Technorati Tags: fractal art, great fractal art, really really good fractal art, the best fractal art, the apex of fractal art, greatest fractal art ever, bow before me — mortals!,
There is a new legend that tells how a bird gave birth to the moon.
For thousands of years the bird had laid eggs and all of them had been eaten by animals in the forest.
The bird started by laying eggs on the ground, which were of course quickly found and eaten.
Next the bird laid her eggs under the ground. Some of these were dug up and eaten by animals on the ground and others were found by animals inside the ground. But the rest that stayed hidden, died and rotted in the ground.
Finally the bird laid her eggs in a tree. They were far away from the animals down on the ground and inside the ground, but not from the other birds. The birds came and ate the eggs.
For a thousand years the bird laid no more eggs because she was sad. But the bird started to get bigger and bigger because of all the eggs storing-up inside her. One night the huge bird looked up into the sky and said, “I will fly as high as I can and lay my eggs at the top of the sky. I am filled with children and I can’t go on living like this. If they also die, then I will die with them.”
The bird, who had now grown to a giant size, flew up to the top of the sky and instead of laying many eggs, laid a single enormous egg then returned to her tree to see what would happen to it.
The next night, all the animals gathered under the bird’s tree because they were excited about this bright new egg in the sky that was so bright it seemed to give them a second daytime. They laughed at the bird whose eggs they had eaten and said, “too bad your tasty children aren’t here to see this!”
The bird replied to her children’s killers, “Say goodbye to your easy hunting in the nighttime. This shining moon you see is the birth of a thousand eyes. The animals you used to hunt will now see you and escape. And with every new moon, when it is dark like before, you will be the one who is hunted, because your starving friends will turn on you in the dark.”
Technorati Tags: legends, fractal art, digital art, illustration, moon, birds, die weasel die!, sterlingware, Sam Peckinpah's Bedtime Stories,
Brought to you by the proud sponsors of the 2012 Olympic Clickism Team!
I’m trying to get Clickism recognized as an official Olympic sport.
Of course, if that happens I probably won’t even qualify for a spot on my country’s first official team to compete at the next Olympics. The competition gets pretty stiff once that fabled Olympic status is conferred on any sport.
But that’s Okay; I train hard and run fast so that others will train harder and run faster. Just remember; it takes a lot of losers to make one winner. Who is the winner of a one-man race? Without a crowd of losers, a winner is nothing. But do the losers ever get any thanks or recognition? No. Anonymity is the left hand of losing.
Here are the hurdles that I’ve met, and mastered in my most recent race in the arena of Clickism. Do not be impressed! I went off-course many times before arriving at the finish line.
And finally, click on Almodovar.8bf, another sports enhancing filter (not yet banned) by Andrew Buckle, and you’ll arrive at the finish line, to the sounds of applause (the 100m finals are being run in the same stadium), and the image posted at the top. If you haven’t suffered a serious injury (or been tackled by some nut in the crowd), you’ll be around to lose another race.
Grasshopper; Consider the way of the loser. Inspire others to lose so that you may win — so that you may be a winner at losing. Don’t order a lot of team jackets and uniforms, though. Nobody wants “LOSER” written across their back. Pride in losing is self-indulgence.
And self-indulgence is futile because self-indulgence has only 256 colors, which is not enough for any being who wishes to use photoshop filters. Go soak your head in vinegar until you understand this.
Technorati Tags: Olympics, Olympic Games, Beijing Olympics, Olympic Art, Clickism, fractal art, Sterlingware, Alfredo Mateus, Andrew Buckle, art steriods, loser, losing, loser-town,
Another paradigm shift: This blog, Orbit Trap, is a whistleblower. I think that’s why there’s been such hostility to it and such little open support. That’s always the way it is with the unpopular role — of whistleblowing.
Whistleblowing, by it’s very nature occurs in environments in which power is monopolized and everyone therefore falls into one of two categories: The Bosses, and The Bossed.
If power wasn’t being monopolized then whistleblowing would never occur and attempts to act like a whistleblower would appear ridiculous and simply be ignored. A dictatorship is an example of a monopoly of power, in a political context. It’s a classic example of conflict of interest and the resulting influence that such a monopoly of power has on everyone who isn’t part of the monopoly.
You don’t go to the courts and file a lawsuit against a dictator because the dictator owns all the judges. The judges, who would normally be expected to be independent (so they can judge independently) are, like everyone else who plays a visible role in the country, deeply dependent on the favour of the dictator for their positions and, should they ever decide to blow the whistle and oppose the dictator — jeopardizing their personal comfort or lives.
In an environment where no single group has control of everything, criticism is much more freely offered and issues are dealt with routinely, in their early stages, and thereby prevented from developing into deep-rooted and systemic (i.e. whistleblowing) problems in the first place.
In the fractal art world however, control over contests, calendars and just about everything else has become monopolized. The “official” face of fractal art is nothing more than a clique who use that “official” status as an opportunity to promote themselves — an opportunity which they could never have gained on the artistic merits of their work alone. The monopoly is maintained by the intimidating influence felt by anyone else who wants to gain recognition in an art form which the clique claims to represent and whose most publicly visible examples they administer as their private fiefdom.
Someone has to be the one to blow the whistle on all this if there is going to be any hope of changing the perception and attitudes amongst people in the fractal art world who, if they had knowledge of these things, could easily act to change the way things are run.
Criticizing judges and editors for their conflicts of interest clearly leaves one open to retaliation via those very same conflicts of interest that one is attempting to expose. Few are willing to suffer the consequences of challenging the same authorities who have both the power to correct themselves and the power to punish those who are challenging them — no one except a whistleblower.
So, my only comment to the Kens and Tobys (and the next Stooge to be sent from our adversaries) who show up to defend the status quo of the fractal world is this: Leave it to the many silent readers of Orbit Trap to judge the merits of what we say and come to their own conclusions. If you really feel our whistleblowing is a false alarm, then present your objections in your very own venue in infinite length and in total freedom. Then the audience can freely choose if they care to listen to you.
Technorati Tags: fractal art, digital art, whistleblower, whistle-blowing, Orbit Trap, monopoly, blogging, free speech, art criticism, online communities, stooge, stooger, stooging,
My latest paradigm shift: The online fractal “art” world is primarily a social network where one’s “art” is used to gain admission to, and build a network of friends. My impression is that something like 90% of all the fractal “art” activity online is little more than an attempt to participate in a social scene and not a serious interest in fractal art as one would suppose it to be.
If you want to join a motorcycle club, you’ve got to have a motorcycle. If you want to join a fractal “club”, you’ve got to have some fractals. It’s Facebook with fractals.
This is not a criticism of the fractal art world exclusively. I suspect that this sort of “social-hobby” mingling goes on in many places on the internet and has in fact gone on in the past for centuries in the form of cultural clubs formed around various ideological, literary or artistic themes. The internet however, has enabled it to take a quantum leap creating communities where art (or whatever the original theme was) takes on a token role, conveniently disguising groups that engage in idle chit chat and gossip as “art” communities.
What lead me to such a conclusion was a perennial question that for years kept puzzling me: “Why is art on the internet so boring?”. And this one: “How can there be so many people displaying art online and yet there be less creative output than one of my high school art classes?”.
I think this aspect of the online fractal art world has been misunderstood and its inclusion under the label of fractal art has diluted and devalued the whole genre — in the eyes of those who don’t see it for what it really is. Once the Fractalbook crowd is factored out, I think the remaining handful of artists, styles and opinions is much more easily understood and will take on a greater and more progressive influence.
Technorati Tags: fractal art facebook online networks social networks culture clubs online affiliation group identity online identity virtual idiots
Technorati Tags: fractal art digital art tierazon algorithmic art circus balloons popcorn candy floss…
I don’t know exactly how it works, but where there’s math… there’s fractals! Sure, the math folks will argue with me, but like all great minds, I don’t expect to be understood in this lifetime (or solar system).
