I’ve been reading a book about various “-isms” in the art world. Eagerly wanting to follow in the footsteps of those great, outspoken artists of the past and to contribute something new and personal to the exciting pursuit of labels and the ever teetering tower of human achievements, I propose… Clickism.

First rule is: Mouse clicks only.

Second rule is: Start with any kind of image you like, but when you get finished the result should bear no resemblance to the original and in fact, can only be connected to it, with some doubt and lingering uncertainty, by careful DNA testing.

Third rule is: One level of undo, only. Clickism is forward thinking and reflects the relentless progress of technology which refuses to admit mistakes but rather sees them as a challenge and attempts to correct them with more clicking.

Fourth rule is: Stay lazy. Sure you can open your image up in a graphics program and start masking and layering and all that sort of artist stuff, but “painting” is not clicking. Better yet, use software that won’t allow you to use advanced graphical techniques, with the sole, and very important exception of….

Fifth rule is: Photoshop Filters. Freakier the better. It doesn’t matter if they don’t add anything of value to the image –yet, it just makes for more excitement, and the challenge I mentioned in the Third rule, of trying to make something awesome out of something apparently hopeless and growing increasingly dark and shapeless.

the horror, the horror …of Clickism

Sixth rule is: If you can remember where you came from, then you haven’t gone far enough. Apply several crazy filter effects just to get warmed up, and then let ‘er rip! Pretend you’re being stalked or followed by a crazy man or some insane wild animal infected with rabies or a strange new disease introduced by aliens crash landing their spaceship in a remote and forested region and you’ve got to lose them by choosing a series of completely unpredictable and incoherent choices. If the crazy man or the animal catches up, let them help out. Always have a clear idea of where you’re going and don’t go there.

Seventh rule is: More filters. That which does not crash your program will make you stronger. Don’t ask “why?”, instead ask, “what if?”. Look for ones that are “helpful” to the team not necessarily “useful” on their own. Distortions or anything that makes simple but random shapes are always useful, eventually. You never know what will be the final filter that turns something progressively awful into the Mona Lisa of Clickism.

Eighth rule is: The rules are never finished. Ask yourself, “What could I do that I haven’t done?” “What am I not thinking of?”. When you think you’ve reached the end and can’t make anything that even looks half good, then you’re just tired. Get some rest or do something else. Pretty soon you’ll be back and ready to set sail like Sindbad on a new voyage filled with more of the surprises and mysteries of Clickism.

Technorati Tags: clickism art movements isms digital art photoshop filters hit it with a hammer

Technorati Tags: vernissage digital art poetry photoshop filters apartment building suburban decay

somewhere
in the world
there is a cave

and the eye that looks from it
sees the star of arabia

years have passed
the eye, unblinking
looks from it

pale, dark, written with red
sees the star of arabia

the wind blows
the sand is rewritten
the eye, unblinking

there is a cave
in the world
pale, dark, written with red

somewhere
and the eye that looks from it

Technorati Tags: fractal art digital art poetry with crutches arabia cave dervish

Here’s another theory in the rough; something that I think is relevant to Fractal Art, and probably all artforms: There are “Artists” and there are “Craftsmen”.

An artist is… I don’t know what an artist is, exactly. They make “Art”. What is art? It’s more of a concept, somewhat subjective in nature, but not just anything at all. When we look through an art book, something general, like a history of art, then we know what art is. You can feel it, or sense it, maybe not while viewing every item, but I think we all sense something when viewing art that we don’t sense when we’re looking at an image that is merely nice to look at or colorful.

Nice to look at. That’s the other kind of work. People who make works that are only “nice-looking” are what I would call craftsmen. This isn’t supposed to be an insult; it’s just describing what takes place, describing the audience’s experience, or at least mine. Good craftsmanship takes talent, experience and dedication –technical ability. Think of “well-crafted furniture” as opposed to sculpture. They both have qualities of beauty but one of the items is the work of a craftsman and the other is the work of an artist.

Amsterdam Canal

It takes a great craftsman to produce a good copy of an artist’s work. But it takes an artist to design the original. There are probably artists with great ideas that never bring them to fruition because they lack the skills of the craftsman necessary to do that. Artists work with ideas; craftsmen work with media (paint, clay, computer code, tools).

Artists can also be craftsmen and vice versa. In fact, you could say that someone acts as an artist when they’re creating art and as a craftsman when they’re “crafting” something (manifesting the idea).

When something looks really ugly but captures our attention and causes us to feel something and think “deeply” about it, that, I think, is art and nothing more than art. When something looks really “cool” and causes us to feel good or happy, like sunshine, trees and a handful of balloons kind of happy, that’s craftmanship. Eyecandy is probably a better word; sweet, but only satisfying in a shallow, temporary way.

So you’ve got eyecandy at one extreme and at the other, stuff that may lack any sort of visual “attraction” yet is captivating and engaging to the mind in a deep, exhilarating way. Of course, art can be as colorful and sweet as a sugary piece of eyecandy. The essence of art being, I suppose, that it’s beautiful without “looking” good. Or rather, it’s beauty is of an inner kind, which stimulates the mind and it’s appearance is irrelevant.

You could say, I suppose, that there are two kinds of visual beauty: eyecandy, and art; surface and substance. Which is better? or more important? Well, they’re different, aren’t they? Like the proverbial apples and oranges, or like candy and “food”. We want them both, I think. Although I suspect we’d put greater importance on art, the nutritious stuff, because it’s serious and deep, but what I think most people prefer is a combination, some balanced amount of both.

Alright. How “balanced” is Fractal Art? Is it all just craftsmen?. Can an internet search bring up nothing except gallery upon gallery filled with superbly crafted toys for our little eyes and tiny minds to play with, to get bored with, grabbing up another, every few seconds, then going on to the the next brightly coloured Disney-thing in the toybox/website until we’re told it’s time to brush our teeth and go to bed?

The real challenge I see for Fractal Art is, how do you make the deep, thought-provoking, serious kind of art with something like fractals that are generally abstract and lack most of the rich meaning and symbolism that realistic imagery can contain. In other words, how does one move beyond the mere “cool graphics” and “awesome” eyecanding to anything else at all?

My strategy is to focus on the creativity of the algorithms and give the machine a free rein. (Let the computer become your brilliant assistant and steal everything it makes.) This means lots of experimentation, high volume, and picking out the stuff that looks good (if there is any). Of course, I like that sort of thing. It’s fun to play with parameters and anything random.

The other strategy I can see is much more traditional and doesn’t appeal to me at all. You use the fractal machine to produce images that you then assemble (layer) and tweak (mask, I think) and do other stuff, until the artist has actually created a piece of artwork pretty well by hand. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s the normal way to make art, or was, I suppose, but surprisingly it tends to turn people into craftsmen rather than artists which is quite the opposite of what you’d expect, isn’t it? You would think that human intervention –human expression– would be the essence of art, and the raw output of a machine, lacking any sort of intelligence or intent, ought to be limp and lifeless and artless (no pun intended).

It doesn’t have to be, but it’s been my experience that where you find the unexpected, you are more likely to find art. A very creative mind can produce an unexpected piece of fractal art through layering and masking, but it’s hard, and I might add, getting harder everyday. It requires craftsmanship of the highest order.

Technorati Tags: fractal art digital art amsterdam art theory craftsman algorithmic art

The Fractal Art world is an odd place. The strange combination of technical people (mathematicians, engineers, programmers) and artsy, creative people is curious and could almost be the setting for a mystery novel. My wife once told someone at work about my fractal hobby and said they were really impressed after visiting my website that I knew so much about chaos theory and fractal math. Hmmn… I wondered, why would they think I knew anything about math?

Recently, while looking into things, I came across an interesting association of attributes: science credentials and Fractal Art. I “hmmn-ed” again. What’s all this science stuff got to do with making fractal art? 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.

The Rocket Scientists are the sword-makers of our artform. They adapt new fractal formulas and all that “chaos stuff”, molding it into forms that are practical and useful in our hands. All our tools come from them, and the tools of the future will come from them also, not from people like me.

