Actually, it’s all older stuff transferred from our archives over at the old, Blogger site.

Why did we move Orbit Trap to this site? Well, like any online publishing venture, we’ve changed and grown over the years and our web hosting needs have become more sophisticated. We need things that Blogger, as wonderful and generous as they’ve been to us over the years, isn’t able to provide.

“Oh?” you say. “What kind of things is big old Blogger not able to provide for tiny little Orbit Trap?”

Well, since you asked, rhetorically, Blogger isn’t able to provide us with things like protection from false claims of copyright infringement. For a blog like ours that specializes in comment and criticism of current artwork, the principle of Fair Use as provided for in the Copyright Act is what allows us, or any publication like it, to speak its mind. Fair Use of copyrighted material reflects the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment right to freedom of expression. Fair Use, is a Constitutional right founded on Constitutional principles, not a legal loophole for unsavoury lowlifes to squeeze through.

Some of you reading this may think that Orbit Trap deserves to get muzzled and who cares about such academic things as the Constitution? That wouldn’t surprise me because I’ve seen such attitudes very much alive and well in the way contests and other events are run in the fractal art world. They’d like to see Orbit Trap shut down, but so far all they’ve been able to do is harass us in minor ways. Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States of America and the U.S. Copyright Act wasn’t written by people with such ethical apathy or such a narrow perspective on culture and public commentary. I don’t expect any of Orbit Trap’s critics to object to the censorship of our blog postings through bogus DMCA complaints.

What is the DMCA? Ask Cornelia Yoder. Ask her how a screenshot of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Winners page, published on the internet, intentionally or not, indexed by Google and used on Orbit Trap for the purpose of reporting on how the contest is run behind closed doors; ask her how it could be considered copyright infringement because it just happens to include a trivial 30×100 pixel thumbnail of one of her images entered in the contest?

It isn’t, of course. In fact it’s a ridiculous claim because the image represents nothing more than a navigational button in a gallery index. But that’s all you need to push the DMCA takedown notice button these days and get the entire blog posting taken offline for a month. Guilty or innocent, it makes no difference, and web hosts like Blogger are caught in the middle, forced to become instant copyright lawyers and chose between becoming part of a lawsuit themselves or to censor their own clients by removing entire blog postings without consulting the author.

I guess it’s a clear indication of how desperate our critics are to have Orbit Trap silenced that they’ve taken up such sleazy tactics as this.

So where does Orbit Trap go from here? Stay tuned. That is, change your bookmarks to OrbitTrap.ca, and stay tuned!

In keeping with the Phase 2 idea that the essence of fractal art is found in the imagery and not in the tools that made it, I present a mixed bag of things I found while taking the paths less traveled, or never traveled, to find fractal art.  I followed a number of categories during my search on Flickr, mainly the New Abstract Vision Group.  Ironically, I found this a better path to take than the more orthodox and straight forward strategy of simply searching on the word, “Fractal”.  I think they’re all interesting; whether they’re all fractal is a matter of argument and I present them here as food for thought.  None of them would look out of place in any fractal art gallery, that is, with the exception of the tree stump, which at first might be considered a joke, but only once one recognizes that the outer edges of this apparently inverted formula are covered –in bark.

(Click on the images or text links to see larger views and links to similar work by the artists on Flickr.)

Untitled by Segozyme, 2009

Just a spiral, but how many fractal images can we list that serve no other purpose than to be such simple laboratory specimens upon which experiments in rich, ornate rendering textures and colors are conducted?  It’s all in the surface texture which in places resembles the pitted surface of the moon and in others resembles expensive suede leather.  I’ve always thought that spirals were the still lifes of fractal art and this one’s a fine example.

Aztec by Manas Dichow, 2008

Manas Dichow is a fractal artist I’ve reviewed before.  He uses Ultra Fractal, and I think it was from a comment to this image in his Flickr gallery that I got started on the New Abstract Vision Group’s Flickr gallery.  I found this image to be a good example of the complex juxtaposition found in fragmented images of micro/macro and detail/panorama and if it caught the eye of a member of that Flickr group then I thought I ought to see what else they’ve collected.  Of course, from a fractal perspective this image is just a sierpinski triangle variation with simple coloring and not the sort of thing you’d expect much from.  But Manas, like most good fractal artists, seems to excel at the use of simple formulas to make surprisingly interesting and artistically engaging work.  Very creative.

101100111 by jj1236

Although it’s really not all that apparent, this image is a painting.  At first I wasn’t sure as I’ve seen a lot of sophisticated rendering that creates paintbrush textures like this.  As far as it’s fractal qualities go, doesn’t it have the proliferating, vegetative look that many fractal programs easily produce?  If I had to guess the rendering, I’d probably say it was a Stalk method.  But it’s a painting and if you’re interested you ought to check out similar ones in jj1236’s gallery.