How does it work? Start with some colors and some shapes, move the two sliders around and then push the “shocko-wocko” button, labelled, “OK”. Actually, there’s more to it than that. Like all artistic activity it requires a good eye and knowing just when to click.
Yes. It’s a lot like the old western gunfight dueling with six-guns. But just as the people of the future will have to use the western gunslinging skills of the past to deal with aliens on other planets, I too will have to use the ancient, tried and true techniques of the old masters as I polish the artform of clickism in this (can you believe it?) 21st century.
Parameter files? How does one even start to list the parameters of this bold new art, much less quantify them? Every work of clickism is a total original and extremely hard to reproduce, or more accurately — reverse engineer. Ask Da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa again. He could try. He could come close, but it would be different. He’d be able to… uh, actually Da Vinci or any of the other old masters would probably be able to reproduce their own work quite easily since everything is quite carefully planned out and controlled. But it’s still hard work.
Yes, these are the Digital labours of Hercules. Fortunately I have strange new machines to do my heavy lifting, and detailed work (Leonardo got some help too, I read somewhere…), leaving me free to focus on the essential, more serious matters of looking and clicking.
Oh, of course. The filter is the circular wave distortion filter from Showfoto. You don’t need to use their’s though, just about every graphics program has one of these. I think they’ve been around for ages; they look like circular water ripples — that is when they’re used in their proper, prescribed way. (And why would anyone want to do that?) In fact, that’s why I never bothered to experiment with it before. Give something a clear, coherent label, and everybody thinks they know what it is …and what it does …and what it’s for …like Fractal Art
Technorati Tags: Digital Art, Non-Fractal Art, Circular Wave Filter, Da Vinci, Hercules, Astounding Science Fiction, Terry Gibbons, sfcovers.net, gunfighting,
“The sages of Calisto were super-intelligent and had become so far advanced in the Sciences that there was nothing more for them to achieve. They had then moved on to the Arts. Rega, the sociable one who had helped me repair my ship, was eager to show me their art gallery. ‘Art, when it reaches perfection,’ Rega said, ‘is nothing more than a stunning cloud of golden dust, suggesting both the entire universe and a sub-atomic flash in the same image’. I laughed out loud when I first saw it. But now that I’ve been eating their secret scientific food for three months, I’ve come to agree with them completely.”
— (excerpted from A Student on Calisto, 1953)
“Imagine my surprise when I arrived on the spacemen’s home planet only to discover I was a celebrity in their eyes and treated like some kind of king! Still, I was not fully at ease despite how well the whole ordeal had turned out. I wondered constantly, ‘What will they do with me when they find out what normal Earthlings are really like and that I was escaping from jail when they captured me?’.”
— (excerpted from, From the Electric Chair to the Throne of Pluto, 1949)
Every morning the same thing. Fifty or sixty gopher-sized holes – all new – would be discovered around our spaceships and equipment. Yet no one had heard or seen anything during the night. We all knew there couldn’t be any animal life since there weren’t even plants on Mars. That was before we’d started drillling.
— (excerpted from Gopher Hunting on Mars, 1962)
Professor Menkin was a likeable enough fellow; he said hello to everyone and even once gave me a lift to the spaceport on one of his days off. I guess that’s what should have tipped me off: what was he doing driving out of town – and there ain’t nothing out of town on Venus – when he ought to be spending his free glide credits back at the Floaterium like the rest of us? He was working for the Venusians even back then, that’s what. I hear they’ve got his face on one of their coins now.
— (excerpted from I Wore a Tungsten Crown, 1951)
Technorati Tags: Digital Art Frank R. Paul Pulp Science Fiction Clickism Science Wonder Stories Mars Venus Pluto Showfoto XnView circular wave graphic filters
“One small step for a fractal artist; one giant leap for Fractal Art” -Neil Armstrong.8bf
“The aim of photoshop filters is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” -Aristotle.8bf
“What the mass media offers is not fractal art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” -W. H. Auden.8bf
“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” -William Blake.8bf
“A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone” -Francis Picabia.8bf
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without photoshop filters” -Emile Zola.8bf
“Good taste is as tiring as good company” -Francis Picabia
“If we could but paint with the computer what we see with the mind.” -Honore de Balzac.8bf
“When I judge art, I take my computer monitor and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.” -Paul Cezanne.8bf
“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of Ultra Fractal.” -Cecil Beaton.8bf
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game. -Octavio Paz.8bf
“Photoshop filters produce ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Ultra Fractal, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” -Jean Cocteau.8bf
“If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s synergy” -Wilson Mizner.8bf
“A fractal formula gives the image structure. An artist gives the image feeling. A photoshop filter destroys both and changes the hue.” -Ragland T. Tiger.8bf
“Fractal Art is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” -Edgar Degas.8bf
Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Digital Art Marc Chagall Neil Armstrong Aristotle W.H. Auden Robert Oppenheimer Emile Zola Honore de Balzac Cecil Beaton Marshall McLuhan William Wordsworth Octavio Paz Jean Cocteau Edgar Degas
When Orbit Trap was started, back in August of 2006, it had always been foremost in my mind that it would be a positive contribution to the fractal art world.
What does that mean?
To me it means that it would encourage the creation of exciting new artwork. “Exciting”? Exciting doesn’t need to be defined; we know what excitement is when it happens.
Some of the criticism that Orbit Trap has received, and that I have personally received, has lead me to think that many people in the fractal world misunderstand the function of criticism that Orbit Trap is performing.
I believe it all comes down to the role that criticism, and critics in particular, play in the world of art. Serious, meaningful, and sustained criticism is something that has been oddly lacking in the fractal art world. Perhaps because fractal art is still a relatively new art form? Or perhaps because criticism in the fractal world has often been met with harassment and punishing consequences?
Criticism is simply commentary. The word “criticism” has acquired a negative connotation in everyday speech, but I’m using the word in it’s traditional, neutral way, which simply implies any kind of feedback or discussion regardless of whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant. Criticism is merely talking “about” something.
Critics are people who comment on art. They may easily appear “opinionated” because commentary is, by it’s very nature, opinions. While critics have played an important, and at times, very influential role in the development of new artistic styles and types of art, I would say they are not very common, and for that reason, are a somewhat rare and unusual type of person. Most people are uncomfortable in giving criticism — ironically, even more uncomfortable than they are in actually receiving it.
Critics like to comment about art. Why? Well, for the same reason artists like to make art: quite simply, artistic passion. Commenting on art produces new ideas and perspectives and in consequence – new possibilities. Critics are just as interested in art as artists are. The roles are different, that’s all.
Critics help artists and viewers to see art differently – and in some cases to see art where people don’t see it at all. Artists like Jackson Pollock, who have had an enormous influence on the art world, would probably have had much less success if they were not “interpreted” and “explained” and introduced to the larger art audience by the thoughtful writing of art critics who saw something valuable in what they were doing.
So, in the world of art, criticism persists because art persists. Critics do not “get over it” just as artists do not “get over” making art.
Art without criticism is like seeing without thinking. It’s like art without an audience.
Technorati Tags: fractal art digital art Fyre 1.0.1 art criticism art critics Jackson Pollock Art
In case there’s anyone still following this latest comment “thread”, here’s the final chapter.
Toby sent us his final remarks which he said we could post if we wanted to. Unlike Ken, Toby doesn’t accuse us of violating his human rights when it comes to posting his comments.
Toby writes: “in my view Damien’s decision to cease hosting your site was a rational act of self-preservation, which he appears from the record to have done honorably and sensitively”
Well, well. I think the polite term for guys like Toby is “fanboy”. He’s a Fractalus Fanboy.