Blah, blah, blah… I could go on. I propose a toast, in honor of all the…

Houston, I have a problem

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. 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.

Building the racing car vs. driving the racing car. Designing the airplane vs. piloting the airplane. Crafting nunchuks vs. swinging them like Bruce Lee. Making a guitar vs. playing that guitar.

Sure, the tool maker immediately knows how to operate the tool, and may know an awful lot about operating that tool, but being creative requires more skill than just being able to use the tools. 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. Artistic activities, on the other hand, have psychological challenges (objectively evaluating your work; creative inspiration) that the quantitative sciences have less of. 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.

Fractal math is challenging and requires math skills that one can’t acquire quickly (I’m guessing). Programming is another thing that takes dedication and work to be able to do well, especially when complex operations have to be presented via an interface that is easy to use. 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.

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Digital Art Rocket Science Fractals Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest

Orbit Trap has abandoned the goal of becoming a group fractal blog due to lack of interest. Continuing to present Orbit Trap as a group blog is confusing to readers and misrepresents it’s actual content.

Despite the very serious attempt to build for the fractal community a venue to express themselves, the reaction has been primarily one of disinterest. Furthermore, when new ideas — particularly of a critical nature — have been expressed, the environment for writers has become one which silences them rather than supports them.

There are many opportunities for the status quo to express themselves, but Orbit Trap has always wanted to give voice to that which is new and different. We have decided to focus entirely on themes of a critical and innovative nature exclusively. Unfortunately, after a year of invitations and searching we haven’t found anyone else who shares this interest.

These changes are a logical step forward and would probably have been our original plan if it wasn’t for the fact that we really did expect others to join in our project of criticism and new ideas.

I guess the whole thing can best be summed up this way:

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.

I apologize for not keeping a closer eye on the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2006. If I had, these comments of mine wouldn’t have come a whole year late, but it’s just recently that I was able to view the entire exhibition (PDF Catalog here) which includes the works by the judges which wasn’t displayed on the contest site, which is where most of the online attention has been focused. The artist’s notes that are displayed with the exhibition artwork make for interesting reading, for those of us who have a critical disposition. They alone, ought to raise a few eyebrows and cause some to blush.

Yes, it’s embarrassing for me to say I’m a fractal artist and think that I am in some, even very remote way, part of what this contest claims to represent. I’m a naturally trusting sort of person, as I suspect most fractal artists are. I just naturally assumed that such a prodigious-sounding event as The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, would be good for the whole genre even if it didn’t cater to my own particular artistic tastes and methods. If the Ultra Fractalists wanted to lead a parade down main street then surely I could take some pride in it also, even if I wasn’t part of it?

A few words about criticism I think are needed here, since criticism seems to be something new to the Fractal Art world. I should add that the word, “reasonable”, which I use often, can be defined as: “Not excessive or immoderate; within due limits; proper; as, a reasonable demand, amount, price.” [1913 Webster] I mention this because I’ve met a lot of people who incorrectly think, “reasonable”, means, “Anything I can think of”.

Some of my thoughts:

-it is reasonable for the selection panel of a public contest, who are performing the role of critics themselves, to receive criticism regarding their selections

-when all of the submissions for a contest are posted in a single place on the internet, it is reasonable for other people to form opinions regarding the judges’ choices since they are now in a position to judge for themselves

-fair and impartial judging, or at the very least, the reasonable attempt to provide it, is a reasonable expectation when submitting work to any contest

-it is reasonable for a publicly held contest to receive publicity which includes public criticism

The connections that the judges have with each other, the contest organizers, and the artists submitting work to the contest speaks for itself regarding the level of impartiality that other artists can expect from this contest. I’ll let readers connect the dots themselves because they’re so close together it hardly needs to be done for them. But one comment anyhow: the clear association that some of the judges have with the selected works (contest works) in the form of either software, formulas or other algorithms used to create them, make an impartial judgement of these works appear extremely unlikely. I’m aware of these connections because a number of the judges are noted for their contribution, by name, right in the notes that accompany the selected artwork!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, at least one of the judges’ own works is of such doubtful artistic merit, and so out of place with all the rest of the contest winners, that the only reasonable explanation that I can see for it’s inclusion in the exhibit, is the privilege that all the judges have been given to self-select one of their own works for the exhibit. Compare it with the contest entries and ask yourself, “Would that have been selected if it was subjected to the same selection process as all the rest?”

Which raises another point: Why, after an entire year has passed and a second contest with almost identical rules (some are verbatim) has been concluded, have so few people said anything about this insult to Fractal Art? Fractal Art as a genre, can hardly be taken seriously or receive any respect if it’s most prominent and visible members operate public contests with little regard for fairness or principle. This makes Fractal Art look amateurish. And if you don’t have a problem with that, then you’re an amateur too.

It reminds me of an incident that occurred over at Renderosity. Groups of friends in the fractal “community” routinely voted for each others’ work as a team in order to boost their ratings and hopefully make it into the Top 20. The way it worked is they posted a comment under each of their friend’s work and marked it with a “V” to indicate they’d voted for it so their friends would do the same for them.

Well, in addition to distorting the results of the Top 20, a selection of work whose intended purpose was to showcase the better Fractal works at Renderosity (which usually get ignored because they’re buried in the enormous quantity of work that gets posted there), they went on to give the whole community a bad name by playing the same game in the Terragen Community.

A few of these fractal “artists” decided to start posting their Terragen images in the Terragen Community on Renderosity and then do the same “team-voting” thing. The Terragen folks got rather upset when their Top 20 started to fill up with second-rate works by a small group of newcomers, and started asking where these folks were coming from and what was going on with the voting. I guess the Terragen folks aren’t afraid to speak up and do some investigating when they see things are not quite right.

I think Fractal Art’s reputation and development ought to be just as important as getting in the public spotlight and promoting your own personal artwork. I think “Art” is more important than individual “artists”. In addition to being a maker of fractal art I’m also a viewer and fan of it. I like fractal art. I like to see new talent encouraged and new styles given the attention they deserve when they have artistic merit — that’s how an artform develops and becomes refined. Otherwise, it becomes the domain of a few oldtimers who’d rather replicate themselves and their tired styles while any new ideas or fresh talent that arises is sidelined to smoulder away in obscurity.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Art Criticism Renderosity Fractal Art Judging Art

Before I start to comment on this year’s Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, I should tell you something: I don’t like contests. I think they trivialize art by turning it into a sports competition. The only redeeming features these self-inflicted events have is they create a compilation of artwork whose average level of quality is usually higher than normal, and they also allow those selections to gain more attention than they would otherwise have had, particulary for Fractal Art which is a genre that is primarily online and as a result, scattered far and wide all over the internet. Contests also cause people to reflect on art in a thoughtful, critical way, which usually leads to its development and refinement.

It’s this critical influence, intended or not, that contests have that prompts me to respond to them. I don’t think contests like this change the public’s image of Fractal Art as much as they change the image that Fractal artists have of it — particularly ones who take their direction from what they think is popular or presented as “the best” (like in a contest). Contests establish standards and make statements about art, even if the judges and organizers don’t want them to. Contests put artwork on trial and become a very strong, and very public type of artistic criticism. Contests promote values by selecting from the submissions artwork which best exemplifies the characteristics that the judges think are best. Contests are anything but neutral or non-judgemental and need to be carefully examined so that the values they suggest or imply can be given more deliberate and deeper consideration. Contests are criticism of the sharpest sort.

First off, it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone who reads the rules that the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest is ultimately going to result in an exhibition made up of highly polished work made in Ultra Fractal. It’s there. It may not be intentional, but if you ask the question, “Why?” (and you should always ask that), the answer is plain: those are the attributes that they think makes good Fractal Art.

The required image sizes alone immediately narrow down the possibilities. Check out the names of the judges and see the sort of work they produce online and you’ll get an even clearer view of where this contest is leading. Check out last year’s results. That’s the sort of artwork this contest is all about and was directed, by design, to be. Unless the rules were made by accident, or a committee, which is often a special type of accident.

