Hey, that’s the name Paul DeCelle gave to it. I kind of like the serial number, date-stamp theme. Didn’t many of the great classical composers give their works names like, “Symphony #4 in A minor”?

This recent work by Paul DeCelle (Feb. 24th, 2008, maybe?) is exceptional in many ways. First off, it’s a nice piece of Fractal Art, which makes it an exception in the great wasteland of what the genre seems to be coming to. I see most artists simply producing variations of the same old themes, but since I’ve been following Paul’s work for about three years now, I’ve noticed a steady progression and refinement of old styles and a perennial interest in creating new ones in his work.

20080224-01 by Paul DeCelle, 2008. (Click for larger image)

I’ve criticized layering because it’s often used in a crude way to reinvigorate cliche types of imagery and thereby attempt to compensate for what can only be achieved through pursuing new ideas — recycling vs. experimentation. Which brings me to the second exceptional quality of this work here: Exceptional use of layering.

Notice how the background layer looks like a background layer and compliments the rest of the picture and doesn’t interfere with it? Secondly, the colors go together well and set each other off. There’s a variety of clear solids (the black) and also detailed areas which display the other layers in various ways (i.e. interesting, not predictable).

I was told once in high school art class that a good design could be measured by how long it held your interest. The image should make you curious enough to want to examine it more. Good layering can do this and unlike most fractal artists, Paul knows how to do it well.

In fact, I think layering is the trap of most Ultra Fractal artists. It’s easy to do, but it’s not easy to do — well. The challenge is to create a composite image that doesn’t look like it’s a composite image. They should fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Think “symphony” not “tossed salad”.

Fractal Art is a shrinking genre. Right now I think it’s evolving from what started as a scientific novelty which attracted a crowd of curiosity seekers. There’s still a steady but much smaller stream of curiosity seekers today who pick it up for a while and then move on when playing with fractals no longer thrills them.

But there is a small number of people who have made the jump from “imitating the heroes” to getting creative with fractals. They don’t all choose the same software, but the software they use — they use creatively — they do new things with it and make new things with it. That’s why they make art and the rest make calendar decorations.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, Paul DeCelle, Ultra Fractal, layering,

Why? Because you can’t sell it!

Why not? Because Fractal Art, like all digital art, is easily reproduced, that is, displayed on a monitor or printed out — again and again!

Need some more explanation? Digital Art is really a computer file. An oil painting is really — an oil painting!

That’s not enough? Here’s another way to look at it: If I put on a beret and picked up a wooden palette with paints on it and took a brush and painted a fractal on a canvas, I could then turn around and sell that piece of fractal art. The person who bought it could say they own that piece of fractal art now and display it with confidence knowing that while talented forgers or even myself could make apparently similar works, they own “the original”.

Okay. Here’s more: If I make a fractal on my computer, the end result is actually an image file, or a parameter file which will reproduce the image on my monitor. That image file can spawn milllions of millions of identical images on computer monitors or in the out-tray of millions of millions of printers. In short: in digital art there is no original.

Consequently, there is nothing to sell or possess in the same way that one can sell or possess an oil painting or sculpture. Fractal Art is intangible. Which is to say, Fractal Art is simply digital.

It’s actually a good thing from the perspective of viewers who can easily view digital imagery via the internet or buy a copy (but only a “copy”). But for collectors who like to possess a piece of artwork wholesale, digital art repels them.

Of course there are other art forms that “suffer” from this lack of possessability: Printmaking, Photography. Printmakers often number each print indicating the total number and then destroy the plate. Photographers could do something similar and then destroy the negative. But how many fractal artists will print out a limited amount, or just one copy, number each one like a print maker would, and then delete the image file that made it?

The reproducibility of digital art forms (don’t forget music too, mp3s, Napster…) is just part of the nature of the genre and “copy-ability” is what defines it as much as anything else. And the only way to sell it in the way that traditional art forms are sold is to destroy it’s digital-ness.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, digital art, art sales, art business, selling art, printmaking, photography, listen to the golden sage,

It was a dark and stormy night. Inside the castle, the notorious Dr. Leys was busy working away in his laboratory. Either by serendipitous discovery, maniacal experimentation, or exhaustion brought on by long bouts of feverish fractal rendering — an Ultra Fractal parameter file fell into the POV-Ray Raytracing program …and began to grow.

Well, it probably didn’t happen like that, but the results are pretty freaky. For those of you unfamiliar with Jos Leys he’s a very well known Ultra Fractal artist and is one of the featured artists on the official Ultra Fractal site. I stumbled once again on his website while searching for Droste Effect photos in hopes of finding “something interesting to review even if it’s not really a fractal.”

I’ve always liked Jos Leys’ shiny and colorful fractal images (are they really “fractals”?). I noticed especially that a write- up of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2006 held in Madrid, Spain (in Europe) featured prominently Jos’s image, Indra’s Pearls in it’s title spread. Jos’s work has a very polished professional look which I’m sure appeals to many people — something which didn’t go unnoticed with the writers from El Pais, I suspect.

It would be easy to dismiss work like Jos Leys’ as nothing more than eye-candy with it’s bright colors and shiny balls, but unlike most examples of eye-candy, Jos’ images have a unique style that preserves the wonder of Fractal Art and at the same time presents it in tasteful elegance. The fact that Jos’ work is so captivating and yet seems to come from just a very small section of the formula spectrum shows how creative it really is and that it isn’t just endless repetitions of a worn-out theme.

You can browse his 3D Ultra Fractal / POV-Ray sculptures in his online gallery; here’s a few highlights for those of you who have become so cynical you won’t click on a text link until you see a pretty picture first:

(Above) Eerie, elephant-like and surprisingly, monochromatic

(Above) Kill it before it breeds!

(Above) So simple, so colorful, so wonderfully “Jos Leys-ian”.

(Above) I like the shadows in this one. Remember, it’s ray-traced; even the shadows are drawn by the program and determined by where the user sets the light source.

What else is there to say? There’s a beautiful sense of proportion and shape to these images. But of course that comes from the math. Rather than belittle Jos for this, he ought to be given extra marks for not interfering with the natural artistry of the formula.

Something else I’d like to draw your attention to, in case you might miss it, is the wonderful effect of shadows that Jos often seems to be able to harness for a powerful artistic effect. Here’s an excellent example from his Kleinian Groups Page 5 gallery:

(Above) Click to view the cool shadows in the full-size image

My final tribute to the greatness of Jos Leys’ work is from his Floating Kleinian Groups gallery:

(Above)You’ve got to have real talent to be able to take one of the cheesiest effects of all time, “Lake Effect”, and make it look sublime. I’ve really come to hate Lake Effect, but for some strange reason it looks great here!

Yes, if Jos can use Lake Effect and it still comes off looking great, then he really does have Super-Powers. And how come there’s only one Jos Leys in the Fractal Art world? What have the rest of you Ultra Fractal folks been doing? Eating Kryptonite?

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, fractals, Jos Leys, Ultra Fractal, POV-Ray, Ray-tracing, Art Review, Super-Powers, Indra Pearls, El Pais,

How could this have happened?

I really thought this was going to become a regular part of the Fractal Art world, but I guess that was too much to hope for.

What could have gone wrong this year? How did this happen?

Let me count the ways…

Artistically Anemic: I guess when you make the submission requirements sound like the feature set for Ultra Fractal you’re bound to get only one kind of artwork.

One-Dimensional: (No pun intended) Making everything exactly the same size was pretty stupid; how many artists make everything the same size? It this a fractal brick exhibition?

Enough Judges to Fill a Bus: And they all get a reserved spot in the exhibition because of their hard, hard work. “Many hands make light work” — not in a fractal art contest apparently! It’s just an excuse to take a free ride on the sponsor’s money while everyone else has to jump through a bunch of hoops just to be seen by the “judges”.

Amateur Attempt at Judging: Who exactly are these judges? All I saw was a guy and a bunch of his friends. Why not add a few judges who have a different view of fractal art? Or how about getting a real art judge who’s unconnected to the fractal world and can handle the very hard, hard work of sifting through the several hundred submissions that any contest (or high school art course) will produce? It ought to be easy for someone familiar with approaching art from a critical point of view. Let the busload of amateur judges line up with everyone else to get judged instead of lording it over their fellow artists.

The Devil Sponsors Made Us Do It That’s all I can remember hearing when the organizers attempted to explain the odd-ball setup for the contest — both years in a row. Yeesh. Show some leadership and maturity and just admit you made mistakes and make the necessary changes. The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest can be saved! It just needs an attitude that won’t sell out to sponsors or the private ambitions of a small clique of artists and self acclaimed experts.

The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009?

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, Art Criticism, Art Contest, Fractal Art Contest,

Hey fans. Welcome back to the award-winning Image of the Week series here on Orbit Trap — your one stop clearinghouse for all things fractal.

Today’s King for a Week is none other than the famous Mr. Velocipede, an artist of many mediums and styles of which Fractal Art is just one of them as you can see on his Flickr Photostream.

What caught my eye was his printmaking series where he has done some preliminary and experimental work printing fractals on an old-fashioned mechanical printing press.