Booting a long-time, paying client off your webserver when they criticize you on their blog isn’t retaliation or intimidation or an attempt to stifle free speech? No, no. Not when Fractalus does it!
According to Toby it’s “a rational act of self-preservation”.
In keeping with Toby’s Communist China analogy he used for us, I’d guess he’d probably say that Mao’s repression of criticism and throwing dissidents into labour camps was also “a rational act of self-preservation”.
Sorry Toby – and all the rest of you Fractalus Fanboys (and Fangirls). I don’t think your attempts to use the comments section of Orbit Trap to prop up your glorious leader by demanding, over and over, “freedom of speech” and “alternative viewpoint” are working.
That’s the current state of the Fractal Art world (in case you’re wondering what all this is about). But don’t worry about Orbit Trap; we’re not on anyone’s leash.
Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Digital Art art criticism Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Fractal Universe Calendar Freedom of the Press Freedom of Speech Fractalus Fanboy Fangirl Damien M. Jones
Technorati Tags: digital art terraform read-only moon space exploration space cadet space in my head
I read once
about kids who would go looking
for arrowheads
I was a kid
so I went looking for arrowheads
also
The arrowheads
are in the ground
or just below the surface
The shaft of the arrow
is gone
and the feathers too
the guy who shot the arrow
is gone
but the stone, flint arrowhead
lives on
Flint is a stone
It doesn’t know
it’s an arrowhead
So it waits
the way a stone waits
stays sharp
stays covered
Technorati Tags: arrowheads fyre 1.0.1 childhood memories poetry picture talking
I know this will probably crack some folks up at first, but bear with me as I tell you about something that came to mind just recently while browsing the big page of “winners” at the 2007 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest site.
First, let me draw your attention to the “anti-” thing. I am referring to anti in the sense of “Anti-Christ”, a term which most people will be familiar with, mostly from the popular media, I suspect, which is why I want to clarify its meaning.
Anti-Christ has two accepted meanings. The first is the more common and obvious one, “opposed or against Christ”. The second is a similar, but slightly different meaning of “substitute or alternate Christ”. That’s the meaning I’m referring to when I speak of “Anti-Fractal” – a substitution for, or replacement for Fractals. Much more insidious than the first one.
So I’m looking at the winners’ page last week because I read a short blog posting about the 2007 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest and I wanted to double check which of the many “species” of winners the reviewer’s three favorites came from. There’s an interesting comment there, but let’s stick to the Anti-Fractal.
While browsing down the winners’ (that’s plural) page I was struck by the suddenly different style of three of the judges’ works.
Well, Ultra Fractal has a lot of processing options so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see some pretty unusual looking fractals. But it made me think, “Are they bored with fractals and trying to make artwork that looks as little like fractals as possible?”
I’m referring to the wispy, melting, flowing style of image. It’s not the usual crisp, structured, patterned type of fractal image that has traditionally been associated with fractals. It’s something new and different and in the art world that’s always a good thing.
But this is not the art world, this is the fractal art world and I say, “BRETHEREN! BEWARE THE ANTI-FRACTAL!”
Now, I’m sure the artists can produce plenty of fractal formulas and other scientific evidence to easily prove by way of parameter files that those images are as fractal as any other fractal image, but just different-looking than the usual old-fashioned fractals because these new flowing-style fractals have been created with cutting-edge Ultra Fractal techniques.
I think these judges are leading the way in leaving the little world of fractal art and heading out into the larger and more creative realm of Digital Art in general. And by corollary I would say that Ultra Fractal is a tool primarily designed for this purpose: Anti-Fractals – making fractals that don’t look like fractals but can still be easily called fractals because you didn’t use Photoshop, you only used Ultra-Fractal.
In other words, Ultra Fractal is being used to mask post-processing and conceal the the true label of “Digital Art” under layers of fractal formulas!
Don’t we all want something good for Fractal Art to come out of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests? Yes! And now it has. The judges have shown us that Fractal Art is Dead and Boring and it needs to be cooked a little.
No more spirals – behold the un-spiral! Want your crisp frozen curves to look more relaxed and flowing? Enroll in the Mississippi School of Anti-Fractal Art. But be forewarned: only the good ship Ultra Fractal can take you down that river. You can’t do this with your small fractal crafts.
Unless of course you’ve got the guts to be a Pirate and use Photoshop.
I’ll stop now. I’m meandering.
Technorati Tags: Anti-Christ Anti-Fractal Boing-Boing Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Mississippi Ultra Fractal Photoshop
Algorithmic Art (art made by machines) is a lot like digital frost.
I think almost every photography book has a picture of frost on a window pane. Frost is a mechanical process and is quite well understood but the imagery it produces never seems to lose it’s allure.
There’s no Jack Frost or any deliberating influence involved, it’s just a simple, natural process of water crystalizing (freezing) on window glass. The frost patterns develop as more water vapour adheres to the edges of the growing formation.
The ingredients of frost are simple. The ingredients of algorithmic art are fairly simple too. Although some algorithms may be difficult to construct, they’re simple to run. Similarly, water molecules wouldn’t exactly be easy to make oneself, but once made, they run themselves.
Like the mundane process that creates frost patterns, these images were made with the block wave distortion filter in KDE’s Showfoto (part of the Digikam project).
It’s just a distortion effect and probably not anywhere near as fascinating as fractals, which seem to occupy a whole separate realm of digital art (and mathematics too). Distortion filters ought to be much less interesting than fractals, one would think.
What does that say? It says that art is stupid. It says that our eyes care little for the origins of the imagery they look at, although they can be easily influenced, temporarily, by a nice frame or a famous name …or a price tag.
A fractal on the computer screen is a fish out of water – dead – just another piece of visual meat to be devoured by our eyes. Fractal math is just an interesting anectdote and bit of trivia that people like to package with their fractal images like the phrase,”Sparkling Natural Mineral Water” that you see on the labels of bottled water.
“Post-processing”, the use of filter effects, lays bare the inner workings of digital images. Before long it becomes pretty obvious that “fractals” are just another photoshop filter. Add in the use of layering, one of the strongest and most common graphical effects, and the mighty label, “Fractal” starts to look a little transparent.
Yeah. It’s true. I know it. I speak the language of the ice. I can read it.
Technorati Tags: art digital art fractal art algorithmic art any kind of art KDE Showfoto Digikam
In the spirit of Sindbad, I went on a voyage and just recently, returned. It was a digital voyage. Not really a voyage I guess, but I left where I was and out of curiosity went somewhere different and then here I am again.
I journeyed to the edges of minimalist window managers and desktop environments in Linux. While doing so, I often experienced a completely black screen (call it a desktop) from which I was only able to send messages to the system by way of a run dialog opened with the keystroke alt+F2.
Like a sailor whose map is the stars and navigates better at night than in the day, I found that a simple run dialog was often more efficient (and certainly much simpler) than desktop icons or menus. Better still was the boolean search feature in Thunar which would allow you to access any icon in the /usr/applications directory.
As I continue with my tale from strange lands, I discovered the near ability of the Opera browser to replace all the functions of my operating system with the exception of the ability to run Opera itself. In addition to browsing the internet I could read my email and RSS feeds and also browse (in a primitive way) my hard drive and even write postings via it’s onboard notes feature.
I loaded a widget that completely replaced the calendar, clock and appointment manager that normally requires a taskbar and system bar and was able to switch from application to application via something so incredibly simple as alt+TAB.
The greatest moment of all was discovering this stunning image of the planet Mercury which, like my empty, minimalist desktop (no taskbar, no icons, no clock, no right-click menu…) fitted in quite well with my floating in space desktop environment. I splurged with 8MB of RAM and launched xfdesktop and dropped this image of the planet Mercury into my desktop, which now was a completely black screen with only Mercury on it.