It all about Ultra Fractal. But that’s Okay, in my opinion. Sure, it might be a little dull, at least for people like me, but I don’t blame the Ultra Fractalists, or any other group, for cultivating and promoting their own style of Fractal Art. Perhaps Ultra Fractal really is a distinct, unique genre, or sub-genre, and should be presented separately. Of course it’s not exactly labelled, The Benoit Mandelbrot Ultra Fractal Art Contest. But that’s Okay too, it doesn’t have to be in the title. Many events have generic names and don’t necessarily represent everything in their field. The World Series, for example.

If you read carefully you’ll also realize that the “exhibit” is not the same as the contest results. The “exhibit” is made up of two groups of work: the contest winners and the judges own, self-selected work that is not judged, but is included with the contest winners for reasons I still can’t understand, although it may have been a half-baked idea — the first year. Why have a “contest” and then add unjudged work to it? Why is it considered a conflict of interest for the judges to submit their own work to the selection committee, but not when they select it themselves and have it automatically included in the exhibit? (Rules 2.1) Why not simply have the judges submit their work like everyone else, but abstain from voting on it? Or just not submit anything at all? Of course that last one is easy to answer: the exhibit won’t be the best of Ultra Fractal if you exclude the best Ultra Fractal artists. It’s also a “plum” given out to the judges to reward them for being involved. Apparently it happens in other contests, although the judges’ (unjudged) work is then presented separately to distinguish it from the contest.

Why do that? Why separate such work from the contest? As I mentioned, contests set standards and make statements about what is good (selected) and what isn’t (unselected). Conflicts of interest regarding selection undermines that standard and in the extreme case, invalidates it on the grounds that motives other than artistic quality influenced the selections. Pretty simple reasoning, don’t you think?

This is the achilles heel of the contest and it ought to be eliminated because it’s insulting to the judges as ultimately it makes them look like they’re cheating and using the exhibit to present their own artwork under the guise of having received critical acclaim (ie. selected by the judges -more than one) when in fact it only reflects their personal choice (one judge). They’re all respected fractal artists. They don’t need this private, back door to the exhibit. Their work is more than capable of standing on its own merits. Of course, you never can tell what the final result of any committee’s selection will be. There’s a gambling factor to contests that one always has to keep in mind, just like job interviews or academic marks or jury trials.

So what’s the bottom line in all this? It’s advertised as a Fractal Art contest but it’s really an Ultra Fractal Art contest. There’s no reason to apologize for this, as I’ve said. In my opinion people ought to read the rules closer, check out the judges and look at last year’s winners and they’ll realize that soon enough. Will the world come away thinking that Ultra Fractal is all there is to fractal art and the rest of us don’t count? Well, it’s an offline exhibition, and even though Madrid is a big city and everything (Barcelona might have been better), and all of this is part of an international gathering (of math people), I don’t think it even represents anything near the audience that visits my own personal website in the course of a single year, despite whatever long line-up there may have been. Oh, I’m forgetting, Dr. Mandelbrot. Sorry, but with all due respect to our dear mathematical genius and theoretical founder, he’s just a celebrity endorsement (but definitely the best, I might add). To put it simply: offline art doesn’t count for much anymore. Not even the Louvre can compete with the internet. Times have changed.

Anyhow, I’m sure we’ll be seeing a Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2008. Most artists love contests and art galleries, even if they never win one or see their art displayed there. I believe there were many more submissions this time than last year, which is a clear sign of growing interest — and influence.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Contest Digital Art Art Criticism Madrid Art Contests Fractal Art

If you’ve ever driven on a highway in a snowstorm you probably know that the best way to stay on the road is to drive with one wheel just off the edge of it. I think that’s a good technique when it comes to creative activities: stay half off the road. It’s slower, but ironically, you never end up going off the road completely.

While trying to find the outer creative edge of the Block Wave filter from showFoto, I discovered a rather interesting effect that mimics the natural effect of trying to scratch something to pieces. Not everyone may enjoy this pulverized effect, and I had my doubts too, but it gives a delightfully decayed and overgrown feel to imagery that is all too often polished and recognizable.

There’s such creative potential in distortion filters once you’ve discovered where the road ends and where the ditch starts.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: digital art fractal art distortion filter showFoto wipe out

Browsing fractal sites usually leaves me with a feeling best described by the fancy term, “Ennui“. There just isn’t much originality. I don’t know why. Maybe most fractal artists makes fractal art for reasons other than creative expression or any of the usual motives that lead people to produce artwork. There’s a few notable exceptions, maybe, I guess.

Jock Cooper is one. Let’s just jump to his fractal animations –his latest stuff, I suspect. I discovered these following a link in the comments section of the recent Orbit Trap post, Video Links. Personally recommended links are still the only reliable way to find great things on the internet, especially where art is concerned.

2266 has the best piece of fractal music I’ve ever heard. Fractal music is a very difficult artform, probably because music is more complex than visual art and for that reason doesn’t provide much potential for algorithmic (mechanical) creativity. Music is just different. But as I watched this fractal video the first time (I’ve seen it almost 20 times, now) I just assumed I was listening to something by Erik Satie which Jock had used for background music. It wasn’t until I noticed the ” * with fractal music ” written under some of the thumbnails, that I realized, that Jock had made the music too, and not just the fractal animation.

Anyhow, you can all judge for yourself, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s the Mona Lisa of fractal music, so far, at least. Speaking of Da Vinci, the next best thing on Jock’s site is his machines, his Mechanical Gallery.

I’ve known about these for a while. I suppose they’re not for everyone, but what is? Who would ever have thought the insides of electronic equipment could become an artform? This is very unique, almost surreal, like some sort of alien technology. Many look like photographs, that’s how well the 3D effect has been done. Since the sign says there are 271 images, and I know some of you are pressed for time, I will direct you to some of the Mechanical Gallery’s highlights:

Jock’s got a unique style and that’s something you don’t see much in the Fractal Art world where there’s just so much of, so much of…. Here’s a few examples of this from his Miscellaneous Gallery:

In keeping with his “Renaissance Man”, “Jock of all trades” style (that’s awful, isn’t it?), Jock has a very intriguing, Zoomable Gallery that recreates the awesome depth to fractals that one usually experiences only when using a fractal generator (or when skydiving). These zoomable images display the rich, elegant, spiral-laden artwork that Jock has raised to high level in his Traditional Gallery. Quite a wide range of fractal artwork and styles for a single artist to produce.

As is the case in all high-class galleries and high-class guided tours, we finish off at the Gift Shop. For a mere $20 you can get Fractal Recursions, “the long-awaited collection of Jock Cooper’s fractal animations. Twenty exquisite segments representing over five years of design and rendering have been compiled for your viewing pleasure. The animations you are about to enjoy are the frame by frame calculations of math equations strung together in a digital format to produce unearthly beauty.” At Customflix or Amazon. Jock’s website says that the DVD contains high-resolution versions of the animations (720×480) and also some of his other work. Don’t wait until Christmas, you’ll be sorry.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Fractal Animation Digital Art Fractal Music Jock Cooper Mona Lisa Renaissance Man

It’s always amazed me how careful and disciplined insects can be. One of the many wonders I saw when visiting the tropical Gulf coast of Mexico were leaf-cutter ants. Up here in Canada (Toronto), ants don’t do much except crawl around and occasionally make an anthill. Leaf cutters make Canadian ants look primitive.

Although leaf-cutters can probably be a problem when they decide to remove all the leaves off a tree you’d like to keep, they can be quite inspiring when you consider how tiny they are, and what enormous achievements they can make just by being cooperative. The Block Wave distortion filter from showFoto and the digiKam project, makes me feel I’ve harnessed a colony of digital ants to dig and chew old images into astounding new things.