Monoprint Background 2, by Mr. Velocipede, 2007

The printing medium, especially this sort of vintage method, really adds some style to what is normally a digital and squeaky clean process. Printmaking (and silkscreening too) never fail to capture my interest and when browsing photoshop filters I often look for ones that simulate the style of those mediums.

Mr. Velocipede has even attempted some new sort of printmaking thing, which I’m still not sure I understand, that involves laser toner and has a really wonderful gritty look to it. He explains a bit about it on his blog in this posting.

Paper Lithography #4, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008

Paper Lithography #1, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008

Paper Lithography #3, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008

Paper Lithography #2, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008

It was a relief to see that Mr. Velocipede’s Flickr site wasn’t inundated with the usual flood of self-serving and moronic comments. I took a screenshot of this one (below) because I thought it really summed up what makes Mr. Velocipede’s fractal prints interesting to me also. It’s a comment on the image, Paper Lithography #2, just above.

There’s a lot of other exciting things to check out there; some fractal and some not:
Bifurcus Speculorum
Gumball machine oracle
St. Francis of Assisi Kitty Litter Cathedral

All of the images of Mr. Velocipede’s here are covered by a Creative Commons license found here. The smart choice for internet-savvy artists.

Well there you have it. Join us again next week for Image of the Week here on Orbit Trap where we praise the positive and play football with the negative — either way it’s always a touch-down for our ever-faithful readers!

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Fractals, Printmaking, Mr. Velocipede, Art Review, Flickr,

Bloody Sunset

In the year, 2008, Fractal Art is boring.

It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when Fractal Art was exciting. But that was just because it was new.

Now the excitement is found only in a few enclaves high in the mountains; hard to reach, remote, inaccessible places. From my mountain retreat, far above the smog-filled haze of the valleys, I reflect on a few things…

Just because your fractal program won’t let you do it, doesn’t mean you have to stop there.

Stop listening to your online “art” friends. They’re boring. And so will you be soon. Listen to that inner voice. The one that says, “There must be something better.”

If you want to find something new, you’ve got to stop hanging around the old places. In the words of Long John Silver, “You’ll only find dirt, diggin’ where others have dug”.

Bad art isn’t instinctive — it’s taught. Creativity however, is instinctive. Creativity is the exploration of new places and the wandering away from familiar territory. Even a cow will do this.

The next big fractal art contest will give awards to itself and the artists who produce the best portraits of it. Everything will be reworked versions of ten year old ideas. Winning prizes is a good sign you’re becoming boring.

Serious artists get bored easily, are always looking for new styles and ideas, and usually head off in directions they’re not supposed to.

Fractal art has become standardized but this appeals to those who want to compare themselves to each other and get prizes. If you want those prizes, you’d better stay in line.

In the smog-filled valleys you can’t even see the mountains. But from the mountains you can easily see the smog filled valleys.

Ultra Fractal has achieved the goal of actually making fractal art more difficult while at the same time convincing it’s users that this is better and is an improvement over those older programs. If this perspective was applied elsewhere, comic books would be written in Greek and Latin and come in scrolls.

Let me put it into layman’s terms: Fractal Art is a horse that should be shot, made into dog food and fed to a pack of wild Siberian Huskies who will be much better able to carry on its mission of racing tirelessly across moonlit frozen lakes.

The enlarged heads, low intelligence and common facial features of most fractal artwork reveals the inbred nature of the genre and the widely prevailing social stigma surrounding intermarriage with other graphics programs.

If you think Ultra Fractal is the apex of Fractal Art, then you’ve been climbing the wrong mountain.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Fractal, Dog Food, Siberian Husky, Ultra Fractal, Block Wave Fractals, Red Hot Fractal Art, The Good Stuff, Home of the Fractal Sherpa,

I used to go hunting for exciting new images. Now I’m content if I can just find something that looks different. I don’t care if it’s great or not.

The Golden Age of Heroes is Over
Guido Cavalcante summed it up quite well two years ago while writing on a related topic, that being the pursuit of more than just “beauty” in Fractal Art:

It’s not a problem, of course, if some prefer to continue on creating purely aesthetic and visually intriguing objects. There is nothing wrong in doing that, although doing so does not constitute the same “heroic” accomplishment that it once did when algorithmic artists were struggling to break away, and give birth to a new medium. That was the challenge of the last 20 years.

Yes, all those sleek, true-color, multi-layered, “what formula is that?” fractal images we see today were once an heroic accomplishment — just like climbing Mount Everest used to be. But nowadays, on Mount Everest, things have changed. There are package tours running tourists up the sides of Mount Everest and the real skill and endurance comes from scaling government regulations and waiting in line. It’s not the same place anymore. Perhaps one day mankind’s abilities will reach such heights that we will no longer climb Mount Everest but rather descend upon it from above; from a high tech helicopter or even from space. Metaphorically speaking, that’s where I think Fractal Art is: the achievements of the past are beneath it.

Those achievements were technical achievements. In the Golden Age of Fractal Art’s past, each new rendering capacity or feature gave a quantum leap to what a fractal program could achieve and what the person using it could achieve. It was a time where the artform was characterized by what you could do; a time of technical innovation not artistic innovation. It was like discovering or arriving at the edge of new territory.

But it’s no longer heroic to plant the old flag in the same place and claim the same land for Fractal Art again and again. It’s time to move on and explore the interior.

We Don’t Need New Tools
We need new eyes.

If you still like looking at the carefully shaded, superimposed, “perfect” images, like those featured in that great king of cliches, the Fractal Universe Calendar, then the problem is in your mind and not with your software.

If you’re not bored with boring things — then you’re boring!

Animation alone seems to offer something new. There have been some interesting achievements (“2266” is my favorite), but by far little more than “zoomathons”. Of course, motion pictures didn’t make still photography obsolete. But rather, “animated photography” expanded the territory (and costs) of the photographic artform. So if you’re thinking of upgrading to Ultra Fractal 5, then I recommend you get the animation version. It’s a new frontier for Fractal Art, and I think you’ll find you’ll need just as much creativity with sound and music as with fractals since silent fractal movies will probably have the same one-dimensional feel as the original silent movies did with their audiences.

Layering is the Opiate of the Masses
I think graphical enhancement or “post-processing” is great; it merges seamlessly with the processing that fractal generators do. Fractal “generators” render fractals, but what this actually amounts to is nothing more than photoshopping invisible mathematical calculations. All fractal imagery is artificial and whether its appearance is limited to just those graphical tricks that the fractal program knows how to do, or whether you add a few tricks from the repertoire of a graphics program (where most of those “rendering” tricks come from, anyway) merely reflects one’s political and social allegiances in the online fractal world, a matter which is purely trivial or abitrary with respect to the pursuit of making artwork. (Or, as The Fractal Artists Ring says, “Dogmatic”)

But combining fractal images in layers like some gourmet sandwich is a technique that I have rarely seen yield successful results and most often leads to the blurred, wispy, non-descript “stuff” that populates most of the online galleries of Ultra Fractal enthusiasts. Layering as a creative strategy in Fractal Art might seem normal and “professional” but I think that’s only because so many people are using it. I don’t think layering as a feature in fractal programs has produced the quantum leap in creativity that it was expected to. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and two dull layers rarely turn into a single good one. Texture or background layers are a different matter. They perform the same enhancing function as a graphics filter.

In short, very few fractal artists utilize the creative effects of a graphics program to enhance their work and as such the vast majority of fractal artwork displayed is plain and repetitive. Layering, I suspect, for those who work with Ultra Fractal, is just the result of trying to revive such lifeless imagery in a context where there’s nothing else they can do.

Art, not Artists
Stop praising new artwork whose only significant attribute is the name of the artist who made it. For that matter, hold the Big Names and the old Has-Beens to higher standards of innovation and ridicule them when they just repeat the same old visual tricks. And how should you ridicule them? Direct them to your own latest work that looks just like theirs. Imitating someone else’s work is the sincerest form of flattery in Fractal Art — flattering yourself, that is.

And then… start praising artwork that’s innovative despite who made it. Forget politics and give kudos to the artwork that deserves it. Of course, if you love online politics more than art or are more interested in the personalities of fractal artists than the artwork itself, then you will have no interest in this — because you have no interest in fractal art.

Well, there you have it. Sorry I couldn’t find someone to fill the Image of the Week chair. Masterpiece of the Second, however. That would be easy.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractal, what’s wrong with our society?, art criticism, art hammer, the wrath of art,

Sterli30.loo

I made this image in Sterlingware with only a slight hue shift in XnView, my trusty side-kick. Although Sterlingware is now over 10 years old, which is pretty old by software standards, and lacks many of the new features that extend the rendering powers of fractal programs (i.e. user formulas and other junk) I consider it to be the current Heavyweight Champion of Fractal Art without any real competition.

Am I nuts?

No, no. Not at all. It’s because of Sterlingware’s color capabilities and the ease with which it allows you to experiment with it. A color coup d’ etat.

That’s right. This is about art, first and foremost, and only secondly about fractals. Art is the more important factor in the label, Fractal Art. (Write that down.)

While new formulas and all that other confusing stuff may sound exciting to the mathophiles in the fractal art world, and has probably lead to the current stagnation of fractal art, it’s what you do with the structures created by formulas that leads to the creation of Fractal Art and not just fractals.