I don’t know if Windows will allow you to work with just a black screen and a few simple keystroke combinations, but I heartily recommend giving it a try if only for the brief feeling of drifting in space.
The thrill of Linux isn’t something as trivial as merely escaping the orbit of Micro$oft Windows. It’s about forgetting all about that old planet Earth and floating through space on a Journey to Mercury.
Technorati Tags: planet mercury linux xfce xfdesktop xfwm thunar sindbad desktop environment minimalist window manager opera
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | click art | clickism | illustration | vernissage | photoshop filters
Back in the early 90’s, I went through a 3 year phase when I wanted to become an airplane pilot. In addition to taking flight training in Ontario, Canada (where I live) I also “studied” in Phoenix, Arizona and Hoxie, Kansas where I took some cropdusting lessons.
During this time I became acquainted with some of the aviation “culture” including the juvenile, false bravado and machismo attitude of many pilots (particularly new ones). Aviation culture also included the habit of using the metaphor of birds to refer to airplanes.
I was never really comfortable with this bird analogy for planes, although, like birds, planes fly and planes have wings. Birds however, incorporate a lot of movement into flight unlike planes which are extremely rigid and also extremely smooth and streamlined — more like fish, fins and swimming than birds, wings and flying.
In fact, one sunny morning at the Scottsdale airport in Phoenix (it’s always sunny in Phoenix) I was doing my required “walk around” of the training aircraft and I decided to take a look at the underneath of the tail of the airplane. It was much like the smooth, curved underside to a fish, I thought. Isn’t an airplane really more like a fish or boat with wings?
In fact, “flying boat” amphibious aircraft require very little design modification to transfom them from what is a typical aircraft design. I suppose, of course, one could say the same thing about a duck — a floating bird — but that just emphasizes my point that aircraft are more like water creatures than air creatures (more like ducks than eagles).
Anyhow, I’m sure the bird metaphor for airplanes lives on, just as the James Bond mentality of many pilots probably does too, even though they’re both just as unnatural and out of place in the real world.
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | Fyre | Fyre 1.0.1 | aviation | pilot | machismo | bravado | arizona | scottsdale | phoenix | fish | bird | flying
Frames? Digital Pictures!
They really ought to be called something like, “Digital Display Frame” since the “frame” isn’t really digital, is it? It’s the picture that’s digital. But I think it’s an example of how language is a practical medium and changes according to the whims of those who use it, rather than the direction of any sort of authority. “Frame” is being used to refer to the entire mechanism, which in this case includes the picture.
Although they seem to be a little pricey right now ($79-4×6″), it’s an exciting development for people like me who find printing to be a completely different medium than the digital, computer one. Of course, they’ve had these sorts of things in Star Wars for some time now. But apparently science fiction is not the same as reality.
On the opposing side of things: isn’t a digital picture frame just a low quality computer screen that eats up batteries and wouldn’t it be better to view digital images on a computer monitor instead? Yes, but the “picture frame” performs the function of a decoration which occupies places that a monitor can’t. A digital picture frame is a digital ornament and that’s the exciting thing. Digital Ornaments are something new. So far, with the exception of printing (a pretty big exception…) digital art has been confined to a computer monitor; it doesn’t hang on a wall like it’s ancestors do.
Think of the possibilities: With technological development they could become cheaper and that would also translate into larger. It’s possible that the technology could produce a very large digital display “frame” that could substitute for large printed images.
Galleries could produce coin operated images. Put in, say, 25 cents and the image appears for a minute. If you want to take a closer look (some people do) then just drop in another 25 cents.
Hmmmn… That’s going to be a problem. Where is anyone going to find digital art that’s worth 25 cents?
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | digital picture frames | digital communities | digital everything man!
No way. Think again, brainiac.
Or go check out the articles in the Wikipedia regarding Nuclear Weapons. The hard part seems to be getting the fuel. You need Uranium or Plutonium, even if you want to make a Hydrogen bomb, but it’s got to be a special type — and lots of it.
I think because there are so many nuclear weapons in the world that people think they’re easy to make. Also, since the principles behind them are relatively simple (nuclear physics is simple, right?) and easily available, it’s reasonable to assume that anyone, who wants to, can make an “atomic bomb”.
Enriching Uranium requires the concentration (isolation, separation) of the Uranium isotope, 235. This is difficult. “Difficult” means expensive in engineering or scientific circles.
Plutonium (239) isn’t even a naturally occuring element and has to be created from Uranium 238 (stable and useless) in a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately it explodes too quickly when formed into critical mass and requires very sophisticated (more money, again) methods to get a useful, high-yielding warhead.
Hydrogen bomb? It takes a plutonium or uranium (235) explosion to just get the Hydrogen bomb going. That’s a very expensive fuse. But after that… The biggest nuclear weapons are all Hydrogen (fusion of small atoms, as opposed to fission –splitting– of big ones) bombs.
Did you know that when U.S. President Harry Truman announced after dropping the second atomic bomb on Japan (Nagasaki, Aug. 1945) that if they didn’t surrender they would see an unbelievable rain of destruction, that he was actually just bluffing?
Apparently the U.S. had used up all of their weapons (they only had 3: dropped two and tested one –Trinity test, White Sands) and didn’t have any more enriched Uranium (235) or Plutonium with which to make another bomb, and would have entailed several months of enrichment processing.
So it just goes to show that the only thing more powerful than an atom bomb is a slick-talking president.
technorati tags: fractal art | digital art | algorithmic art | nuclear weapons |
Getting through the winter seems to be so complicated and expensive for us humans. On the other hand, in the tropics houses are simple. All you really need is a roof that keeps the rain out, screens on the windows (or a mosquito net to sleep under), four walls and a floor.
Winter is the reason that human civilization has primarily stayed in places where nothing ever freezes. Winter is an enormous economic drain.
Which makes me wonder how all these animals up here manage to make it through the winter without ever paying a cent for oil, gas or electricity to heat their homes and yet keep living and carrying on just fine without all the complexities that humans seem to require.
The secret is going underground …and falling into a stupor …waking up every few weeks …seeing if it’s over …falling back into a stupor …again …again …unless something eats you.
Take the Mongolian Gerbil of South Central Siberia, for instance. Don’t be fooled by that “Siberia” name. Siberia is just the prairies or “western plains” of Russia. It’s no colder there than Manitoba (that’s Canada) or North Dakota, where actually it’s incredibly cold, as cold as Siberia.
In the winter they… wait, apparently they don’t hibernate. The whole family moves down into their winter nesting chamber which is 4 or 5 feet below the surface. They store up food? Probably. The burrow is interconnected with tons of other ones. I think they have a pretty good time down there. They don’t shovel snow. They stay underground on super cold days, which means, super windy days. I think they carry the Plague.
Weird stuff happens in the winter up here. Some small rodents, ground squirrels, I think, hibernate. Hibernation isn’t “sleeping”. Hibernation is a (this is true) state of suspended animation where the body temperature drops to within a few degrees of “room temperature” which in these cheap, unheated rodent-homes, could be close to zero (freezing) Celsius.
Pick up a hibernating animal and drop it and it won’t wake up. It’s in a torpor or stupor sort of state.
Most hibernators however, dig a burrow down to a level which is below the “frostline”, which is the maximum depth to which the freezing cold of winter goes. There’s something called the sub-snow layer, too. Under the snow, but above the ground. Not as exposed, but certainly colder than the subterranean areas.
Bears, or at least most bears, don’t actually hibernate. They just lie around sleeping or doing nothing all winter. Apparently this was discovered, quite quickly, by researchers who went into the dens of bears in the winter to take their temperature (the main indicator of hibernation). After the loss of several hundred graduate students… it was assumed the bears were not hiberating and were actually quite alert.