This image resized to 600×800 and zapped with Block Wave, default settings, gets the above image

Perhaps, “harnessed” is not the right word. Unleashed is a more accurate one. The ants march to the beat of their own drum, their own set of instructions, which I rarely understand, but gradually learn to work with.

And to appreciate. Nothing is more pleasant than to be able to just watch insects work away without the fear that they might be threatening you. Well, actually, I suppose there is something more pleasant than that: it’s the expectation that they’re working for you, creating something of such curious appearance, that you could never even begin to imagine, much less produce on your own.

I think the label “artist” is an offense to the great machineries that make these things. These block-wave ant-drawings are more than the results of human effort. I think of it as a digital beekeeping. There’s the hive, and here’s the honey. I slide a blank sheet of digital paper into the hive, and the bees do their thing. Later, I take it out and either start all over again or save it, as is. I don’t change a thing. How can you sweeten honey?

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: leaf cutter ants bee keeping digital art fractal art 6th Dimension lazy man walking

Made from the original, below, using Block Wave with default settings on a resized (enlarged) version

I wonder how many of us, capable of doing so many things, would be reduced to only one single, useful, function if the people we live or work with could custom configure us? That’s the way I’ve come to look at the digital camera program, showFoto. Sure, it’s probably useful for handling digital photos (I think that’s where the name comes from) but it’s distortion filter, “Block Wave”, is all I think of when I use the program.

Actually, I guess it’s not really a feature of showFoto but the digiKam filter plugin that installs the incredible block wave filter. These are both Linux programs, but I don’t think it matters much since these are fairly plain and generic functions that can be found on any operating system. Although I’m not a programmer or math person, I suspect the block wave filter I’ve used, while not as common as the circular wave, implements algorithms that are relatively simple and have been in use for some time.

That’s where I, the digital coach comes in; paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, and directing the efforts of the passed-over, and laughed-at, filter effect and guiding it onward to Olympic, NBA, and World Cup glory. Another digital Cinderella story.

Original, India Inked fractal from Inkblot Kaos

A few notes:
-I don’t know why anyone would ever want to apply this filter to a digital photo, not even me, but that’s where I found it.

-The image needs to have some fine texture or outlining in it (such as the patterns produced by the India Ink photoshop plugin) in order to produce freaky details, otherwise it just makes globby stuff, which is what most distortions usually do.

-a simple recipe is this: take any image, apply the India Ink plugin (unless it already has clearly defined details), then let ‘er rip!(apply filter).

Block Waved in showFoto using default settings

It’s the most creative graphics filter I have ever found; good example of what I like to call “click-art”, simple transforming effects. Better than multicrystal.8bf or uscomic.8bf (and that’s saying a lot). Most distortions filters produce predictable, distorted (ie. ugly) effects, but the effect of this one can be quite creative, although it’s probably a very simple, mechanical process. The “reaction”, or combined effect of the image and the filter, produces something neither of them can really take credit for. (The “Dick and Perry” effect.)

“Block Wave” doesn’t really describe the effect very well, although it may be a good description of its function. Here are some better labels I hope the developers will consider for the next update:

Melting Fog-Cloud Bejeweller

Martian Hieroglyphic Dither

Mayan Secret Script Revealer

Onion Dome Crystal Freeze Pillarizer

Amoeboid Diode Circuit-Board Generator

Alphabet Dissolving Ray

Secret Snail Machine

Alien Fingerprint Spray

Micro-Circuit City Shaper

Martian Undersea Resort Builder

Bubble Pillar Ghost Cloud

Aztec Schematic

Ant World

Liquid Light/Dripping Mind

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: showFoto 0.5.0 digiKam digital art fractal art block wave filters algorithmic art

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description.

It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation.

The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland.

All our Concord waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike.

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond.

…I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown.

We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever.

Tim Hodkinson (just the pictures)

Technorati Tags: Walden Thoreau Phoenix fractal fractal art digital art

As Orbit Trap rolls towards its first anniversary, Tim and I are looking back — and also looking forward.

Initially, we used a by-invitation-only process for selecting contributors to Orbit Trap. We have decided to change that policy in order to hopefully allow broader and more vigorous participation in the blog.

To this end, we are putting out an open call for new contributors.

If you would like to write for Orbit Trap, please contact us at the blog’s email address: orbittrap(AT)ambaka.com (replace the (AT) with @). We ask that you send us (or provide a link to) something you have written on a fractal-related topic. Tim and I will screen and select new OT contributors from among those who contact us and provide a writing sample.

We stress that we are looking for good writers. Orbit Trap is a blog – not a gallery or an art community or a discussion forum. Contributors are free to post art and links, but the emphasis of what appears on Orbit Trap is specifically geared to writing about subjects tied to fractals or fractal art. Review the archives to get a sense of the range of themes and issues. Better yet, bring us something new and inventive to discuss.

Orbit Trap has no one guiding ideology. We welcome diversity of opinions. Applicants should be aware, though, that Orbit Trap is an open, public forum. Our contributors are always free to challenge each other. We also allow anyone with a registered Blogger account to comment on all posts. If you are reluctant to have your opinions confronted and possibly disputed, you should think twice before asking to be a contributor.

Why do we have openings for new contributors? Tim and I have taken the initiative to remove all current contributors who have not posted in the last six months. We figure if you have had nothing to say in the last half a year, we assume you are probably not interested in being an active participant. Moreover, if you are a contributor who, for whatever reason, has made a this-is-my-last-post post, we assume you longer wish to write for this blog. If we are wrong in our assumptions, and if you were dropped but still wish to take part in Orbit Trap, you are welcome to apply for contributor status again through the screening process described above.

If you’d like to join us, we look forward to both hearing from you and reading you.

Tim and Terry
orbittrap(AT)ambaka.com

Technorati Tags: Fractal Art Contributors wanted Writing Group Blogging Submissions

“So radically innovative are Ultra Fractal’s capabilities that they have literally redefined fractal art since the program’s debut.”
(From Ultrafractal.com)

It’s complicated. Believe me, it took me a few years to come to such a radical and harsh conclusion. I mean, what could be bad about a program that has been used to create fractal artwork with such popular and even commercial appeal? Is it simply bitterness, resentment, sour grapes, malice or some other petty feelings that have caused me to speak against this fractal colossus? Aren’t those the usual motives we’ve come to expect when we see someone “taking a swipe” at someone else’s favorite program?

Like everyone else, I am from time to time swayed by the deceptive, emotional impulses which usually leads to ugly behaviour. I’ve taken the time to consider the possibility that I’m being influenced by the selfish, petty things that usually initiate and maintain most discussions in the fractal world. For the record, I don’t think I have any personal bias against UF or anyone who uses it… but I expect most people will interpret that differently. Where you have art, you have opinions about art.

Anyhow, I think I’ve discovered the single most important issue in fractal art today: UF has smothered fractal art.

UF has produced some very graphically pleasing and professional looking artwork. It’s understandable that because of this many feel it belongs at the head of the fractal art parade, because that sort of artwork has a much wider, though shallower, appeal. It’s your best bet for attracting people’s attention and creating a favorable impression with them for fractal art. UF definitely has come to occupy a special place in the fractal art world, a place of preeminence and popularity that has fundamentally changed the environment around it. Not unlike the effect that Walmart’s success has had on the retailing industry in North America.

Strictly speaking, it’s not the program. It’s not the people who use the program, either. It’s this incredible ability that the program has to draw in almost everyone who has an interest in fractal art and keep them there, while the larger part of the genre lies either forgotten or undiscovered in its shadows.

That’s the Walmart effect I was referring to. Except, of course, there’s nothing predatory or monopolistic about UF, unlike Walmart, which engages in union busting tactics that haven’t been seen since the 1930’s (I have family who work for Walmart). UF on the other hand, achieved its popularity through good programming and design; smart trialware marketing; the high quality results of a few of its users; and through a large and very well organized user community.

Nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, the UF community is, in my opinion, the only really coherent fractal art group today. Which is what my point in all this is: fractal art has become Ultra Fractal-ized: One Brand – One Way, domesticated and homogeneous, losing it’s natural diversity by becoming cut off from the very thing which made it attractive to artists in the first place.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: fractal art Walmart Ultra Fractal innovation

In a nutshell, it doesn’t do what Inkblot Kaos, Sterlingware, Tierazon or Xaos does. I want something that sprouts artwork after a couple of clicks. Ultra Fractal? It’s just too much work. Too many layers. Too many moving parts. Too many moving parts that I have to move.

My first attempt at Ultra Fractal was three or so years ago. I don’t remember what version. I didn’t seem suited to it, but I didn’t think much about it at the time because I had plenty of other new fractal programs to work with. I didn’t know much about fractals in general, so I discounted my doubts about Ultra Fractal figuring I just didn’t understand it.

I picked it up again a year later because I had seen some really awesome artwork made by Paul DeCelle. I looked at Paul’s work and thought, “I want the machine that made that and I don’t care if I have to pay for it”. Well I downloaded some UF parameter files by Samuel Monnier (thanks, Sam) in hopes of getting some insight into the secrets of making these intriguing images. I have never seen anything take so long to render. It had something like 18 layers or parts to it.

Yes, some of you may be thinking, “Only 18?”. Well, I got Paul’s machine all right. What I didn’t realize at the time, but I have now come to understand, is the machine doesn’t make the artwork, the artist uses UF as a tool to make the artwork with. The program doesn’t come with an artist.

You see, that’s the whole problem. There’s no digital Rumplestiltskin inside UF like there is in most other fractal programs. Stop me if I’m wrong, but UF is all about layers, and layers are chosen and positioned by a human mind and not a computer algorithm, although an algorithm may have made each layer, separately. This may explain why there is very little really “freaky” stuff made in UF: there’s too much artistic control.

To borrow an expression from the Bible: Freaky is begotten, not made. It comes from chaotic and mathematical algorithms, not from human hands, not even talented human hands. (And your own skill and talent is the key requirement for making good artwork in UF.)

Even Gertrude Stein agrees with me. Here’s what she had to say about UF; “Freaky is not as strange as we can imagine. Freaky is stranger than we can imagine.”

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: Ultra Fractal Bible Gertrude Stein Chaos Artist Fractal Art Digital Art

Before there was only sand and the Shat al Arab.

But now, plumes of color from the petro-chemical plants.

From oil comes the pigments and inks of modern industry, turning the sombre land into oceans of color.

The nets of the fisherman have given way to great cables of oil, shipping lanes and refinery ports.

The sea is proud to share its home with oil, and to see its shores touched with color.

If we could draw a map of the land of oil, we would not use sand and dirt, we would use our modern colors.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: oil petro-chemical Shat al Arab digital art oil spill

I have wanted nothing else
but to release the machine
from its stall

I have told it
you are better than the others
faster than the others,
they paint with sticks
and they talk like fools

Sure, a lot of it’s junk
but there’s a thousand sides
to a sheet of digital paper
and the machine is never discouraged

Batting one in a million
to an empty stadium
the machine is still a star

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: fractal art digital art machine art cauliflower

Sometimes the past fails us, and we have to write our own ancient legends. The 8th voyage of Sindbad, and other things that were probably imagined, but never recorded. How many books could be filled with the things that are unwritten?

Ideas come and go. Swirling, returning. Maybe a story has to be told several times before it’s written just once.

There is a very old Arab legend, dating back well before the times of Sindbad, and even of Bagdad itself, about a mysterious sandstorm. Like a dust devil or tornado in size, it would swallow up lost travellers, even whole caravans and take any gold they were carrying. All it would take actually, was their money.

As the legend goes, this storm rages on continuously somewhere in the desert, becoming richer and richer as time goes by collecting more money from travellers.

As is the case with sea monsters and other terrifying things, enough survivors exist to keep the memory of this mysterious sand storm alive, but not enough to make it entirely credible to most people. This is where Sindbad comes in. Sindbad, although advanced in years and finished with travelling, is still as curious as ever and likes to hear of the fresh adventures of others.

Always hospitable, he invites to his home a man he recently met while downtown in the bazaar. The man appears to be slightly crazy but also harmless and more importantly, full of the fresh stories of adventure that Sindbad is craving to hear these days. He tells Sindbad the story of the Gold Mirage that lured him out into the desert and which turned out to be the mysterious sand storm.

Is it the money that entices Sindbad to travel? or does he just get bored of the comfortable, but predictable, experience of living in Bagdad?

But this is the 8th voyage of Sindbad. The one that never gets written. The one he never returns from.

If it’s any consolation, let me suggest that Sindbad finds the sand storm. It is apparently so full of gold that even when it’s far away on the horizon it gleams brightly creating the so-called Gold Mirage that others have seen and gone in search of.

It turns out there’s isn’t any gold in it. Sindbad reaches the center of the storm without injury and finds that it’s just sand swirling around, creating strange, fantastic scenes and sounds. He makes no attempt to escape and joins what he discovers to be thousands of apparently lost travellers who are content to just wander about gazing at the sights in the sand.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags: fractal-art fractals digital-art sindbad crazy-stuff

When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear explosion, a project which he personally managed, he apparently said, “I am become Death, the destoyer of worlds”.

When I first tried out this photoshop filter, I said, along the same lines, “I am become Klimt”. I didn’t say it out loud, just like Oppenheimer, I suppose, didn’t declare out loud that he’d become Death.

plain mosaic squares overlayed 50%

A mosiac filter is part of almost every graphics program. Sometimes it’s called “pixilate” or something like that, since a mosaic is essentially the rendering of an image in larger, simpler pieces (ie. lower resolution) resembling pixel blocks.

It’s probably an easy thing to program, like blur or sharpen. But this particular mosaic creates a variety of effects derived from that simple idea of the mosaic. Instead of just a square, you can have a box with a little square inside. The box and the square are different colors, based on the underlying image and some simple complementary or other color wheel relationship. The mosaic square can also be circle or ball (solid circle) or gear or flower. They save very well as indexed pngs since they’re already indexed to a certain extent, as long as you don’t include a gradient effect.

Layering too. Or blending, they call it. This creates some very interesting effects because you can make a “semi” mosaic image by overlaying the effect by degrees. Some look like squares of transparent tape stuck to the image. I like to use Square Rings or Gears, Cell pixel size= 10, Blend= 130 (half way), Normal/Overlay/Multiply/or Expose, and no gradient things.

It’s called, the Mosaic Toolkit made by Lance Otis, and is free. It ought to be called, Klimt in a Can. The webpage has a sample mosaic of George Washington, which can be viewed from 30 feet away for an interesting digital parlour trick. I have to admit, that image caught my eye and I might not have downloaded the filter if I hadn’t seen that because there’s a lot of free photoshop filters around and most of them are not too exciting. Some parts of our minds are pretty simple.

Mosaic Toolkit is in the “creative” category, meaning it “makes” things, and you don’t really know what the image is going to look like until you try it. Although the results from “creative” filters can be disappointing when used with “good” starter images, they can also be very exciting and produce something great from a “plain” starter image. I think the most important characteristic of a starter image is its color scheme, since that’s usually the only trait that will survive the transformational process (unless you use layering/blending).

It’s so simple.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:klimt, gustav klimt, fractal art, digital art, photoshop filters, mosaic toolkit, lance otis

There are the few that are Great, and there are the many that are Little.

The Great are classics, or well on their way. Everyone knows them. They have a following. They have names. They get stolen.

The Little are sparks. Bright, in a tiny way. A glowing grain of sand.

The Great grow from thumbnails. The Little are a thumbnail.

A frame is the fortress of The Great, and the gallery it’s royal domain. The legs of The Little are trapped by the frame, and die in captivity.

To be printed, purchased and analyzed, is the way of The Great. To be seen and not deleted, is the apex of The Little.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:
fractal art, digital art, fractal, 
 

The smaller you look, the larger you see.