I think the first converts to post-processing were those who saw something interesting in the basic fractal images they were making and knew how to make that short, but quantum leap to completion in a graphics program.

I’m sure the earliest post-processing successes involved simply color enhancement and not the thermo-nuclear layering that we see proliferating today. Color is a big deal in art because it’s a big deal to the human eye, that is, to visual perception. Color turns straw into gold.

Which brings us back to Sterlingware. Sterlingware still has me engrossed in fractal art despite the fact that it lacks power windows; GPS; and a talking dashboard like Ultra Fractal 5 has. Sterlingware is the Fist of Color! A lean, mean, Fractal Art machine.

Ha! Ha! Ha! …I win again!

Sorry about that. But when I say excited, I really mean it.

If you don’t like it, then go parse yourself.

Technorati Tags: Sterlingware, Fractal Art, Fractals, Art, Color, Go Parse Yourself, Color Fist,

Get back in your seats! First I have to show the Image of the Week:

Wood Fractal by Skepsis, 2006

Flickr comments are a whole new genre of writing — and state of mind too!

I found this thought provoking. Obviously, you can see this is a photograph of a piece of a sawn tree trunk.

If there was a fractal rendering method that could reproduce such imagery, would you use it? If you could zoom into this image and check out the deeper details, would you do that as well?

If you took that fractal image, made with this “wood” rendering method, and printed it out, would it be a photograph? Do the hyper realistic landscapes made with the computer program, Terragen, belong in the photo-landscape category or the digital art category? If someone printed out one of those hyper realistic Terragen landscapes and entered it in a photography contest and won, would that be “cheating”?

Lately I’ve been reading old books from the Internet Archive. There are often a number of file formats to chose from. I usually read them in the Djvu format which is essentially the same as viewing the scanned images of the original books. I have downloaded over 130 books from there in Djvu format (I haven’t read them all) and when I browse the directory they’re stored in with my file browser and see them listed as thumbnails of the front cover, I feel like I have a real library that’s just as real as the one which holds the original, physical books.

Actually, I prefer my digital library to the old kind, although it would be nice to be able to hold the originals or read them while sitting in a lawn chair in the backyard instead of in front of a computer in the basement. The digital medium changes the way I “interact” with the books, and it’s not always for the worse, either.

Call the digital books — Monitor Books. And for that matter, call the digital art that is viewed on the computer monitor — Monitor Art. (And call me… Monitor Man! Hero of all things Digital!!!)

The digital art that is printed out, framed and hung on the wall is different. And expensive! Just as it’s more expensive to produce a book in printed form than it is to produce it in digital form — as a digital file.

But don’t most people prefer to read printed books than to read electronic books on a computer monitor? And similarly, don’t most people prefer to view and display art in an art gallery or hanging in a picture frame on a wall rather than — on a computer monitor?

Print produces imagery of higher resolution and also of greater size (although TV screens/monitors are starting to reach pretty big sizes). Fractal imagery printed out in huge sizes like those of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest are more impressive than the same images seen on a monitor, aren’t they?

Well, no. Or not entirely, I’d say. I think the computer monitor is simply a different medium than the printed one. Just like my electronic library, the “electronic canvas” of the computer monitor has some advantages and, in my opinion, only a few, minor disadvantages to the printed canvas.

I guess you could call printed fractals, “wood fractals”, since they’re most likely printed on paper (wood fiber). And you could call the people who prefer to work in the computer monitor medium, Monitor Heads. The printed stuff gets framed and hung up in a gallery, or something close to it. Gallery’s are notorious for serving wine and cheese on the opening night of a new exhibition — hence, The Wine and Cheese People.

So there you have it: the two fundamental groups in the fractal world with respect to medium.

And who will win? Well, if you’re reading this on a computer monitor…

Alright. Sure. The swastika is an ancient symbol found in a number of cultural contexts and therefore has more than one meaning and significance. It also, I suppose, could be described as a simple geometric shape…

But really, couldn’t they have come up with a better name? Did they have to use the word, “Swastika”?

How about: ElbowCurveTrap; BentCrossCurveTrap; CrookedCurveTrap; BoomerangCurveTrap; RunningCurveTrap; etc…

Screenshot of SwastikaCurveTrap by Ken Childress (KCC)

Screenshot of SwastikaCurveTrap Code from http://formulas.ultrafractal.com/reference/kcc5/KCC_SwastikaCurveTrap.html

Of all the surprises in Ultra Fractal 5, this is the last one I would ever have expected. I know some of these folks know nothing about art, but I’m surprised that they know nothing about history as well!

Technorati Tags: Ultra Fractal 5, Swastika, SwastikaCurveTrap, Ken Childress, History, Art, Classes without any class,

I think the developers of Ultra Fractal 5 have fallen into the trap that has plagued fractal programs from the earliest days: overly complicated, user-dependent configuration.

I have always gotten the feeling, the several times I’ve tried out Ultra Fractal, that it was designed for people who weren’t like me. With Ultra Fractal 5 this feeling is even stronger. While browsing the reference pages for the new Ultra Fractal 5 formula feature that incorporates classes, I was stuck by the thought, “This is an improvement? This is like going back to the old days of DOS and writing your own programs!”

I’d quote some of the formula lingo so you can share my “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” feeling, but it’s not as simple as cutting and pasting the sort of everyday language that us humans use; you’ll have to browse it on the site.

Ultra Fractal in general, and Ultra Fractal 5 in particular, represents to me the “evolution” of fractal art in a direction away from greater usability and user-friendliness and instead in a direction towards increasing complexity that requires skill and training to do anything beyond the most simplest of tasks. This is the classic fractal software design error: making it hard for non-technical people to use and not easy.

From a user’s perspective, Ultra Fractal 5 offers a few new features that make life easier. It seems very evolutionary, a continued refinement of an already excellent product. A thumbnail browser, layer groups, linked layers, image importing. Very good things, but they don’t seem earth-shattering–perhaps a minor earthquake, but certainly not anything that will make California fall into the ocean.

This appearance is quite deceptive. Under the hood, UF5 packs a MAJOR foundational change in the way fractal formulas are written, a change that will–once mastered by users–break down constraining walls that many fractal artists didn’t even know were there.
(Damien M. Jones, “Introduction to Objects: Users Version”)

“From a users perspective”; “once mastered by users”. I think the developers long ago lost that “user perspective”. Or did they see themselves as typical users? And design a fractal program that is written by engineers and for engineers?

A lot of work has gone into Ultra Fractal, and from the looks of Ultra Fractal 5, a lot of work is continuing to go into it. But what I question is whether that work is making Ultra Fractal a better tool for the average user to make fractal art or is simply making a better tool for the developers and beta testers to play with and “oooh” and “aaah” over. Ultra Fractal 5 strikes me as the fractal programmer’s fractal program.

But does the complexity of Ultra Fractal just simply reflect the inherent complexity of Fractal Art? Perhaps Fractal Art really is Rocket Science after all? and maybe good fractal art is like a golden castle high up on a mountain and if you can’t do the math, you can’t walk the path? (ha, ha, funny eh?)

Hmmn… these are big questions. I’ll just say that your answer to how much technical (i.e. math and programming) skill is necessary to make fractal art will probably predict whether you’re going to like using Ultra Fractal 5 or whether you’re going to find it a ball and chain that slows you down and requires you to do excessive, detailed configuration when you’d rather be experimenting and exploring fractals.

I used to hear it said that Ultra Fractal simply had a “steeper” learning curve. But what appears to the eager engineers of Ultra Fractal as a steep learning curve is actually more like a tall mountain to be scaled by the average user; which is to say it’s a barrier and not something most users will simply “learn” their way over. Go ahead, call the users “stupid” or “lazy” or do what the linux gurus do and just say, “RTFM”; but Ultra Fractal 5 is a fractal program that only an engineer would love.

Emergence by Mark Townsend 2006

While writing a recent posting, I was Googling to find Mark Townsend’s orbit trap works done using the image importer, Sprite, and I surfed head first into a coral reef of Neo-Pollockian Artworks at his gallery site, Fractal Dimentia. Like Odysseus from the old Greek stories, lost again on his journey, I exclaimed, “Truly this is the very temple of Pollock!”.

But seriously, I’ve chosen these images of Mark’s for Image of the Week because I quite like them, although I’m sure there are many who won’t care for this sort of style, just as there are still many who don’t care for the classic drip-paintings of Jackson Pollock that now sell for an awful lot of money and receive lofty critical praise. Actually, I prefer Mark’s “paintings” to those of Pollock’s, but that’s just my personal opinion. (Perhaps, art investors should start buying up some of these at today’s, undiscovered, prices.)

Untitled by Mark Townsend 2007

I think imagery like this deserves it’s own category and I would suggest the term, “Granularism”. You won’t find that term anywhere else; I just coined it. I say “granular” because it’s a large assemblage of smaller, micro-images that form granules or smaller, independent parts. (It wasn’t made that way, but it to me it has that appearance.)

One could simply shrug off work like this as nothing more than elaborate “textures”, but that’s the sort of thing that separates the artists from the tourists in the world of art. It’s the skilled or talented eye of an artist that sees something noteworthy or substantial in imagery like this and pursues it and refines it.