Some small rodents actually allow their body temperature to drop below freezing and enter a super-cooled state (below freezing, but still liquid –not frozen). This allows for enormous savings in heat as a body temperature of -2C doesn’t require much metabolic activity. It’s been suggested that perhaps, in particularly cold winters, or during cold “snaps”, that some of these rodents actually die, so maybe it’s not as successful a strategy as one might think.
In the Arctic (snow, ice, tundra, igloos, seals, polar bears…) apparently there is very little or actually no hibernation (low body temperature state). Why? Isn’t it colder up there? Yes, but the winter lasts so long (like 14 months) that no animal could store up enough fat to make it through such a prolonged period.
Polar Bears are active all winter long. They even give birth in the winter. They eat people too. They’ll eat anything. I read about an experienced Inuit (Eskimo) hunter who was stranded on an ice floe and was scared to death about being killed by polar bears, especially at night. It just amazes me that anyone or anything would live way up there.
The squirrels of the Yukon Territory (Canada, east of Alaska) are the weirdest of all. They don’t go underground, or hibernate, they just avoid the really, really bad days. They’re active all winter long and instead of having an increased metabolism which is what you’d expect, since they’d need to supply more body heat, they have a lowered metabolism —yet they do not die. And they live in trees, in nests made up of a big ball of twigs and leaves. You cannot freeze a squirrel. It’s been proven. They have to be run over first. Or go through a snow blower.
I don’t live in the Yukon, but even here, way down south in Toronto (between Michigan and New York state) squirrels live up in trees all winter long. This has always puzzled me, because it looks incredibly cold, especially on windy nights. The trees are bare except for these strange, football sized clumps of leaves. You’d expect people to live that way, but not animals. Maybe living so close to people has made them stupid and they’ve abandoned the steady ways of their ancestors.
But for the Mongolian Gerbil, when it’s night time; minus forty; the wind howling away; he’s quite relaxed, down in his golden chamber, surrounded by the riches of the earth, while a winter storm walks across the plains.
technorati tags: fractal art | digital art | Mongolian Gerbil | hibernation | Inkblot Kaos | winter burrow | squirrels |
From time to time I become curious about something and I start reading about it. A month ago it was hibernation, and in particular, the winter homes of animals. Lately it’s been nuclear reactors.
This sort of informal, casual study of things I’ve found to be similar to assembling a puzzle, or catching glimpses of something in the dark, or to guessing what’s in a bag by putting your hand in and feeling it without looking. It’s a process of sorting and assembling major (essential) and minor (detail) pieces of information.
Unless you’re a serious student following a formal course of study at a school, most of us learn about new things in this sort of way: a process of discovery and tentative conclusions (eg. “breeder reactors are the way of the future; why don’t we all use them?”). It’s a natural way of learning, I think, but not necessarily the most efficient; a formal course might not be as interesting but will bring you up to speed on a subject faster and give you a more complete understanding, although it might not be as “fun”.
Hibernation, nuclear reactors… and of course: Art, is one of those perennial subjects I like to “look into” and to form opinions about. Form opinions and forming opinions and reform opinions, because gathering more information often changes your opinion about the subject you’re gathering information about.
I’ve noticed something about art. There is something called, “Useful Art”. It’s not complicated. It just means that there is a category of artwork that is distinguished by being useful to people, as opposed to the more general category of artwork which is just art and only performs the function of being art.
If you think of this in the context of human society (and don’t we all do this sort of thinking?) then there are, “Useful People” and there are people who are just “People”. Some people are very productive and make a lot of money and there are others who’s contribution to society –usefullness to society– is, uh, less or even less than zero. People, however, unlike machines or highways or other “things” don’t have to justify their existence by being useful. We value all human life, in general, (most of us do) even when those lives don’t benefit us or even if they cost us something (eg. dependants).
Back to “Useful Art”. I’ve noticed (internet, books, media…) that often a greater value or prestige is placed on artwork that has been chosen for commercial purposes. Book covers; illustrations; newspaper articles; advertisements; calendars; posters; exhibitions; these are examples of the sorts of “medals” or “honours” that artwork can “win” –by being useful.
Some of these commercial purposes are more “Art” oriented than others (exhibitions), but I think it’s worth noting or keeping in mind that: the usefullness of art is not a direct result of its artistic merit.
I’m not saying this because my own artwork is useless. This is just the conclusion I’ve come to after observing an enormous amount of commercial art in the media. Commercial “success” and the commercial “look” is very deceptive. Most of the artwork we see is incorporated into advertising and contexts that are not related to the promotion of art for it’s own sake. The most common artwork of our society (there I go again, talking about “society”) is advertising and I think that has distorted people’s view of what makes for good art.
I think this particularly explains the very slick, simplistic, one dimensional, homogeneous look to a lot of digital art. This of course includes fractal art, but that’s just because I suspect the same cultural influences are at work in the minds of fractal artists as they are in the minds of digital artists in general. I really think that most of the people making this sort of artwork actually think it’s good stuff because it fits in well with all the advertising art that is “rampant” (wonderful word!) in our “society”. They have developed advertising “eyes” by observing so much advertising around them.
I used to be that way too (but now I make junk), I loved bump-mapping, rich vivid colors, stuff that looked “professional” and was glossy –or at least I tried to make stuff like that (it’s not easy making slick stuff, is it?). What happened to me was I got bored with it and I began to find the artwork in art books more interesting and then I just stopped paying attention to what anyone else was doing and just made stuff that interested me. Also, slick artwork doesn’t seem to come naturally –a point which I think deserves some deeper consideration.
Now, I’m not saying that all advertising artwork is bad or lacks artistic merit. There’s a wide range of artistic styles used in advertising, although, for the most part, advertising art is: eye-catching; simple themes; bright colors; cliches (they’re quickly understood); idealized.
So avoid all that. Make complicated, dark, revolting, obscure, cynical images.
No, no, no! What I’m saying is that you can’t trust the “standards” and the “examples” for artwork that you see everyday because that’s advertising and it only uses “art” when it cooperates with commercial interests. Trust your own instincts about what you find interesting and make stuff like that and don’t worry if it looks, “different” than anything you’ve seen before.
Of course, if your instincts tell you to make slick, commercial stuff and you actually find that experience interesting and exciting, then IT’S TOO LATE!!! YOU’VE BECOME ONE OF “THEM”!!!
technorati tags: fractal art | digital art | Inkblot Kaos | moire | art theory | creativity | advertising |
While doing some serious research on calendars recently, I stumbled on a gallery where:
Big Black Frames
and
Short Inspirational Titles
In Glowing White Text
Separated by a White Line
With Snappy Quotation Subtitles Below
Were The House Specialty
They looked nice. In fact, this inspirational poster framing style looked very polished and professional, which is what I think, “Corporate” is suppose to mean. I looked at lots of them until…
I got into the mood myself:
All good things come to an end, and what defines, “the end” better than a meaningless string of hitherto useful words? I don’t know, after all that lofty stratospheric, inspirational stuff, my mind just started to crave senselessness again. “Gibberish: Words into Song“
That very same day (this is the truth) a friend of mine dropped off one of his business calendars in my mailbox. And what do you suppose I saw? Yes!
Big Black Frames
and
Short Inspirational Titles
In White Text
Separated by a White Line
Snappy Quotation Subtitles Below
Were The House Specialty
Anyhow, I’m not saying it’s cliche and we should all get rid of the BigBlackFrameGlowingWhiteTitleAndQuotation style of presentation. Come to think of it, it did inspire me to make this posting.
I think the best background for artwork, especially digital artwork, is just plain black. The shining text that results is just an elegant bonus. Now I’m guilty too.