There are two modes I apply when working with fractals or graphic software in general. One is to keep a close eye on what does what, and when I find a good combination of effects, write down the sequence like a script: scripting mode. In fact, in the graphics programs the GIMP, and probably Photoshop too, there are scripting capabilities that create new, composite filters from the combination of individual ones.

The other mode is to idly add effects and just click on things and see what happens: improvise mode. This tends to produce things that are usually unreproducible because you can’t quite remember what you did and what you undid and what you did after the undid. Doing this for a while is a great way to collect experience that will later allow you to build “scripts”. I often move into improvise mode after a lot of careful scripting goes nowhere.

And then I often go into scripting mode after a lot of senseless and semi-random clicking produces a nice effect and I really wish I could do it again. Sometimes you just get lost, and like the location of some buried treasure you may have found during a storm, you’re unable to find your way back. I think I said once, that some filters make mountains and some filters make dust. Hasn’t everyone who works in the digital medium made an image and in the process of perfecting it, lost the whole thing, just like the proverbial fish that got away?

Maybe I should stop using a graphics program that only has one level of undo.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:
fractal art, fractal, sierpinski, digital art, creative process

Well, it’s actually just one, but with such power, such awesome, earth-quaking power.

Ilyich the Toad’s multi-crystal.8bf is a fairly standard distortion, multi-faceted, lens filter. We’ve all seen variations of this all over the place.

I’ve always thought stuff like this was just more cheap digital tricks, and for a while I was beginning to think I was losing my objectivity by using it so much. But there’s something strange and intriguing to this gimmicky thing.

The DNA of seeing.

The what? The way we see things. We are at home in the housefly’s eyes, so to speak. One fragment at a time is about all we can really handle. It is a picture of pictures.

That’s why 3D rendering is so hard: our eyes are always seeing more than one thing -straight ahead, and peripheral.

We see a series of fragments, but they’re stitched together by very sophisticated software in our brains to give the impression that we’re looking at a single smooth image; a sort of mental panoramic photo making.

We see the object in front of our eyes and we see, vaguely, the area or objects around it. Ilyich’s filter I think reproduces this natural way of seeing, although it probably wasn’t his intention. It looks fragmented at first, naturally, but with several hours or days of practice…

That’s why I thought I’d done something to my mind. But no, the effect is real and I think it adds an interesting quality to many images. There’s a depth or movement-quality to them. The images of a flip-book, simulating animation, poured onto a page. Like I said, I thought the filter was just another multi-lens variation when I first tried it out, along with a lot of other ones, but now I find it’s quite creative.

The Absinthe Drinkers (of Alpha Centauri)

Sometimes I like to look all over the image and focus on the “micro-images” in it. I’ve made a lot of junk, but like any other tool or instrument, one discovers it’s potential by testing it out and trying to concentrate on it’s greater talents.

The border is a nice touch. A careful eye will soon see that he’s chopped off the bottom and put it on the top and similarly switched the left and right sides. So simple, but it generally makes for a more appealling image.

One of the things that’s really surprised me is how it can often produce something “interesting” out of an image that isn’t worth keeping around, or an image that is “nice” but nothing special. I’ve always got lots of those.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:
fractal art, fractal, multicrystal.8bf, Ilyich the Toad

 

Some filters make mountains, and some filters make dust. More about Illyich the Toad’s multicrystal.8bf.

I start with a fractal, and then smash it up. I smash some more. Not much fractal left now. If I smash further? Less fractal stuff right?

No. This is where the filter gets pretty weird. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… and fractal to fractal. Busted and fractal have the same Latin root. See the Sierpinski Triangles appearing?

Original Inkblot Kaos Image

I start with a fractal and by apparently destroying it (ie. filtering) and moving further away from something you would call fractal imagery, and closer towards something like just plain digital imagery, I instead end up with a fractal again.

Which brings me to Baba Yaga. She’s one of those characters from folktales who’s an evil, child-eating witch. Being a Russian folktale, it’s a little different from the Western European or British kind. Actually, it’s rather surreal.

Baba Yaga’s house walks around on four (or two) big chicken legs. That alone is pretty scary, but of course Baba Yaga is in there too, which makes it doubly scary. So naturally, if you ever find yourself in her house, which seems to happen a lot to people in these folktales, you want to get out of there and just start running. This is where the silly folktale gets seriously terrifying.

Apparently Baba Yaga casts a spell on anyone who escapes that confuses them, and as they run away, no matter how hard they try, they always end up running right back to her house! You don’t think that’s scary?

 

Original Inkblot Kaos Image (.ink parameter files)

So you see, no matter how hard I try to distort the fractal with multicrystal (and choke the fractal life out of it), I always end up creating a thousand Sierpinski triangles. There’s probably some Edgar Allan Poe story like this.

If I knew more about how these photoshop filters and other programming things worked, I’d say there’s something deeply Sierpinski-ish in there, or the algorithm (programmer’s magic spell) does something which creates the Serpienski triple recursive pattern.

Anyhow, if I ever see anything remotely like a chicken leg in there, I’m never going to go near that filter again.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:
fractal art, sierpinski, multicrystal.8bf, inkblot kaos, 
 

Orwellian, 1984, Mouthpiece of Baal, Howling Telescreen. My latest fractal Rorshach test.

It looks a bit like an old “Victrola”. They were one of the earliest record players, before electricity was widely available, and relied on a hand-cranked mechanism that turned the record after it was wound up. The sound was amplified mechanically (not electronic) by the large megaphone-like cone that was directly connected to the primitive, hollow needle.

Original Tierazon Image, Parameter file

RCA Victor made the Victrola and was also a recording company whose logo was a dog looking into the amplifying cone of a record player. So realistic were the RCA Victor recordings, according to the logo, that the dog was completely convinced that he was hearing “His Master’s Voice”, as the slogan stated.

His master’s voice. The Snake.

Tim Hodkinson

Technorati Tags:
fractal art, digital art, 1984, telescreen, victrola

 

I dislike the “artist” label. Maybe it dislikes me, too.

Original from Tierazon 2.7

To me, the word, “artist” conjures up the image of someone who works hard and approaches their “work” with discipline and dedication. They are the subject of biographies and documentaries; art emanates from them. That doesn’t describe me.

I’m more of a scavenger, a graphic entrepreneur, someone who finds, compiles, edits, and presents. Maybe a talent scout or agent or coach. I am the coach for a small team of digital machines.

I never touch the canvas, and I don’t know where the paints are kept; ask one of the artists. I suppose I could try doing something myself, but I feel more comfortable taking the mis-directed talents of algorithms and pointing them in the right direction.

A coach works with other people’s talent. You could call the coach a different kind of artist; coaching does require some artistic ability, of sorts. I don’t know. I just prefer to call a coach, a coach.

An artist will often work for days on a single image, painstakingly working, and reworking, every detail. A coach unlocks the room and turns the lights on.

Original

Because art is produced, we call the person associated with it, an artist. But the title doesn’t always fit. There are some who deserve that title. As for me, like any coach, I’m just excited whenever the team scores a goal. It’s never my name that gets mentioned in the newspaper, but that’s okay. They only put my name in the paper if I hit someone.

Of course, none of the players on my team can write their name, so I put my own name on the artwork, as their coach. It’s simpler that way, for legal reasons. I always give them credit when I can.

Tierazon parameter files

I told the team: “Tierazon gets the ball and passes it to Overlapper, who sends it to Inverse Intensity. After that it’s Renaissance for that nice edge effect and off to First Stop Randomville or Holding a Cake to the Sun, depending on how things go, for the cool colors and grainy effect. If you find yourselves short, Color Cos or Emboss Coming Out All Over will get it to the net. Multicrystal’s getting a little worn out and will be sitting out this game. Don’t freak out if it doesn’t work the first time. Tierazon’s got a formula parser and can start a million plays if you need him to. You’re all first-class players, but I should tell you that I’ve downloaded some new talent and I can’t keep everybody. So now is not the time to start slacking-off.”