P by -P-, 2007

Nice title eh?  I’d go even further in the alliterative exercise on the letter P and point out the Purple.  Another spiral, but what a strangely proportioned one and with such neonic (neon like) coloring.  I think there’s a Party going on down there.  I don’t know why I like this one so much.  I think it’s the Paul Klee-like shape and style to the spiral and also the fact that it’s quite tastefully presented and not over-layered and stuffed full of distracting elements –simple and strong.  Who would dare to make such a simple and bold spiral?  -P- would.  He even made it his avatar.  That’s Perfect!

treestump C905 by Ian’s Art, 2009

Well, I tipped you off to this one in the intro so you knew it was a tree stump.  The title’s not too subtle, either.  I just find that the shape, the patterns in it, and the je ne sais quoi of fractal art is evident.  Apparently Ian thought it was a work of art too, so there’s another vote.  Does this mean the lumberjack who cut down the tree was a fractal artist?  I can just see the lumberjacks discussing technical matters during a smoke break, “Sven, I’m tired of cutting on the usual plane.  I’d like to experiment with 1/mu today.”

Untitled by Segozyme, 2009

Hmmn… I suspect that Segozyme might have used this same spiral formula up top there in the first image.  This one was either layered in order to incorporate the background, or some filtering took place to produce that orange powdered texture on the iron spiral.  A lot of attention in the fractal world is paid to such details as surface texture and it’s also quite common to compose the background from completely unrelated imagery.  Why not do both?  We often work hard to get a realistic, photographic appearance in digital work.  Why not just import everything?  If you want to end with photo-realism, why not start with photo-realism?  That’s a guaranteed method.  Nice work, Segozyme.

Untitled by Phantom Blot, 2009

Funny, you’d expect a two-headed mandelbrot to look both ways before crossing the road, but this one didn’t.  If you had to guess how this image was made, what would you say?  I’ve seen fractal art like this.  Actually, this is an even better example.  One of the unofficial jobs of artists is to challenge our comfortable ideas about art by putting a frame around ordinary objects or objects that we would normally disqualify from the category called art.  Only then can we be tricked into seeing the beauty of that foreign object which the artist, being more observant than the average viewer, has already detected.  We often see what we expect to see.  The human mind just works that way.  I think this is a photograph of an old plaster wall.  But that could be a trick.

Solder by Howard J Duncan, 2009

When you suspect everything of being frameless art then you have learned something, I think.  We praise avante garde artists because they have shown us new kinds of art; they have shown us something which was always there, but we just couldn’t see it before because either we’ve never looked in that sort of place before or we didn’t expect it and our eyes just glided over that sort of thing.  When they put a frame around it, it helps us to focus our attention and see in a gallery what they were able to see –in the wild.  I like this one because it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a deliberate creation or something resulting from the accidental and random effect of natural decay.  One’s mind becomes a hung jury wanting to both release the defendant and restore them to a place of dignity and honor, and yet, at the same time to see them capitally punished to such a degree that time itself will be reversed and their evil deed erased from very soil of the Earth.  I’ll let you cast the deciding vote.

Tidal by Howard J Duncan, 2009

Perhaps you are thinking that I have become a big fan of (my goodness, this artist has a real name!) …of Howard Duncan?  Actually, I just looked at the artwork and bookmarked what l thought was interesting as I surfed the Flickr galleries.  I was quite surprised when I wrote all this up and discovered that three of the ten were by the same artist.  It ought to happen more often, but it doesn’t seem to; I find many fractal artists have one or two interesting works and about a hundred that are, to put it nicely, “in progress”.  Rich surface texturing and a strange flow of —solid— shapes  makes for a dynamic sort of abstract image that changes its shape the more you look at it.  I wonder if that was intentional?

Bias by Howard J Duncan, 2009

This has got to be a fractal.  That is, the kind made in a fractal program.  I’ve never seen these thread-like intersections in any other kind of imagery.  But, honestly, I’m guessing because as you can see for yourself by clicking the link, there’s no information in Howard’s Flickr gallery to indicate how, or with what, it was made.  Even the image tags only list Digital, abstract, bias and hypothetical.  Hypothetical is an interesting term for fractal art.  This image as anyone can see, is quite simple.  In fact it’s really made up of a tiny and probably minor rendering detail of a much larger fractal image, but shows how one can sometimes be creative with even those sorts of things.  Interestingly, this obviously fractal image is probably the least fractal of all the ones I’ve presented here, in my mind.  One could easily draw such things in a paint program and the grainy background is most likely a simple graphical (noise) effect.  Fractal art is much easier to define and describe when you focus on the finished artwork and not the tools.