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | high class art | Fyre | Fyre 1.0.1 | calendar | poster
Back several month ago, I posted about a program called Fyre. As is often the case with new programs and new forms of algorithmic art, I quickly reached what I thought were its creative limits.
A recent comment on my blog asking for information on how the images from Fyre are made, re-kindled (ha, ha…) my interest in the program. I went looking for the Fyre website to see if it had the information needed (I avoid trying to explain mathematical processes). While there, I visited the official Fyre gallery on Flickr where I saw some very interesting images and asked myself, “How come I couldn’t make stuff like that?”.
One of the extremely smart and super-convenient aspects to Fyre is the incorporation of a parameter “file” in the meta information (hidden notes) of the images it saves. Open up any image saved from Fyre and you can rework it just as you can with the autosaved parameter files from some fractal programs (Inkblot Kaos, Tierazon…).
So I opened up some of the images from the Fyre flickr gallery and began to see how others had used the program and made these images that I hadn’t thought were possible. I then went further still, and began to experiment in many new directions by moving around any parameters that weren’t nailed to the floor or screamed when I touched them.
Fyre has harnessed what I would call one of the primary tools of algorithmic art: RANDOMNESS. Ctr+R instantly gets you an image formed by it’s randomly generated set of basic parameters modified by the users pre-set rendering options (exposure, gamma, type of gradient…). The human mind cannot think randomly and so is handicapped when it comes to competing with the randomly generated constructions of computer software.
Don’t feel bad about this handicap. The ability to be controlled by randomly generated instructions is a result of the weak ability, or complete lack of ability, of machines to think. Machines don’t have a brain and so it’s easy to make them do “machine tricks” like senseless, random behaviour. People, on the other hand, think too much and ironically this tends to make them behave more repetitively instead of more creatively.
So what are we good for? Sorting the good ones out from the bad ones, which is something that will probably always be beyond a machine’s capability, art being the sort of difficult to define thing that it is. Push buttons. Slide sliders. Interpret error messages… there’s plenty of work for us, brain-encumbered, creatures to do.
And write blog postings. Can a machine ever write a blog posting? No way! It’s us, who control the machines and direct their development that alone can do that. We’re the ones who do the thinking and comment on the processes and principles. Speak your mind and we’ll all be enriched and improved by it. The re-education camps are a thing of the past now. It’s safe to speak out, comrades. The Great Leader has said so. Let a thousand fractal art postings blossom!
—
Aw, get real! You’re comparing the guy to Chairman Mao!
Well. Categorically speaking, I think the analogy is pretty good. He forbids his subjects from speaking out and just as Mao encouraged everyone to criticise his Government and then jailed everyone who was naive enough to take his words literally, they all know well enough to keep their mouths shut, or at the very least, not to be the first to speak out.
I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Don’t you?
Hey, that’s another good one. “Mountain out of a molehill”. Yes, I’d like to see fractal art become a mountain instead of the molehill that it currently is!
Look. I haven’t got it on me right now, but I’m sure there’s something in the job description of a conscience that says you’re not allowed to use me as a straightman for your blog postings!
You mean, it’s unconscienable?
I don’t know what that means. And I don’t think you’ve spelled it right, either.
You’re a conscience and you don’t know what, “unconscienable” means?
Now you’re insulting me. You know, you’re the kind of guy who’d get sent for re-education even if you did keep silent.
Ha, ha, ha. Well then, I guess there’s no point in folks like me keeping quiet then, is there?
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | creativity | cheap shots | Jiminy Cricket | Fyre | Fyre 1.0.1 | Peter de Jong maps | Desert Roads | Mountain Lake
“For some folks I write a profound, richly articulated blog posting, and for others I just draw a picture.”
Here’s my latest commentary on the Fractal Universe Calendar: The Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar.
I made the cover for the Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar, so I’m especially proud of it, despite the lack of a cash bonus.
I think it’s a much better way for me to express my artistic thoughts about the calendar in a form which I feel is more illustrative.
What makes it especially exciting is the way in which it was made. In order to suggest the possibility of life on other planets in the fractal universe (and how it might have evolved) I’ve taken my share of the original images from the 2004 Fractal Universe Calendar and exposed them to damaging levels of graphical radiation that would normally be screened out by the Van Allen Belts of the fractal world.
Compare the 2004 Fractal Universe Calendar images to each of the Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar images and see if you can match the original to the “alternate”. Remember, my share have been run through several of my photoshop filter machines, so this a chance to use your forensic art skills and put flesh back on the bones (once you’ve put the bones back together).
Of course, in most cases you might need to do digital DNA testing to be sure, but each one of the months in the Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar started out as one of the 2004 Fractal Universe Calendar selections. That’s why it’s called it the Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar.
I know. Spectacular idea, isn’t it?
I hope this Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar will help all of Orbit Trap’s loyal readers come to a better understanding of my opinion about the artistic style of the Fractal Universe Calendar.
…And it’s free! Go ahead, save the images or download the whole thing and print out a copy for yourself. It’s my Christmas gift to all those fractal artists who’ve been dreaming of visiting other worlds in the fractal universe and might be encouraged by seeing a few moon rocks first.
—Tim Hodkinson
~/~
Kudos to the people who got off their backsides and did something, I say. Their detractors should be prepared to put their own time, effort and maybe money into a venture if they want something run differently, not just sit in a corner gnashing their teeth, spouting insulting untruths.
—WelshWench
Okay.
It’s a deal.
Damien M. Jones once defended his odd protocols (like mixing the judges with the judged) in the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest by saying “at least I’m doing something.” Well, now so am I.
I helped contribute to the Fractal Alternate Universe Calendar. In keeping with the traditions of the original Fractal Universe Calendar, the work is heavily weighted to showcase the work of the editors.
Like my “Energy Vampire” series, the works that served as a base for the images in the FAUC were initially found (in a previous life) in the 2004 FU Calendar. They’ve been digitally pulverized and pixelly reconstituted, though. And why should this surprise anyone? Isn’t this process just a variation of what most Ultra Fractal artists do? You know, pancake together layers of multiple parameter files mostly written by other people? No wonder so much of what appears on the original FUs look so similar.
Am I trying to make a big art statement here? Nope.
Am I taking a cut of the pie for this calendar? No way. It’s free.
Did I include all of my friends in the calendar? Absolutely not. Well — maybe one.
Terry
Rooms with a View
Blog with a View
~/~
Technorati Tags: fractals, fractal art, digital art, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, fractal universe calendar, fractal alternate universe calendar, satire, parody, intellectual cruelty, get off your backside
Back to fractals. I think I did something to the other machine. It’s leaking oil, or something. I smell something “electrical”, too.
My seven year-old daughter was recently invited to a birthday party. While we were looking around in the Barbie Doll aisle of a department store for a suitable present, me and my nine year-old son came across a misplaced item –TEST-TUBE ALIENS.
I can’t imagine who would put down a kit for “making” aliens in a test-tube and choose a Barbie doll instead because my daughter soon shared our interest in this hand-held Easy Bake oven for mutants. Some poor girl must have gotten a Barbie doll after her mother intervened and told her she’d probably have a lot more fun with a glamour pageant Barbie doll than the TEST-TUBE ALIENS that she picked up on the other aisle (where all the exciting, boy’s stuff is).
My interest in the TEST-TUBE ALIENS subsided somewhat after reading on the back that there were three or four different kinds, and they all had pre-detremined names — and predetermined shapes too, it seemed.
That’s no fun. I was expecting something more along the lines of a genetic experiment with such scrambled genes that the back of the box would only speculate on what they might look like and offer a guarantee that what crawled out of the test-tube wouldn’t threaten the human race with extinction. Ideally, it would also have come with a small handgun for terminating the experiment should things get out of hand… chains break, radio-activity be detected.