Mark’s been pursuing work like this I’d say for several years as shown by some of his earlier work which is just as interesting. One can see the development and refinement of this image style by viewing his entire gallery chronologically (older to newer).

Imperator by Mark Townsend 2006

In terms of Fractal Art… Is it Fractal Art? I don’t know. But it’s certainly generated as opposed to hand made. But even if it was hand drawn or whatever-drawn it shouldn’t really matter — there it is, make what you like of it. Scientists are still studying Jackson Pollock’s work (yes, scientists!) and have discovered patterns suggesting that Pollock inadvertently created chaotic systems while working with his drip apparatus of dripping paint cans suspended on ropes which Pollock struck with a stick to induce vibrations. Some have suggested that Pollock’s drip paintings have fractal qualities to them. How’s that for extending the boundaries of Fractal Art?

Fooled ya. This is one’s by Pollock.

Anyhow, in terms of Fractal Art, these granularism works are good examples of how one can produce interesting work without focusing on the usual things — major structures like spirals or mandelbrot figures or other “macro” forms — and instead pursue the internal qualities of fractals — the minutiae — the dust of art, where diamonds lay. I’d like to see more of this type of work but it’s not the sort of thing that is commonly produced. As for Mark though, I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of his exploration of this type of imagery. In fact, I think he’s just getting started and there’s even better stuff to come.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Digital Art, Mark Townsend, Jackson Pollock, Granularism,

“See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”

That Biblical quotation is where the expression, “gilding the lily” comes from. To “gild the lily” is to obscure the natural beauty of something by trying to enhance it. My criticism of Ultra Fractal as a fractal art tool has always centered around that issue — that users tended to get creative by layering fractals rather than by exploring new formulas or experimenting with new rendering techniques.

Layering is a powerful digital effect. And with the many options there are for merging layers it’s quite easy to create a new “hybridized” image (or mutant) very quickly.

Of course there are varying degrees of layering. Adding a layer to give a textured quality to a surface is an example of using layering as an enhancement, or in just a minor way; many rendering methods achieve similar effects. However; taking two fractal images and merging them together usually results in a major transformation of the image (that’s probably why it’s done).

Taking a photograph or other, non-fractal image, and merging that into the final result is most likely to have the same major transformational effect. But this makes the final mix even more complex because now it’s not all “fractal” imagery.

This ability of Ultra Fractal 5 to import images is undoubtably going to be a great feature for users to play with and experiment. Add to that the increased ability to organize and apply layers, which Ultra Fractal 5 also improves upon from previous versions, and it’s not hard to see the birth of a new type of artwork starting here.

But what does this mean for the label, “Made with Ultra Fractal”? Well, if done tastefully and intelligently like many of the examples that Mark Townsend has displayed using Sprite as a plugin for the previous version, Ultra Fractal 4, then little has changed and one can just assume that whatever was made exclusively in Ultra Fractal is exclusively “fractal”.

But I’ve noticed that it’s pretty rare that anyone uses layering with any intelligence or taste in Ultra Fractal. There are exceptions and I’ve reviewed such exceptional fractal art here before. In fact, I believe that these exceptional works of art made in Ultra Fractal have occurred because the artists deliberately tried to avoid the tempting “fractal pancake” strategy and instead exploited the powers of the fractal formula and its inner mathematical machinery and only used the layering capabilities to bring out more of the “fractalish-ness” of the image.

If the Ultra Fractal 5 image importing feature is used by most people as I suspect it will be, then it will become a golden crutch for those who want to make innovative images with Ultra Fractal but don’t want to do so with fractals, which have more parameters than just “cut” and “paste”. This might lead to some interesting photo montages with fractal “highlights”, but at the same time it could lead to a stampede of unicorns and an explosion of flowers leaving the fractal elements (if any) more hidden than a digital watermark.

Technorati Tags: Ultra Fractal 5, Layering, Photo Montage, Gilding the Lily, Solomon, Unicorn Stampede, Run for your lives!

I stumbled on another interesting find over at Flickr.com: Fractal Origami.

fractal by polyscene

Although I’m sure work like this is painstaking and requires considerable skill in the more advanced origami techniques (there’s a special technique involved in making some of these folds), what caught my interest was its artistic appeal. In the hands of a skilled artist like polyscene (no capitals), a medium as simple as lettersize (A4) paper, along with careful lighting, can acquire the depth and subtle detail of an oil painting.

straight arrow tile by polyscene

Although I don’t think this second one has the fractal qualities of the first, it does have an interesting tessellated (interlocking) pattern, and that’s mathematical enough for me to toss it into the fractal category. Once again, the careful lighting has a dramatic effect and in this case turns the simple origami structure into a looming cliff of folded ferocity.

kite repeat by polyscene

Ever tried making seamless tiles — by hand? Another power piece by polyscene. It’s interesting how one can instantly recognize this as a photograph of something real and not a clever digital creation. I guess even a surface as uniform as plain white paper is actually quite complex and not a simple task to imitate with algorithms. There’s a rigidity to the paper here that almost suggests it’s carved plaster. I guess that’s the effect of the special, clean folding technique that polyscene mentions elsewhere on her site that makes it look embossed or pressed, rather than bent and folded.

monomino triomino straight tile by polyscene

More tessellation, but the lighting produces such variations of the color gray to almost be a complete spectrum of it’s own. Perhaps it’s not so impressive knowing that it’s a photograph of an origami sculpture, but I think digital art causes one to look more closely at an image and see it as a unique and singular creation and not merely as a variation of another object under differing kinds of lighting.

Well, I don’t expect polyscene will be making too many more fractals anytime soon because it’s hard work; not like the digital — click, click, presto! — kind that we make on a computer. Anyhow, I’ve found this first attempt to be very impressive and I declare polyscene to be the official discoverer of this new world of paper fractals. Let’s take this day off every year and celebrate.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, polyscene, origami, fractal origami, flickr, art review, art criticism,

Funny, I was Googling something a week ago, and while following a link to the 2009 gallery of winning images for the Fractal Universe Contest I found myself looking at an error page.

These things happen, of course, so I went to the main page and noticed that both the 2009 and 2010 galleries — had vanished!

Naturally, in keeping with the general atmosphere of secrecy and silence that I’ve experienced with the Fractal Universe Calendar, there is still no mention of anything to do with this strange metamorphosis of the gallery displays. Since it’s been a week, I’m sure it’s not a technical problem but rather an “editorial” decision — a change in policy.

Which of course raises the questions, “Who? and Why?”

That’s all Orbit Trap can really do — raise questions. Questions that people seem to prefer to avoid, not to answer. So I’m not expecting to find out what’s been going on over there any time soon.

My best guess is that Avalanche Publishing has decided not to post the winning images from their annual Fractal Universe Contest anymore while that calendar is still being sold, as an attempt to avoid online criticism of their current (or future) products. That would mean the 2009 images would go on display in October 2009, when I believe the 2010 calendar replaces it in Avalanche’s product line.

It’s a small victory for Orbit Trap, but a victory nonetheless. Perhaps the retreat of the Fractal Universe Calendar back to the display racks of drugstores and shopping malls and away from the front lines of the online Fractal Art world is a sign that the Fractal Art genre is maturing into a respectable art form. Avalanche Publishing seems to think so.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Art Criticism, Fractal Universe Calendar, Avalanche Publishing, Drugstore Art, Shopping Mall Gallery, Dress warmly in Moscow,

My apologies to jamfancy, Funny Bunny and tibiloo, but I found this online vignette was just too precious not to share it with the loyal, die-hard, though thick and thin, grassroots supporters of Orbit Trap — the greatest thing since sliced Mandelbrot. (That’s a joke on the German word for “bread”).

Want a link to the original? — go find it yourself!

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, good ole days, definition of fractals, hey there – fractals!, fractals — yeah!, fractal fractal, fractals for me, fractals for you,

“After 85 gazillion fractals, I broke the camera out.”
-Manas Dichow on his Flickr site

Egold: “Love this one but it’s pity that yo’ve gone into “fractals” dream.”

Manas Dichow: “egold, Photography isn’t dead yet. Fractals are just a current obsession.”

“It’s amazing to me that this software can continue to produce such a broad range of images. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Ultra Fractal can do.
Addicting.”

“PS; This image created with “Ultra Fractal 4.04”
Best viewed in Large “

I’ve been ending up at Flickr.com quite often lately, following links to digital artwork from other websites (it’s not just a site for photographs). So I thought I’d try searching Flickr for fractal art.

I found a much more interesting mix of fractal art on Flickr than on Renderosity or Deviant Art; perhaps because the Flickr crowd is a more eclectic group of people? I don’t know, I was just very glad to have stumbled on this image by Manas Dichow after surfing through the link and “award” infested waters of Flickr. Manas’ image here was a real sight for sore eyes.

Burma Wishes by Manas Dichow 2008

The comments sections of many Flickr galleries make the contortionist back-slapping and self promotional social networking comments of Renderosity and Deviantart look mild in comparison. On Flickr, they’ve even brought back the concept of “link-awards”. “Will you please put this link to my website on your page? — it’s an award!” Manas doesn’t need any of that to promote his work though, his artwork stands out on its own merits and I found it pretty quickly browsing through the other stuff posted to the Fractal category on Flickr.