They tell me I’m the best coach they ever had, but I’m not so sure that’s what they say about me behind my back.

Tim Hodkinson
 

Alright, it’s not historically accurate. Traditionally, I think, Mary has always been portrayed with two eyes. None of the Bible accounts mention how many eyes Mary had. Da Vinci’s Madonna had two eyes. Of course, if Da Vinci was such an expert, the Last Supper wouldn’t have been painted with table and chairs.

I took a break from Inkblot Kaos and decided to try out Tierazon again. After trying out the formula parser in Inkblot Kaos, I had the confidence to use the one in Tierazon, something I’d never done before.

“z*c-c^z+c” I don’t know if there’s any procedure or method that helps to create interesting fractal formulas. Perhaps there’s a way to add an extra eye to this image. I’m always stunned by the amount of work that can be accomplished by even a short formula.

There’s still this magical quality to fractals. Stick a few letters and numbers together, wave the fractal wand, and things appear. Add a few photoshop filters to the process and soon it’s weird scenes inside the goldmine, as Art Linkletter would say.

Tierazon 2.7 parameter file

This is a weird scene, isn’t it?
 

Tim Hodkinson

I saw a documentary on Middle Eastern wells. A well is a big deal there. Everything happens because of water.

Some of them are quite old, even supposedly dating back to the days of Abraham. A well is so important that there are men who dive down into these narrow tunnels and remove debris when they’re plugged. It’s the ultimate claustrophobic experience.

Abraham named his children and he named his wells. Political deals were associated with wells. From the well flowed water, and from the water grew a city. Beersheba flowed out of a well.

In the desert, life is a plug and the well is the socket. Sheep, goats, men; they all orbit the well. Our eyes see the stars, and by them you can navigate the sea, but your feet travel from well to well, in the desert.

There were many tribes and clans, but they all drank water. If a well can be dug, and water can be found, then a well can be plugged, and the strangers move on.

In the Australian movie, Mad Max, they coveted the stockpiles of gasoline that ran their cars. In Abraham’s day they coveted the wells that watered their camels and livestock.

Inkblot Kaos parameter files

To find water, to dig a well that has water, is to re-write the land, to redraw the map. Water runs like a cable, deep below the ground. Every well is a node, a network in a world that ebbs and flows according to the water protocol.

You dial-up, there’s a handshake. When they connected, they washed their guests feet. No ID? Wrong password? Your sheep will not drink at this well.

Tim Hodkinson
 

We worked as a team. A huge team of scientists and builders like me.

No one had built a star before. We were going to be the first.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? We know now. We built very special pins and we saw things that no one had ever seen before. The scientists knew how to make these pins. They were needed to help build the star.

It took years of work. When it was finished we all crowded together to get a look. The most important scientist was there. He turned the switch. We had made the very first star.

We’re all retired now. We still like to talk about the old days when we built the star. Especially when our grandchildren visit. We wish they’d visit more often. We tell them how we built the star.

“The star that makes the electricity for our houses Grandpa? Did you make that star?”

“No, not that one. We made the other star. The star that kills.”

Inkblot Kaos parameter files

Tim Hodkinson
 

I read somewhere, or heard from someone, that study carrols were invented in monasteries. A study carrol (did I spell it wrong?) is a one-person table that is walled on all sides except the one you sit at. The prototypical cubicle.

No, it wasn’t the first. The first cubicle was the small cave preferred by sages. I saw a documentary about a place in northern India, an area that is rugged and remote and home to real old-fashioned sages along with smugglers and some very paranoid tribespeople.

I saw this guy sitting in his little cave, thinking, or something, and I thought: he works in a cubicle. He met with some tourists who were told not to wander around or disturb the locals, and he highly recommended that they not return home, but rather get themselves a cave like he has.

In my six short years of normal working I worked for 4 months in a cubicle; nicely padded; color-matched to the chair and carpet; nice, solid desk. You stand up, and all around you are busy people on the phone or frowning in front of a computer. Sit down, and you’re back to being Robinson Crusoe.

Dilbert makes it sound as if there’s something second-rate to cubicles or that they’re some cruel substitute for an office. To me it was a mini-castle. Until I got fired. It took a while to adjust to the working world after being in university for what boils down to about six, or seven and a half years. The fact that the cubicle was so appealing to me was perhaps a sign.

Original image from Inkblot Kaos before being processed with multi-crystal.8bf and some of Andrew’s filters and India Ink.

I went on to work in warehouses. Like the playwright, Arthur Miller. One time, during the Depression when Arthur Miller was working in an auto parts warehouse, he had to climb up to the top of a shelf (25+ ft) and from there marvelled at the panoramic view.

It was December, and I was working in a dollar store (cheap plastic junk) warehouse picking orders. Someone wanted water pistols and they were up on the top shelf because it was summer merchandise. The place being what it was, I just climbed up by stepping on boxes and pulling myself up when I could reach the next metal support.

I got to the top and naturally took a look around before looking for the water pistols (which were probably a mistake on the order). The heat in those high altitudes was surprising, and looking out at the tops of all those giant shelves, instead of the bottoms, was actually somewhat exhilirating. And I wondered, how come no one wants to work in a place like this?

Tim Hodkinson
 

The first Radio Satelite. 1957, or around then. Whatever happened to Sputnik?

No longer a celebrity, and not too shiny anymore, he slides through space, without destination or purpose. His simple senseless beeping, once the scherzo of a great Superpower symphony, is now just a sign he’s still alive.

Years pass, decades pass. Then one night, while orbitting, forgotten, worthless, abandoned, obsolete, junked… he hears a voice, a song in space.

“Glowing, glowing, my heart is glowing.” Sings the distant satelite.

Sputnik finds himself drawn to the soothing song and sets off in search of her.

Begone, crude space-can!

Not her father, it’s her guardian that confronts Sputnik. Jamming her signals and chasing off all suitors, the old guardian secretly plots to marry her himself.

Beset by a web of intrigue woven by her guardian and unable to approach, Sputnik despairs, but cannot forget her voice.

“Sputnik!” she cries. She appears, dressed in leopard skin and blushing rather profusely.

Her older brother, calling long distance on a cheap phone card, disapproves of Sputnik and his lack of current employment.

Mother is happy with anyone because she knows of the Guardian’s evil schemes. She calls Sputnik a Russian Prince.

The Guardian is incensed and argues violently that Sputnik is a theif and has fled Earth to avoid prison.

At last, they are married, and go to live on a mountain on Pluto broadcasting with joy.
 

Sasquatch, UFO’s, Bermuda Triangle, and now –Space Heads.

What am I talking about? Imagine that outer space is something like the ocean: mostly empty but “infected” with life. We don’t expect to find something. We don’t expect to get a cold. But we’re not surprised when it happens. Probability says, it’s going to happen, instinct says, not today.

Space Heads, the micro-plankton of the space: floating, primitive …collectible.

An extra z here, a cos instead of a tan over there. Change the + to a ^ and you’ve got a new Space Head. Or just some new space.

Tiera-zon 2.7 parameter files (.zar) “spaceheads.zip”

There’s fractals and then there’s the other stuff, hard to categorize or describe: Floating; unconnected but associated; head-like. Space Heads.

They are primitive because they are basic and close to the trunk of the tree, unlike ourselves, complex creatures, who form the distant tip of a limb. It’s no surprise to find them represented in the fossil record; ancient, the earliest of iterations, almost timeless, drifting in time.

Haven’t fractal generators changed the world? Before, there was the wilderness -the natural world, and there were the cities -the places of human design. But now there is a new place, half-natural, half-human, neither of those, transcending both.

On the frontier, few things are labelled and nothing is categorized. The question, “What is it?” has not yet occurred. We look, we wander, we forget what brought us here.
 

It’s never been my intention to talk about war and depressing stuff like that, but I like this image and all I can think of when I look at it is the B-29 fire-bombing campaign that took place over Japan in the spring of 1945.