Guys like me won’t be designing children’s toys anytime soon.
Fortunately fractal programs are also test-tubes — digital ones — and have very few restrictions on them, which makes for hours and hours of frightening recreation. The results aren’t always pretty, but for the mad scientist in the family, they are rarely boring.
Now if you’d prefer to take a look at the Barbie doll aisle instead…
…
What? Did I go too far again?
Well, it does seem to be a popular calendar, and even if it isn’t, what’s wrong with people liking a type of artwork that’s different from yours?
Alright, sure, folks Christmas shopping in the mall might “like” that sort of thing, or at least buy it, which isn’t really the same thing as saying they think it’s great artwork… but it’s incredibly cliche isn’t it? It makes fractal art look like it’s nothing more than a children’s pin-wheel display. That’s not “arty” artwork.
“Arty artwork”? Sounds like some new animal species. I think you’ve become a test-tube experiment yourself, man. Maybe you should have a warning label.
Hey! You’re just my conscience. You’re not suppose to insult me. You’re supposed to act like Jiminy Cricket and give gentle advice and reminders, like when I’m totally wrong and steadily slipping into a muck hole of depravity.
Alright. Sorry — sorry for having a sense of humour! But back to your impolite comments about the Fractal Universe Calendar; I’ll try to be more Jiminy Cricket-like. I find the calendar’s choice of artwork to be a profound statement of time and very appropriate for what really is the current state of fractal art.
You’re joking again, right?
No, I’m serious. Every year, the same old stuff, reworked by a few people and slapped with a new label: 2005; 2006; 2007… In the words of Samuel Becket, I think, “Nothing ever happens”. You see? That really is the current state of fractal art: a handful of people doing the same old thing every year.
Hmmnn. That’s quite interesting. I didn’t think my conscience would ever come up with anything so cynical!
You’re having a bad influence on me. I’m going to ask to be reassigned.
technorati tags: fractal art | digital art | fractals | algorithmic art | cheap shots | Christmas shopping | Fractal Universe Calendar | Fractal Calendar | Jiminy Cricket | gone too far
Peter and Alice were still a long way off, but stopped to take another look through the telescope.
“I can see it!’ said Peter, “It has to be Santa’s home. But it looks strange.”
“Here, let me see” said Alice. “That’s barbed wire. It’s all over the place. He’s practically living in a fortress.”
“I guess it’s true, then” said Peter, “He really has changed. It’s Santa against the whole world. He’s lost all hope in humanity.”
“He hasn’t lost hope in anything –he’s gone ape-crazy! Get the radio out of your backpack and let’s call in the airstrike before one of his elves picks us off with a sniper rifle.”
“Can’t we at least try to talk to him? He’ll remember us from all those letters we sent him. Maybe all this is just for defense –to protect himself.”
“Sure, let’s talk to him. I suggest we start by ringing his doorbell with a cruise missile.”
-excerpted from: Santa’s Nuclear Gamble, (The All-New Christmas Fireside Companion, 2007)
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | picture-writing | illustration | Santa Claus | North Pole | Christmas
technorati tags: digital art | photoshop filters | vernissage | the Bomb | atomic field goal | plutonium pig-skin | pompei | radioactive Heinzman
Made with vernissage.8bf, a couple of Andrew’s filters, India Ink, some hue adjustment, and the cold November wind.
technorati tags: digital art | wind | picture-writing | illustration | half-poem | piano | music lessons | singing | photoshop filters | vernissage | high class art
Block-waving is all about lines. If there’s no lines, then you just end up with a pile of block-waved mush.
I was looking through an old book on my computer. It was a series of scanned, tiff images. I noticed the fine lines in the black and white engravings and instantly opened it up in ShowFoto and block-waved it. As is often the case in exploratory oil exploration or prospecting for gold, the results were disappointing; all it made was a whole lot of (uninteresting) tangled threads.
But I don’t expect these things to work out the first time, so I tried another black and white engraving. This one wasn’t a full page illustration, so it had some text included in the tiff image, above and below it. I didn’t bother to crop the image out and just went ahead and block-waved the whole page, illustration and text.
The full-page tiff images are quite large and I had to scroll down to look at the illustration. I did it so quickly in fact, that I didn’t pay any attention to the part that was just text. Again, the image was just a mess of smudgy bubbles and chopped up bits. But the caption just below it caught my eye:
Weird. Who would ever have thought of applying graphics filters to text? Not even me. But the block-waved text was more interesting than the image; like some sort of bizzare alien hieroglyphics. The words had turned into pictures.
This is what I find makes digital art, and fractal art as well, so interesting: the algorithms often have surprising, creative results and there’s always something new turning up just when you think you’ve seen it all.
Some clothing manufacturers in Asia incorporate Western writing, like English words, into the designs on their clothing because it looks nice and gives a foreign look to it. To a Westerner, however, these “decorative” words and phrases can be easily read. To the foreigner, these “foreign” decorations often appear as meaningless, senseless strings of words, chosen, it would seem, for their graphical appearance and nice looking shapes without any regard for what they actually say.
Which make you wonder. What would those Chinese characters used as design elements on Western clothing actually say when read by someone who speaks Chinese? In the West, as in the East, foreign alphabets are used as stylish, graphical emblems completely removed from their usual function of communication.
In that sense Spider Writings are abstract art in its purest sense: they represent or stand for nothing, except themselves. In this particular case, abstract writing. Words that are an exact picture of what they describe –which is themselves, actually.
The pictographs of our time
made by a computer, naturally
on the walls of digital caves
in the time of the 21st century savage
the Digicene Period
technorati tags: digital art | algorithmic art | block wave | ShowFoto | DigiKam | pictographs | hieroglyphics | spiders | 21st century savage
(from the journal of Columbus)
Whereas, Most Christian, High, Excellent, and Powerful Princes, King and Queen of Spain and of the Islands of the Sea…
…this present year 1492, after your Highnesses had terminated the war with the Moors reigning in Europe…
…having been brought to an end in the great city of Granada…
…I saw the royal banners of your Highnesses planted by force of arms upon the towers of the Alhambra…
…the Moorish king come out at the gate of the city and kiss the hands of your Highnesses…
…So after having expelled the Jews from your dominions… ordered me to proceed… to the said regions of India…
…and for that purpose
granted me great favors
and ennobled me
that thenceforth I might call myself Don
and be
High Admiral of the Sea
perpetual Viceroy and Governor
in all the islands and continents which I might discover
and acquire…
…and that this dignity should be inherited by my eldest son
and thus descend
from degree to degree
forever……Hereupon I left the city of Granada, on Saturday, the twelfth day of May, 1492, and proceeded to Palos, a seaport…
(from the journal of Columbus)
All the great stories start in Spain.
All of them sad, and all of them true.
technorati tags: digital art | Spain | Columbus | Granada | Alhambra | Moors | Jews | Christians | ship | block wave | tragedy
Although algorithms can be very complicated and creative (fractals, for instance), it’s natural, I think, for anyone to be amazed when the process of just clicking on effects (filters), produces anything of interest. Not so with the talented, dedicated human artist who uses a paint brush; for them we should have a much higher standard because they are free to think and choose and correct, on the fly, rather than blindly carrying out instructions which, by definition, is what algorithms are. We expect human thought and careful reflection to be the more successful strategy and, correspondingly, purely algorithmic, mechanical artwork has to overcome some resistance to it and thereby be twice as impressive to achieve equal standing.