Although Manas seems to be relatively new to fractal art (First fractal, Apophysis, Dec. 22, 2007) he’s not new to producing art and he brings a fresh perspective to fractal art, a genre which I would say, over the years, has become sadly inbred and populated with enlarged headed, banjo-playing, spirals.

I’ve heard that Ultra Fractal has a steep learning curve, but it seems Manas has had no trouble climbing way up there in a short time. But then Manas is no stranger to high heights; he was an accomplished member of a sky-diving team back in the 70’s when I was still learning to ride a bike. Speaking of bikes, here’s the artist on a motorcycle.

Bullseye Series #2 by Manas Dichow 2008

I really like the coloring in this one, Bullseye #2. Color is another aspect of fractal art that seems under-developed to me. So much of fractal art seems to have the same “style” or flavours in coloring. Manas’ image here is a nice departure from that. I also like the rough, jagged and more natural and wild appearance to everything. Manas has also produced many of the shiny, polished type of fractals which Ultra Fractal is known for, but he’s also managed to produce a wider variety of images than many UF artists who have been working with the program for years.

Burma Wishes also has a more interesting and “raw” look to it’s composition. It’s not the same old slick stuff that I keep seeing elsewhere, this has a fresh, natural style about it. And the coloring is bright, but not over-saturated or overdone.

I couldn’t end this posting without talking about Manas’ very impressive photographic works that are also part of his Flickr site.

Doorway With Wall by Manas Dichow 2007

In addition to the fine composition and other standard photographic skills that this photo demonstrates, it’s a good example of the power of High Dynamic Range Imaging. Basically, if I understand this right (I just discovered it on Manas’ site here) it’s a composite of several layers taken at different exposure settings. It’s interesting because there are photoshop filters that attempt to render the same effect by combining different contrast levels into a single image, making the darker parts lighter and the lighter ones darker. I think the effect of HDR produces a photograph which is actually more natural looking, as our eyes instinctively compensate for various light levels when viewing scenes like the one in Manas’ photo above. HDR is a better representation of what the human eye sees.

It’s also interesting to note the link that Manas’ work makes with photography and fractal art. I’ve noticed that there are many fractal artists who also find photography very exciting as an artistic medium. Perhaps there are some strong similarities between the two art forms, despite the obvious differences in hardware used.

Anyhow, I hope you’ve all enjoyed this brief introduction to new and wonderful work of Manas Dichow. Next week we’ll have another Image of the Week.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Ultra Fractal, Manas Dichow, Flickr.com, HDR, photography,

Chapter One: What is a contest?

“an occasion on which a winner is selected from among two or more contestants”
wordnet.princeton.edu

“A contest, is an event in which two or more individuals or teams compete against each other, often for a prize or similar incentive.”
wikipedia

“1. A struggle for superiority or victory between rivals.
2. A competition, especially one in which entrants perform separately and are rated by judges.”
thefreedictionary.com

 
Chapter Two: Art Calendar Contests – A Few Examples

Example #1
The Knitty 2007 Calendar contest!

Have you knit something from a Knitty pattern? Yahoo! You’re eligible to enter!

The 2006 Knitty Calendar Contest was a huge sucess, so we’re doing it again! Now’s your chance to share your gorgeous work with all our readers!

We’re looking for the best, most enticing, amusing and well-shot photographs of items knit from Knitty patterns. We’ll select the 12 best and publish them in our second calendar, this fall, for 2007. And the best of those 12 will go on the cover and get some seriously fabulous knitworthy stuff! Read on!

PRIZES

Grand prize:
One [1] of the 12 runner-up winners will be chosen to be on the cover of the calendar.

Runners-up:
Twelve [12] winning photographs will be selected to fill the pages of the Knitty 2007 calendar. Each winner will receive one [1] copy of the Knitty 2007 calendar and will be fully credited in the calendar [right on their photo].

from the rules…
Knitty staff are not eligible for this contest [that means the catalyst, editors, columnists, technical editor and myself].

Example #2
Another calendar contest from the quilting world: 2009 Quilting Arts Magazine Calendar Contest

Example #3
Illinois Work Zone Safety Calendar Contest

From the contest site:
“The contest judges have cast their votes and have determined the winners of the 2007-2008 Illinois Work Zone Safety Calendar Contest! Congratulations to the following 12 finalists”

Example #4
Space Settlement 2009 Calendar Art Contest

To bring attention to our goal of creating a spacefaring future, NSS is sponsoring a contest for such artwork to be used in a calendar promoting a future of humans living and working in space. The best of the submitted artwork will be selected for inclusion in the 2009 NSS Space Settlement Calendar.

For the Grand Prize winner:
* Publication as the cover of the National Space Society 2009 Space Settlement Calendar

For each of the four First Prizes winners:
* Publication in the National Space Society 2009 Space Settlement Calendar

For the remaining 7 winning entries:
* Publication in the National Space Society 2009 Space Settlement Calendar

Judges

“To determine the winning entries in the National Space Society’s Space Settlement Art Contest, we have selected a mix of internationally renowned space artists and space activists.”

Example #5
WINNERS of the Energy Quest Art Contest
for California’s 2008 Energy Calendar!

Example #6
The American Academy of Equine Art Calendar competition

The American Academy of Equine Art is planning to produce a 2009 Calendar featuring contemporary equine art. We are looking for 12 feature paintings or sculptures plus one for the cover. Your work could be a part of this calendar. Just enter the competition. Submissions will be posted on this site. Each month the general public will vote on line for 10 finalists. At the end of the year, a jury of AAEA artists will choose the 13 winners from the 120 finalists. The winners will be included in the 2009 Calendar.

Example #7
Barn Calendar Contest

Twelve winners were chosen in the statewide Barn Again Calendar Contest, co-sponsored by the Nebraska Humanities Council, the Nebraska 4-H and the Nebraska Soybean Board, in conjunction with the traveling exhibit “Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon.”

Nearly 300 participants each submitted a crayon drawing of an existing barn in Nebraska and a brief paragraph about the barn. All Nebraska students grades 3 through 12 were eligible.

Winners were chosen in three categories — junior (grades 3-5), intermediate (grades 6-8) and senior (grades 9-12). Three winners were selected in each category and three additional winners were chosen at large. All 12 artists received savings bonds.

The winning entries, which are displayed below, will be featured in the 2002 Beautiful Barns of Nebraska Calendar.

Chapter Three: Quiz Time!

True or False (7 questions)

1. The Fractal Universe Calendar is an annual Art Contest where entrants may each submit up to 10 Fractal Art images for judging. True or False

2. The Fractal Universe Calendar is a fractal art contest where the prizes are publication in the calendar and a few hundred dollars cash. True or False

3. The Grand Prize in the Fractal Universe Calendar fractal art contest is having your image used for the front cover. True or False

4. On average, over the years, approximately 40% of the prizes awarded in the Fractal Universe Calendar contest went to just four people who were all either current or former judges of the contest. True or False

5. In the 2009 Fractal Universe Calendar art contest, the Grand Prize (front cover) was awarded to one of the judges along with the largest cash prize. True or False

6. The “Editors” and supporters of the Fractal Universe Calendar deliberately avoid the use of the terms, “contest”, “judge” and “prizes” (and consistently refuse to accept such terminology) because, as a contest, the Fractal Universe Calendar is blatantly unfair because it allows the “Editors” to judge the work of their fellow competitors while at the same time judging their own submitted artwork which is competing against the others for inclusion in the calendar. True or False

7. Only a complete idiot or a barefaced liar still maintains that the Fractal Universe Calendar is not a contest. True or False

Technorati Tags: art contests, fractal art contests, Fractal Universe Contest, Doublespeak, semantic games, double-plus ungood, deception,

Welcome back all you faithful Orbit Trap fans to this week’s episode of, “Image of the Week”.

Well, as you may have guessed from the title, this review is not going to be pretty. Keep your shoes on. There’s plenty of broken glass around in here.

As usual, I was surfing along on my way to something else when I hit this rock. Ouch.

I probably would have just gotten back on my surfboard and zipped away, except for all the contortionist back slapping going on and the hallowed heights this particular image was being raised up to. Keith was named as “Artist of the Month” there on Renderosity for May, and in the little write-up they had on him, he described this image as his “most recent favorite”.

Rainbow Garden by Keith Mackay (Deagol on Renderosity)

As many people in the fractal art world are aware, Keith has done some very impressive work assembling fractal images to make up complex scenes like coral reefs (complete with fish) and flower-like arrangements that are very eyecatching, unique and popular. I’m not knocking the guy for those, because for work like that Keith really is an example for others to study and ought to be praised for it. That sort of work isn’t easy to do and requires real technical skill and opens up all sorts of creative possibilities for fractal artists.

But the image he describes here as his “most recent favorite” embodies everything that I think makes Fractal Art cliche and boring.

It’s not because it’s a spiral. Spirals can be a very versatile and fertile sub-genre of their own and are capable of producing new and interesting imagery (in what has now become a classic fractal theme) when dealt with in creative ways (note the word, “creative”). This one here, however, doesn’t show any of that sort of creativity and is just a very dull, and uninteresting spiral. The coloring (which is often what saves mediocre work like this) isn’t particularly interesting or creative either. What is this thing good for?