Well, I hope you’ve been as challenged by these fractals (“genuine artificial” or otherwise) as I’ve been.  Removing the software bias from the definition of fractal art I think will make the genre both more meaningful as well as more creative.  At the very least, it will force people to look at fractal art more closely.  And that’s always a good thing when it comes to art.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, Flickr galleries, phase two, spirals, sierpinski,

Whether you’re a fractal artist or simply just a fan of fractal art, you’re bound to eventually notice similarities in style and develop preferences for this kind of art or that kind of art. Fractal art is still what I would consider to be something of a niche art form, but thanks to the internet, enough of it has been created and displayed that one can start to see styles emerging.

The most obvious style to anyone observing fractal art today is what I would call the Ultra Fractal Style. It’s more than simply art that is made with the popular program Ultra Fractal now in it’s fifth version; the UF Style focuses on the enhancement of basic fractal imagery by constructing, through the use of graphical layering, images with very elaborate structure and detailed surface texture. The UF style has pioneered a movement away from simple fractal forms in favor of images that rival the most complex creations of popular graphics programs like Photoshop.

While most fractal enthusiasts have eagerly adopted this style and some have even categorized their artwork as Before Ultra Fractal and After Ultra Fractal, I see this style as more of an abandonment of fractals as an art form than an enhancement of it. While not all artists utilizing the powerful programming and layering features of UF produce work that would fall into the category, UF Style, most artists using the program lean heavily on the program’s graphical rendering powers and make little effort to explore the fractal side of the art form.

Two recent fractal artworks, both of them winners in the BMFAC of recent years, exemplify what I would describe as the UF Style. The first is by Dave Makin, entitled Theme Park 2 and was a winner in last year’s contest. The second by Nada Kringels, And how is your husband Mrs. Escher, a winner in the 2006 contest.

Sheets in the Wind

Rings of Gold

I’ve labeled them Sheets in the Wind and Rings of Gold because those are the best descriptions I can think of to summarize the kind of imagery that characterizes the UF Style and these two images are some of the finest examples of it in addition to being familiar to many people in the fractal art world because of their presence in past BMFAC exhibits. These two images have met with critical success and therefore represent not only the artist’s own preferences in fractal art, but the confirmation of those preferences in the larger fractal art world itself by their selection in the contest.

I think if one reflects, even just a little, on what they see displayed on the internet as fractal art, they will see that most of it falls into this UF Style category and the epitome of it is work, like this, that features not fractal forms but rather the slick rendering powers of this cutting edge graphical program. It’s not the fault of the program, and similar results can be achieved with other fractal programs or with other software combinations, it’s just that most fractal artists today have fractal art all backwards.

Their approach is backwards; rather than first seeking out an interesting fractal form and enhancing it graphically, they start with some mediocre fractal form, or several, and then try to make it interesting by, literally, layering it with gold or tweaking the colors to produce some attractive piece of fluttering fabric. I see this in both these images. Rings of Gold at least exhibits some recursive pattern, although the pattern, without the gold, is not significantly interesting. Sheets in the Wind is, at best, a borderline fractal image and would only suggest a fractal origin if viewed in another context, such as, a collection of Photoshop artworks, because the image is abstract and reasonably complex enough that it would have required some sort of computational help, a fractal program perhaps? Why either of these images were chosen to be part of an exhibition to introduce people to fractal art says something about today’s fractal art world and it’s own view of itself.

It’s cliche. I don’t just mean that it’s popular. Although popularity can create cliches, cliches arise because of a lack of new, innovative ideas. Those new, innovative ideas can also in turn become cliche, but only if the art form loses it’s creative force and stops developing. (And what would that look like?)

Dave and Nada are making artwork that I believe they truly enjoy and as I’ve suggested, their winning spots in the BMFAC shows that they are not alone in pursuing this UF Style of work. The judges, as shown by their selection of Dave and Nada’s work consider it to be exceptional and worthy of distinction in their contest. So my real criticism of the UF Style is not with any of the artist’s that make it –that’s their personal preference in art. My real criticism of the UF Style is how it’s come to be critically accepted. First off, it’s only weakly fractal; and secondly, it’s visual attraction is almost entirely based on slick looking computer imagery effects which, honestly, might have excited an audience back in the early 90s, but which now are found in almost every television show or advertisement. If they think this sort of thing will wow the average person on the street who they’re trying to introduce to fractal art, they’re mistaken.

Fractals have a lot of artistic potential and a kind of imagery that easily captivates most people regardless of whether they understand the mathematics behind them or not. But the UF Style of artwork resembling Sheets in the Wind and Rings of Gold isn’t like that at all. It’s cliche and it’s hung on this long because nowadays most fractal artists prefer to tweak mediocre work to perfection rather than experiment with fractals. If they want to make that sort of thing, that’s fine, it’s their artistic choice, but giving it awards and presenting it as the best in fractal art just makes us all look stupid.

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