If it were a matter of marks, then a machine’s C+ ought to be “corrected” to a rank equivalent to an artist’s A. Carried to it’s logical conclusion, artists would then have to work very hard to get their work noticed above that of a machine. Since machines can be very prolific in their output, it’s conceivable that when algorithmic art is given it’s proper, advanced standing, that human, home-cooked art will rarely be given much attention, at all –beyond the museum, that is, and special, nostalgic “tribute” events, specialty websites or obscure webrings.
But don’t fear, you humans! There’ll be plenty of honorable mentions given out so you won’t feel like losers when compared to the machines who soar high in the stratosphere of art, plucking gold from the heavens. Machines might be cold and insensitive, but they’re not stupid. Even a scratch-and-win coupon or promotional contest will say, “Sorry, try again”.
(Was that a cheap shot?)
(No, I wouldn’t say so. You’re just commenting on what’s going on around you: current events. “Free country” and all that.)
(But didn’t I take a perfectly innocent post about algorithmic art and turn it into a sudden back-handed slap at the contest? Won’t the peanut gallery get upset and start lambasting me with the same sort of short, sharp insults that made the whole thing begin to look like some political fight which completely overshadowed the real issue and left it conveniently ignored?)
(I don’t know. I think everyone’s forgotten about the contest, really. I don’t see anyone lambasting you in a gauntlet of angry comments or offsite “forum fallout”, this time. The herd doesn’t care and they aren’t interested in what it all means or doesn’t mean. They haven’t gotten over it, they’ve stepped over it.)
(Ha, ha, ha… Stepped over it! That’s great! Like dog dirt or garbage. I want to put that in my blog posting. Stepped over it! Nice one. But. Is that a cheap shot?)
technorati tags: digital art, algorithmic art, old masters, creativity, cheap shots|
These days, you could find yourself travelling half-way around the world in a few hours. And in the world of art: a couple clicks and you could find yourself in the Louvre. That’s the reality of our tiny, modern world: technology takes our little feet and straps jet engines on them.
Unfortunately, there are no licensing requirements for these turbine-powered, photoshop filters. The accidents will continue. He’s my latest attempt to land safely in the Louvre.
Technorati Tags: digital art rothko Louvre photoshop filiters flag day panic future pilot error
Learn it’s mysteries –if you dare!
Stop! Stop!
Your mind is in its icy grip!
Run, you fool!
The Stone of Mystery will DESTROY YOU!!!
Your puny brain can not survive its thunderous torrent of KNOWLEDGE!!!
(sung to the tune of, “Here Comes Santa Claus”)
Could this be the innocent precursor of… The Stone of Mystery?
I started with an old record cover I found at mentomusic.com; India Inked it, double resized it and wheeled it into the ever promising, and soon to be famous, block wave filter from digiKam’s showFoto. Then I cropped out a piece of it that looked great at the time, but which I have since deleted. This was then distorted several ways to produce something that looked like a Mayan temple painted pink and sitting in a snowstorm, which I then deliberately saved as a black and white, two-color file, for some reason.
Upon noticing the fine, intricate lines it had just then acquired, I returned to the block wave filter (the roulette wheel of filters). It was double resized again and finally, shackled to the table, sent back up and reanimated with the filter set on high (77 instead of 25).
Voila. The tricks of Clickery made plain. It looks easy, so easy, until you learn the torturous route I travelled to make it.
But, I am a hero, and thus, it is my lot to wrestle with the heroic. And now, unable to endure the comfortable ease of victory and it’s resulting decadent rewards, I struggle onwards, always onwards, to reveal…
Smaller.
Shallower.
Cheaper to produce.
But, featuring previously unreleased scenes, that didn’t make the final cut, the first time, because the movie going public were not ready for them.
Has a much better soundtrack, too.
-with thanks to Universal Pictures Inc., 1957
Technorati Tags: digital art stone of mystery ancient secrets revealed photoshop filters digiKam showFoto the hero
I deleted lycium’s (Thomas Ludwig’s) original comment to my posting about Fractal Art isn’t Rocket Science. But his expansion on the theme expressed in his original Orbit Trap comment grew to become an interesting work of art and well worth reading. It was posted in the fractalforums.com site, where I recently found it. It’s not exactly a “positive” review, but for someone like me, any attention is exciting.
A word about criticism. I once read about a sage who adopted the habit of sending all his new students off to listen to his critics. He defended this somewhat unusual teaching practice by saying that until his students had refuted the claims of his critics, he could not begin to teach them anything. I hope you will take lycium seriously and consider the possibility that what he says about me could quite very well be the truth.
Copied verbatim from fractalforums.com. The boxed, indented text is the quoted references from my posting to which lycium responds. His responses are the regular text which follows:
lycium’s review begins here…
just when i thought orbit trap couldn’t get any worse… tim posts this gem: http://orbittrap.blogspot.com/2007/09/fractal-art-isnt-rocket-science.html
i want to take a little time to reply here in detail, where more programmers can see what this man thinks of us.
Quote from: Tim
Would it help me if I had such a solid math and programming background as these super stars did? It doesn’t seem to be helping them out too much.
let the slandering begin…
now honestly, how can someone with such earth-shatteringly poor “artworks” (which bear essentially no fractal traits at all, ignoring the 16 colour lsd-inspired palette) even think to question the works of others, let alone the forerunners of our field?! such collosal arrogance is SO rare, even among arrogant people.
Quote from: Tim
Moving on. What confuses things is that the “tool-makers” can also perform the role of “tool-users”. But the skills and abilities that lead to good tool making are irrelevant when it comes to using those tools to make art.
as if he would know; as if he has the faintest inkling as to what sort of skills and abilities it takes to design a vast fractal parameter space, or a flexible colouring algorithm, or a simple control system and all the other things necessary to hide the reality of fractal generation.
Quote from: Tim
They might as well be two different people because when the “scientist” takes up the tool he made, he begins the same process of discovery as everyone else who takes up that tool.
inhuman ignorance meants superhuman ego. notice how he puts scientist in quotes (!!).
Quote from: Tim
“Crafting nunchuks vs. swinging them like Bruce Lee.”
…
Quote from: Tim
Sure, the tool maker immediately knows how to operate the tool,
allow me to inline a quote from just sentences earlier: They might as well be two different people because when the “scientist” takes up the tool he made, he begins the same process of discovery as everyone else who takes up that tool.
hmm.
… and here is the tour de force:
Quote from: Tim
Actually the tool maker may have a handicap: he may think he has an edge over the one who is merely a tool-user and come to think his tool-making experience gives extra weight and an enhanced quality to his artwork.
really, this one needs no comment.
Quote from: Tim
Artistic activities, on the other hand, have psychological challenges (objectively evaluating your work; creative inspiration) that the quantitative sciences have less of.
too bad he has neither: (selected from his many “cutting edge” block wave filtered images; there are plenty of these littered about the blog)
tim is just as poor a spokesperson for the social sciences as he is for the fractal community (quoted from http://orbittrap.blogspot.com/2007/09/orbit-traps-change-of-format.html): We invited the Fractal Community to speak for themselves and they didn’t want to. We spoke for them and they told us to shut up.
Quote from: Tim
Furthermore, the precision and absoluteness of the quantitative sciences creates a mindset or approach to art that I think can be a stumbling block in the evolving, shifting, combinant and recombinant, alchemical world of art.
nevermind “different perspective” or “broader view”, it’s a stumbling block to have a clue how the software you’re using works. yup.
Quote from: Tim
But Fractal Art is Art; it’s got its own set of skills and talents, which in the same way, also count for nothing when applied to the world of mathematics.
no, you utterly fail at logic. having a grasp of basic maths DOES help with making fractal art. you just wouldn’t know because you don’t have it, so stop being so damn presumptuous and cocky.
…end of lycium’s review
Technorati Tags: fractal art rocket science criticism digital art
Technorati Tags: timbuktu block wave filter photoshop filters digital art fractal art join the mirage