The Fractal Universe Calendar! It wouldn’t even look out of place if it was featured on the cover.

It’s funny. I guess I must be the only person who didn’t know this image had already been picked for the 2009 Fractal Universe Calendar. I wasn’t even aware of that when I started to write this posting. It wasn’t until I went looking for links to include that I started to read some of the (very flattering) comments posted on its gallery page on Renderosity. (Whoa. A lot of folks really love this one!) One of those comments congratulated Keith on having the image chosen for – the cover! That’s how and when I discovered that what I had been joking about in my posting had already become reality.

“The stuff piles up so fast in the Fractal Art World you need wings to stay above it” (Martin Sheen, Apocalypse Now, …more or less).

Why don’t they put some of Keith’s good stuff in the Calendar? Keith also makes artwork that is very professional looking and original. His fractal flame assemblages I mentioned earlier, although not really my sort of thing, personally, have a thousand times more creativity and interest to them than these cheap plastic pinwheels. Can it really be that people would rather look at those worthless spirals instead? Why not just one image that’s a little different? It would sure make the “horrendous” job of editing easier. At least it wouldn’t be so hard to tell the images apart when they’re “sorting” them.

I can honestly say that I consider the Fractal Universe Calendar to be an embarrassment to Fractal Art. It’s not even good eyecandy, its just a lot of mediocrity, rehashed year after year; variations on a theme that was already boring 10 years ago. All it’s doing is perpetuating the stereotypical image that people have of fractal art as being stupid wispy spirals. Keith’s front cover up there is a prime example of what has come to be an annual collection of the most shallow, juvenile, tasteless fractal art imaginable.

Well, there you have it folks. That’s all the time we have tonight. Tune in next week for another fresh and never before seen episode of Image of the Week.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, Fractal Universe Calendar, art criticism, bad taste, kitsch,

We’re starting a new weekly feature here on Orbit Trap. Every week we’ll be reviewing an interesting piece of Fractal artwork.

This is nothing radical, of course; many sites do this sort of thing, but here on Orbit Trap it’s going to be much more exciting and lively.

I thought I would launch this regular weekly feature by reviewing a very well done piece of Fractal Artwork by Kerry Mitchell, an artist everyone in the Fractal Art world probably knows of.

It’s not one of his recent works; the collection’s dated August, 2004 on the Ultra Fractal website. I know many artists prefer to have their current works reviewed rather than things they’ve done a few years ago, but I think this one has such a strong sense of style that it’s worth taking the time to take an extra-careful look at this one.

Arabesque by Kerry Mitchell
(Click image for larger version)

Simply put, what I like about this image is that it’s an excellent presentation of what could be called “classic” Fractal Art, and directs one’s attention directly to the elegance of the fractal formula. If you don’t like images like this, then you don’t like classic, hard-core Fractal Art. (Yes, there is such a thing).

Everything that has been done to the image compliments and enhances the appearance of the fractal imagery and doesn’t obscure it or steal your attention from it. In fact, the image has a very natural, almost photographic look to it.

If one was flipping through a coffee table book on Arab artwork and style and saw this image, few people would question it’s reason for being included, although they might comment on it’s unique appearance. No doubt, that’s why Kerry named it “Arabesque”.

It’s interesting, the little mandelbrot man in the center almost looks like a key hole on some elaborately made jewel box or cabinet. And the darker gold background has a very realistic looking enamelled appearance.

From the notes for the image:

This image was created with a formula that combines the Mandelbrot and Newton fractals. The 3D effect comes from a coloring technique that mimics the look of embossed paper.

The embossing effect I think is what gives the fractal pattern such a stunning display. I’ve seen this effect used with other fractal images elsewhere and it’s not always done this tastefully; here it’s just enough to bring out the pattern and raise it up from the background and not create a high contrast moonscape (although that can be fun sometimes, too).

There’s a funny story about how I stumbled on this image. It was back in June of 2007, or something, when I was working out my personal thoughts on Ultra Fractal and trying to see as many examples of UF work as possible. Naturally, I started with the official, UF site.

I was looking for examples of excessive layering and smudgy, syrupy sorts of things. I was quite surprised when I came across this. Although I’m sure it’s not an overly simple image, it’s complexity accentuates the simple beauty of the fractal formula. In fact, I suppose this image could be displayed just as easily in a math textbook as it could in an art gallery. Far out, eh?

Stay tuned next week folks, for another exciting episode of Orbit Trap’s featured artwork selection. The image could be yours, it could be your neighbor’s, it could be from someone you’ve never heard of! It will, however, be noteworthy.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art, Kerry Mitchell, Arabesque, Ultra Fractal, Art Review, Digital Art, Math Art, Good Art

You’ve got to be sharp to win this one!

It’s a fresh new year. Who knows what could happen? Although based on previous year’s results, almost half of the exhibition has already been chosen and reserved for the judges, there’s still a good chunk of space reserved exclusively for the contest winners. So get working!

It’s probably too late to make changes to this year’s contest, but there are some suggestions I’d like to make:

How about fewer judges? Do they really need that many to judge such a small contest?

Also, how about some Art judges? In fact, why not make the judge (note that’s singular) someone who isn’t involved in fractal art at all? like some curator or Fine Arts professor who has a reasonably respectable reputation in contemporary art (but not expen$ive)? How would that be a problem? Are the merits of good fractal art only discernable by good fractal artists? Will an “outsider” pick junk and not “understand” what they’re looking at? Maybe a mainstream art judge will pick works that have good mainstream art merits?

Anyhow, get those submissions ready. Especially those of you who came so close to winning last year but still ended up becoming an honourable midget.

What else?

Well the war of words over last year’s contests is over: Orbit Trap has won.

How can I say that? Because all I hear now in the minor skirmishes that take place, from time to time, here and outside the castle walls, are personal attacks on us OT writers. If there was a weakness in our criticisms of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests or the Fractal Universe Calendar, then our critics would be attacking those first.

I guess I’ve come to see the personal attacks as acts of desperation and last resort. They attack us personally because they can’t find anything to attack in our arguments or what we’ve said. In fact, the personal attacks confirm to me that our arguments are solid and have passed the test and show that now our critics just want to change the subject. They attack us out of frustration.

I’m not totally indifferent to these attacks, but maybe because I’ve had very little association with these people and have never really identified with the fractal world that it allows me to be somewhat detached.

I would say these two primitive contests are proof that the fractal world is still in the stone age as far as standards go (i.e. professionalism, ethics), but because things are so undeveloped and in such a early state of advancement, criticism of the contests is quite likely to have a great impact because it’s easy to start over and simply abandon both of these circuses. Fractal art has advanced so little that it’s easy to change direction.

I would also say that since the two contests are all there is at the moment to represent the genre in this way (competitions) that they are perennial issues that won’t go away until the issues they raise go away. Our adversaries like to portray the contests as personal projects and therefore make our criticism of them look inappropriate (“just get your own contest…”) and yet the organizers use these contests to draw in and represent all of the genre, while at the same time using all that attention to pawn off their own artwork alongside “the best”.

Those contests turned the spotlight on themselves – we didn’t do that. They want the freedom to speak to the whole fractal world, but they don’t want anyone to speak back to them.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractal art contest, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2008, Fractal Universe Calendar, judging art, ethics, professionalism,

Yes. Apparently all the diseases and infirmities that I’ve been complaining about in the Fractal Art world are widespread and commonplace — in the mainstream. The Fractalbook people that I said were obscuring the really serious Fractal Art “nucleus” like a cloud of mosquitoes are actually what most of the real world is made up of.

This oozing sore on the face of Fractal Art (the source of most online “itching”) is in fact a sign that Fractal Art has arrived. A huge audience of shallow, distracted social butterflies is what mainstream is all about.

Here’s what I stumbled upon (no pun intended): Social Blogging Creates Bland Popularity
Stumbleupon has arrived. Stumbleupon is mainstream and popular. Here’s how Tony Lawrence describes its apex:

I used to use StumbleUpon to find good content. I don’t bother any more, because it’s now full of ho-hum content. Not “bad” content, but not exceptional. Not good enough for StumbleUpon to remain of interest to me.

That’s Fractal Art in a nutshell today. Right up there with the best in the online world.

There’s more from the reflections of Mr. Lawrence:

Point of reference: I’ve written a little less than 3,000 articles for this site. A handful have attracted attention on StumbleUpon or Digg. A small handful at that. Those posts weren’t voted up because somebody owed me tit for tat: these were honest appraisals of value devoid of motive. But it’s just a handful, just a very few.

And that’s exactly as it should be, right? Nobody hits home runs every time at bat, but in the new world juiced by social media, you can bat 1,000 with the help of your pals.. all it requires is that you help them as they help you

Of course it’s never so simple. There are always a few exceptions. Not everyone is getting with the program. They’re the losers.

Again, please understand that I am NOT saying StumbleUpon or Digg or any of the others are full of junk. I’m simply pointing out that gaming the system as is now common practice produces mediocrity.

But should we just ditch the whole system and crawl back into our rabbit hole? Can’t things be fixed? Isn’t it just a growth phase that will pass, and in turn produce something more mature and substantial?

Please don’t Stumble or Digg this post. Seriously – it’s not of interest to the social media promoters and will only tick them off. We’ll get hundreds of insipid comments from troglodytes who haven’t read the actual post and wouldn’t understand it if they did.

Insipid comments? Troglodytes?

Or how about this cheery, Solomon-like quote which Mr. Lawrence gleans from James Chartrand:

I’m disillusioned these days. It takes a lot to get me interested in anything, and as each day passes, I scan more and read less. I don’t care.

I like that. Cynicism is better than mediocrity. It’s better to be cynical than to applaud mediocrity. Cynicism is the beginning of something better. You don’t find much cynicism in the mainstream. The mainstream is big, bright and fast flowing. When things are found in the mainstream they’re usually belly-up and lifeless. “Dead things go downstream”.

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Fyre embedded parameter file

Lately I’ve begun to seriously question whether using the term, “abstract” to describe any piece of artwork can be realistically used. I think the term abstract is itself an abstraction and is hopelessly inseparable from the world of realistic forms and imagery.

I think abstract is another way of depicting reality, that is, real things. It’s because our minds instinctively try to interpret all visual experience in realistic terms. Abstract becomes real in our eyes.

We ought to speak of “abstraction” then, because our minds refuse to think in any language other than that of real objects. Abstract is a style or type of realism; a minimalized style, transforming real things and commonly representing them in a simplified way.

The other end of the “abstract” spectrum — the opposite of simplification — is the excessive detail of chaotic imagery. It doesn’t look “realistic” but our minds translate such things so quickly that it soon becomes “something”. Jackson Pollock’s famous (notorious?) drip painting come to mind.

Fyre embedded parameter file

Maybe that’s it; abstract art is suggestive, and therefore keeps triggering matches from our mental database of real imagery. We’ve all just seen too much of reality to go back to looking at even a blank canvas or a simple square without seeing it as a variation of something we’ve already seen in the real world.

Fractal art is an excellent example of this; fractal art often “looks like” real things and is almost always named after something real — like it was a perfectly natural and obvious thing to do. Is it possible to look at a fractal image and not “see” something?

Some fractal imagery of course is obviously realistic as fractal patterns can be found in natural things (brocolli; the structure of trees; clouds…) so it’s not surprising with those fractal images that one sees something real. But I’m thinking that all fractal imagery is converted into real images regardless of how “unreal”, “non-representational” or abstract it may appear when analyzed.

Fyre embedded parameter file

Just as the state will appoint a lawyer to ensure that all defendants have representation in a court of law, our minds keep appointing realistic interpretations to represent “non-representational” artwork in the “court” of our minds. Abstract art never gets a chance to speak for itself.

Mark Rothko’s famous smudgy square images (also infamous? like Pollock) I always thought of as being windows in dim rooms (although very expressive windows). The smudgy outlines resemble clouds or muddy water; an archetypal sort of imagery if there ever was one. I find these things realistic, but just “stylized”, as if abstract was a style of rendering real things. In fact, take away the realistic qualities or interpretations and I think Rothko’s works lose all their effect, as does all abstract work.

The human mind just can’t handle abstract art.

Technorati Tags: abstract art, Fyre 1.0.1, realism, art theory, fractal art, digital art, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Geomo,

Fyre 1.0.1 embedded parameter file

Most have never looked beneath the surface of a wall, or even considered doing such a thing.

A wall is not seen as an object of substance, and therefore not thought of as having depth, or in this case — inner workings.

What walls do, cannot be explained merely on the basis of color and texture. Just like skin, which is “skin deep”, the smooth surface of a wall is deceptive and can easily suggest simple answers to all suggestions of deeper things.

People have often responded, perplexed, when asked, “what’s behind this wall?”

Fyre 1.0.1 embedded parameter file

Once, as a child, when I had measured the rooms of our house, I was intrigued by the discovery of what appeared to be (by implication of my measurements) an unexplained space in a wall. There was the fireplace, there was the bookcase, and now, here — the empty place.

Beneath all stairways, in every situation, without exception, there is a space. It’s as if the ascension of the stairway, like the acceleration of a rocket, requires something equal and opposite. When the design of the house was negotiated, the living room declared, “If you are going to leave my room and go upstairs to another room, then you will leave with me — your emptyness.” “Cursed are you above all constructions, stairway. For leading a man where he should not go, you will forever be half-useless and the haunt of spiders, a Tower of Babel in the DNA of every double-floored home.”

Fyre 1.0.1 embedded parameter file

Don’t be surprised.

Imagine what you thought the first time you looked under the hood of a car and saw — all those things. The car had done a pretty good job of hiding its inner workings. Perhaps you thought it just moved — all by itself.

Yes, and so it is with the inner workings of walls. The engine revealed. The machine unmasked.

Woven within white wind, we whispered; what wonder was worked with walls.

Technorati Tags: fyre 1.0.1, fyre, Peter de jong map, walls, digital art,

Sterli18.loo

Just like fractals, there is a special allure to the stories of The Arabian Nights.

And also like fractals, I think that special quality that makes them attractive comes from their unique origin: fractals springing from a strange new area of mathematics; and The Arabian Nights, from the Middle East.

I’m not even a student of literature, or even much of a reader at all for that matter, but I’ve noticed that there are artistic differences between the folk tales of the British and the Europeans, and with those of The Arabian Nights.

What are they, you ask? Well, read the book and find out. It’s there, as curved and flowing as the arabic alphabet it was originally written in.

So I like fractals to be fractal-ish and The Arabian Nights to be Middle Eastern, retaining their Arab and Persian (Iran) origins.

How can fractals or Middle Eastern folktales be anything other than what they are?

Just as The Arabian Nights can be mistranslated or European-ized, fractals can be layered and “artist-ized”.

For example: one translation of The Arabian Nights I read told how Sindbad returned to Baghdad after another voyage into the uncharted world and out of thanks for surviving, gave a large donation to a “church”. Obviously it was a mosque, but why use a word which in 20th century English usage is never used to refer to a mosque? (And this was a version from the 1940’s.) Why not change Sindbad’s name to Sigfried or Samuel or Stephen, as well? Or substitute Basra with Vienna (not a good substitute for a busy ocean port) or Paris or London instead?

Anyhow, translation isn’t always so simple and sometimes there is more than one reasonable rendering and the final choice can come down to subjective, stylistic preferences that grow out of long, complicated scholarly arguments — the sort of things which I suspect bored Sindbad in Baghdad and drove him back out to sea… In fact, the Sindbad stories, although also of Middle Eastern origin, are not considered part of the Arabian Nights and were included by European publishers who regarded all Middle Eastern folktales as a single category, in the same way as “fractal” art includes, from time to time, imagery that isn’t strictly “fractal”, but looks like it.

I’m not arguing for a “pure” fractal genre, or even that such a category (is such a category even possible?) should have a special status; many of the stories in the “Arabian” Nights are very similar to those of Indian and Jewish origin. So in the literary arts as well as the visual arts, categories are a matter of degree because styles and methods are easily, even subconsciously, influenced and exchanged across (apparent) cultural boundaries. In such a context, purity has to be defined because very little is or can be isolated.

What I would say is: Don’t overlook the “natural” beauty of a simple fractal formula rendered in a fairly plain way in a program like Sterlingware. There is no natural or “pure” way to graphically render fractals, but it is possible to use simpler methods which allow the fractal algorithm to contribute more of the imagery instead of less. Like a translation that doesn’t attempt to embellish or transpose the cultural context of The Arabian Nights, sometimes fractal art can be more interesting by allowing it to retain its original “style” and making less adjustments to it.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, the arabian nights, folktales, translation, cultural styles, Sindbad,

The Ecstasy of St Clickism

It’s not exactly a single photoshop filter, “bernini.8bf”, but rather a syndrome of filters (to use a pathological expression).

The sierpinski effect from multicrystal.8bf (Ilyich the Toad) produces the sharp, stone-like appearance that extractor1.8bf expands upon so well. But it’s the simple mirror,mirror filter that takes it to a whole new level, and in such a simple way, by creating nothing any more exciting than bilateral symmetry, like a face has.

Or one of the great works by Bernini.

The Ecstasy of St Theresa by Bernini in Rome, from Wikipedia.org

This might help you relate to my, sometimes, obscure perspective:

Processed with Extractor1.8bf (Mario Klingemann)

Symmetry adds some sort of majestic quality to these crushed and crumbled images, taking what would otherwise be, uh, something crushed and crumbled, and raising it up as a monumental, altarpiece-like construction.

Have you ever been freaked-out by fractals? Stunned by a spectacular image that has apparently grown out of a mere mathematical formula? That’s how I felt, now and again, while making these Bernini-esque images.

Some I found a little disturbing:

Is it just me? Or is there a disturbing, skull-like head there?

This is like some scene from the altar of an evil, cult-like temple:

The book, the banner behind it, the black flags? You don’t think that’s scary?

What’s odd, and adds to the wonderment, is that they all have such humble, clickism origins. They start off as some image (it doesn’t really matter much what the image is) I’ve found on the internet. I then multicrystal.8bf it about 10 times till it looks nothing like the original — just a wall of sierpinski blocks in the colors of the original photo.

In a variation of the crumblescapes I made previously, I add two seemingly uninteresting filters and then use the mirror effect in mirror, mirror. The two new filters are distortion effects. Distortion effects can be the most creative effects of all, literally making something out of nothing.

Revolver33RPM.8bf and Overlap4.8bf (in that order) both by the prolific filter writer, Andrew Buckle, from his Andrew’s filters collection. They basically add a curved crushing effect, instead of the usual square crushing effect. I discovered this somewhat by accident, although I had already been using Overlap4 with extractor to make a couple of interesting “gravel clouds”.

Take that twisted, crushed thing and mirror, mirror it and then apply the extractor thing to produce the black and white, high contrast images here.

Do you see what I see? If you’re screaming, you do.

It’s interesting how combining filters can produce such a powerful effect — instead of the usual grey sludge that commonly results from driving half a dozen filters over the same image,
one after another
like a convoy of tractor-trailers
at night, in a rainstorm
obliterating a wet cardboard box
under their wheels
leaving in their wake,
shreds of box paper
pasted to the gleaming pavement

Technorati Tags: Bernini, Ecstasy of St Theresa, clickism, photoshop filters, Andrew's filters, altarpiece, digital art, horror,

I remember the great arrival of the prose poem. I was taking a poetry “workshop” and there, suddenly, on a page in the poetry anthology was a clump of text without any explanation. This fragment of text, which was actually shorter than the poem on the facing page, had a title at the top, just like poems did, and the author’s name at the end of it, just like you’d expect a poem to have. I thought it was merely an interesting excerpt taken from a novel, but we were all told, to the laughter of the whole class, that it was a new form of poetry, although consisting entirely of prose.

Although I had also joined in the laughter, me and a few people like me who found prose exhausting and poetry frustrating, immediately saw the potential for such a wonderful development. And we also saw the embarrassment of writing what was basically a piece of “prose”, like a short story, but so short it couldn’t even be the beginning of anything, and which was conveniently called a poem for no other reason than it seemed to fit in the same space as one.

A poem was anything short and didn’t have to follow grammar rules. Prose took up a lot of pages and had “development”. Maybe they should have been more specific. But it’s too late.

Poems were short and prose was long. Poems made up for shortness by being intensive and therefore, hard to write. But not hard to write the way a novel is hard to write.

Since it’s much easier to write prose, there has to be a lot of it to make up for this imbalance. Either way it’s a tough job and a good poet actually gets the same respect as a great novelist because they both share the same pain. One kind of pain being extremely intense, but lasting only for about an hour, and the other, spread out over the course of several months and several hundreds of pages, acquiring unique qualities of its own, but reaching the same level of suffering when it’s all added up at the end.

A prose poem was obviously cheating because it’s so easy and because it’s so short. Maybe that’s the real reason we laughed so much when we first heard the idea. Could it really be true? Could there really be such a large, gaping hole in these prison walls of weekly assignments?

If you had a fantastic idea for something and could start by getting most of the entire first paragraph done…

I ran a marathon, once. It wasn’t anything like how hard I had thought it would be. I only ran part of it. I ran for two minutes. And I could do it again. And again. Its my favorite sport now — now that it has this new, modern form.

Think of each prose poem as a book. Think of each prose poem as just the fun pieces of the book. The rest of the book hasn’t been written, but could be written, but that isn’t likely because the book’s already been gutted and it’s most important parts sold on the black market as a prose poem. It’s a masterwork of editing and the audience should applaud it’s invention with a great sense of relief.

Relief from bad prose. And relief from bad poetry. There’s none of either in a prose poem.

The prose poem is the perfect genre for people like me who love to write, but just not very much.

Technorati Tags: prose poem, creative writing, prose, poetry, digital art, genre abuse,

All text taken from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe, more or less…

Technorati Tags: Fall of the House of Usher, Illustration, gothic horror, gothic lying, Edgar Allan Poe, Sierpinski things, Poe to go, Classics Illustrated, Classics Defibrillated,

All text from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (in case you thought I wrote it…)

Recipe for Crumblescape
-Take any image, process 7 or so times with multicrystal.8bf (by Illyich the Toad)
-Process with Extractor 1 (Mario Klingemann, VM Toolbox), adjusting for optimal effect
Variation: use Mirror, Mirror (by Alfredo Mateus) to create a symmetrical appearance
Notes: don’t grease the pan, don’t sift the flour, let the smoke detector tell you when it’s done.

Technorati Tags: crumblescape, sierpinski, The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe, Poe, photoshop filters, clickism, clickism the great, digital baking made easy, one-bit wonders,

Yes, but let’s give the old guy credit for having to work with such primitive tools — like himself.

That’s right; I don’t have to calculate or plan anything in my own head like what’s-his-name did. With a single, thunderous click I unleash an awesome whirlwind of mathematical calculations, the simplest of which would leave me frowning and scratching my head.

Folks like me often forget (or don’t know) how many sets of “shoulders of giants” we stand on and what those giants are doing down there. (Is it any wonder I often feel like a conqueror, standing astride this apex of culture and science?)

But that’s only one of the reasons I’m better than Escher. Or wait. Actually, that’s the only reason I’m better than Escher — it’s that simple!

Perhaps there is something from the mind of that Escher guy in one of my photoshop filters? That’s not a bad guess, especially considering how incredibly Escher-like this image is (I made it, not Escher). Declaring myself to be better than him (was he a man or a woman?) is my little way of tipping my hat to him/her.

Why then should anyone hold on to works by MC Escher, or look at them, when they’ve got my stuff? Well, lots of reasons. First of all, they make me look good.

Escher worked almost entirely in black and white while I work with millions of colors, although I restrain myself (most of the time) by sticking to a 256-color palette to reduce file sizes, and for some other reasons I can’t remember.

If Escher was alive today (he isn’t, is he?) he’d want to steal my enchanted tool kit and run out the door with it. But I wouldn’t stop him. In the classic sage-like response to just about everything, I would just roll on the floor laughing. And then download the whole lot once more. Times sure have changed, haven’t they?

What would Escher be doing today? He’d probably be writing graphical programs with a mathematical angle (no pun intended) like fractals or 3D; trading his pencils for pixels in an instant. He’d know better than to compete head to head with the likes of someone like me. Smart guy.

Technorati Tags: MC Escher, Escher, MC Escher II, Son of Escher, Revenge of Escher, Fall of the House of Escher, Es-cher! — Gesundheit!, eschewing Escher,

There was a time when the radio made pictures. There was a time when you could see the sounds you heard. You could look at the radio waves.

Abandoned now, the memories still exist. Ask anyone, like me, around my age, how the radios at one time used to come with a little TV screen, the size of someone’s palm.

I guess it was like a cell phone picture screen, but you didn’t see icons and a little computer screen, you saw the radio waves. They shimmered, sort of, and made scratchy looking, wavy shapes.

There’s nothing like it today. The colors changed a lot, and when you turned the tuning dial, the picture shook and crackled like the music did.

You couldn’t do a screen capture or save anything. Some people got really good at it though, and would show off the pictures they could make on their radios during recess time at school.

I don’t remember when the aliens came back, but that’s when all the radio screens disappeared. Nobody said a word, but I knew. I was playing with my radio and watching the scratchy colors and that’s when I saw their ship appear on the tiny screen. I saw it coming through the sky. Just one ship.

Not long after, my brother’s was gone and no one at school had one anymore, either. I kept mine hidden, but they found it.

Nobody said a word, but I knew.

Technorati Tags: radio waves, oral history, conspiracy theories, space aliens, fiction is the lies worth writing down, circular wave filter,

bubbles03.loo

I don’t know what made me pick up Sterlingware again. After a year or two of experimenting with the formula parser in Inkblot Kaos and Tierazon and a whole bunch of photoshop filters, Sterlingware didn’t seem exciting anymore.

Once again, I’d thought I’d squeezed every good thing out of Sterlingware. Sure, like every progam it was still good for making raw material to morph and zap with photoshop filters, but I figured its days of stand alone usefulness were gone.

I started with the old the combinations that had been successful in the past; that’s a good way to review things and get back in the grove, but the old paths lead to the old places. I started with twister-weed and sine-trap; high color teethed grass and water falls; and then on to all those other rendering methods that I had always had high expections of, but had never worked for me…

That’s the point when I would usually give up out of frustration and move on to some other program, looking for new horizons. But this time I became fascinated with something that I’m sure I had already experimented with and abandoned: guassian sine dimension 9.

Visions of bubbliness

Sinister, and circular, bubbles14.loo

What’s weird is I’d seen these before, but at the time, I wasn’t ready for them.

It reminds me of the perlin noise images I’ve seen by Samuel Monnier and Paul DeCelle. Although I’m sure these two types of imagery are not related mathematically, they both have that same endless cloud feeling to them, of infinite resolution and unpredictable patterns.

Unpredictable. That’s what creativity is all about: making something you haven’t seen before.

I used to think stuff like this was garbage. But now I realize I just wasn’t ready for bubbles — back then.

Technorati Tags: Fractal art, digital art, Sterlingware, gaussian, bubbles, patterns, creativity, fractal art?,

Technorati Tags: art contest fractal art contest humour humor art humour the art of humour say it with dogs

Technorati Tags: say it with flowers, say it with carrion, postcard, art contests, fractal art, fractal art contest, what's suzy eating?,

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