I read the diary of an allied soldier who was a prisoner of the Japanese working in a coal mine in Japan during WW2. The entries were very routine and written every day without exception for the duration of the war from Dec. ’41 to Aug. ’45.

My Grandfather had been part of this group of 2,000 Canadian soldiers, just like the author of the diary had. They went to Hong Kong in November of ’41 and fought from Dec. 8th until Dec. 25th when the British colony surrendered.

Although my Grandfather’s been dead for almost 15 years, I joined a veteran’s organization whose purpose is to comemorate their memory as well as look after the interests of those surviving Canadian veterans who fought in the Battle of Hong Kong. I wanted to get some understanding of what the veterans went through so I could relate to them better, and I thought reading the diary’s exhaustive, day to day account would do that.

Can someone like me really understand these war experiences? Possibly not, or at the most, only in a limited way.

(With regards to the image above, this is the original image from Inkblot Kaos from which it was made, with the help of Illyich the Toad’s multi-crystal.8bf and Martijn W. van der Lee’s, Ink Rubber.8bf (“inkrubbr.8bf”) which tinted it.)

The guy who wrote the diary was very methodical and disciplined. He never missed a day, even if there was nothing really to write about. He soon fell into a routine of writing two sentences a day about his experiences as a POW working as slave labour in a Japanese coal mine. It became a ritual.

Until the spring of ’45 when the regular entries abruptly stopped.

I knew he hadn’t died. He survived and came back to Canada after the war like my Grandfather did. But camp life for the author was turned upside down and it seemed to have something to do with a sudden change of events in Japan associated with Allied bombing.

The war ended and the author left Japan in September of 45. While enroute by train to board an American ship homeward, he saw the ruins of Nagasaki, destroyed only a month previously by the second atomic bomb.

So what had happened that caused this man to stop writing in his diary for a whole month? What was going on that had such a profound effect on the behaviour of the prison camp guards that he thought they’d kill him for the slightest reason such as possessing a diary?

I found out by reading a book called Flames over Tokyo by E. Bartlett Kerr. The catastrophic events were the B-29 incendiary bombing campaign that literally burned up most of Japan’s major cities in spring of 1945. Most people know about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few, including myself, know much about the fire-bombing campaign that went on all over Japan and was actually much more destructive, although less “glamourous” to write about than the atomic attacks.

To make a long blog posting short… back in the 40’s most of the buildings in Japanese cities (even large parts of the national capital, Tokyo) were made mostly of wood. European cities had much more brick and concrete construction which made the strategy of fire-bombing less appealing, but for Japan this was it’s achilles heel.

Add to all this the brand-new B-29 (“SuperFortress”) with increased bomb load and extended range of operation, and then the newly designed incendiary bombs, in clusters, made with “jellied” gasoline (napalm), designed and tested to puncture a roof and several floors of a wooden Japanese building and squirt on impact…

Once the fires got going, some of the flight crews in the next wave of bombers said they could actually smell the fires -and burning flesh. They weren’t flying at 30,000 feet like the new “pressurized” B-29 was capable of. They were flying at a few thousand feet, at night, to maximise accuracy and minimize losses. Less like flying, and more like driving, through Tokyo.

Well, so what? War is pretty awful and destructive all the time isn’t it? Yeah, but in these cases huge chunks of the city were obliterated (and the people in them). Not just a few isolated, industrial areas or strategic targets, but something like 40, 50 or 60 per cent of the whole city. In a few Japanese cities, upwards of 90% of the urban area was burnt to the ground after only two or three bombing missions.

The war that had so far been foreign and far-away, all of a sudden came home.
 

Forest of Knives

I remember back during the last few years of the Vietnam war, in the early 70s, reading an article in the magazine that came with the weekend edition of the newspaper, about the various booby-traps the enemy was using against US soldiers.

I was 7 or 8 at the time and living on the edge of a small pulp and paper town up in Northwestern Ontario (sparsley inhabited wilderness). Me and my brothers spent most of our time out in the bush making forts and hiking around, so we were fascinated with the eleborate mechanisms the NVA and VC were making with sticks and other natural materials.

Sharpened bamboo covered with pig manure was a common ingredient in most constructions, as was the occasional venomous snake tied to a stick. It was all pretty exotic for someone growing up in a world of spruce trees. The only threat to my well-being was having my favorite TV show pre-empted by a football game.

The magazine article was part of a series, and the next week featured the high-tech booby-traps of the American forces. They weren’t quite as interesting; all of them were more or less variations on the theme of explosives blowing pieces of steel around. None of them were hand-crafted, and in the full-colored drawings they just looked like little plastic boxes. I gave them second-place in the creative design category.

What caught my attention, and still does to this day, was how to set up a series of claymore anti-personnel mines so the enemy soldiers would actually jump on them, or at least run towards them, just before they exploded. That made the little plastic boxes more interesting. I remember me and my brothers having quite a few arguements trying to second-guess the enemy’s response, and therefore where to place the second (third, fourth…) anti-personnel mine if our living room was ever infiltrated.

It’s like a well thought out chess manoever, but with different equipment. For instance, you hear a big bang, you turn away from it or move away. It’s human nature to minimize injuries. So the second one goes over where you would run to get away from the first. The third is placed in the same way.

Later on we applied this technique to kill houseflys. Imagine a housefly sitting on a table. You move forward and try to hit it by smacking your hand down on the table. It rarely works because the fly sees the hand coming and flys up and away.

So what you do is take your hands and clap them together above the fly, or above the place the fly is when your hands start to move. The fly jumps up when your hands start to move, and literally flys up into your hands. If he he’d just stayed where he was on the table, nothing would have happened to him.

The fly is faster, and you can’t compete with his speed and agility, but you’re smarter and you know where he’s going. The slow hand gets the fast fly.
 

Smashing with style

Digital Dynamite

Filter of Frenzy

Ripped-off beyond recognition and left for dead

“No, your Honour; I didn’t do anything. I just took the dog for a walk until it was dead.”

Together, me and the filter formed a third personality, which neither of us could talk any sense to.

Art grows out of the barrel of a photoshop filter.

The smaller they get, the more I see.

Every chop is different. And I try to choose the best one. But they all look good.

The author called it “Slice” which to me suggests something simple and restrained like the careful preparation of a sample for a microscope slide. Perhaps he never conceived of this “Feast of Knives” effect, or if he had, would have been unable to imagine anyone finding a use for something like that.

I keep thinking, just one more chop and we’ll turn the corner; one more chop and the effect will take a quantum leap and start forming new wonders. Deep down in it’s algorithmic DNA some gene, so far only weakly expressed, will become like a crystal, suddenly bringing order and magnificence to the supersaturated solution. But no. Like everything else, it moves onward to its logical conclusion, and returns to dust.
 

You know, post-processing can really mangle a decent, law-abiding fractal image and make it an almost unrecognizable, but strangely delightful, wreck. Some will never walk straight again.

But when you start with an image that is almost entirely a product of the program’s filtering effect, and not quite a “fractal” image to start with, the results strain the already stretched categories of visual taxonomy, sowing the seeds of an impending visual collision, or shall we say, “Collisual” – intriguing arrangement of debris.

These were all originally made in Tierazon 2.7. Here’s a clean one that hasn’t had anything done to it. In fact it’s the original image the above one was made from.

Download parameter file “shift06.zar”

Same one – Antialiased 4:1

They’re alive. I should explain that.

This is rather Twilight-zonish, although I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation: The images keep changing.

When you see something interesting and zoom in on it, it’s gone when you get there. I think it’s because the image is created by a moire effect and the resolution of the image changes the resulting pattern of circles.

In fact, I wanted to call this series of images, “Monsieur Moire and the hypno-dots from the Atom Ray”, but it just didn’t have the same zip as stepping off on Saturn.

Well, that’s just the beginning. The really freaky thing is when you antialias one of these things (as you can see above). The resulting algorithmicolated picture transforms into something quite different; the dots are in different places and the colors have changed too.

In an image viewer, when looking at the thumbnail, you see yet another variation of the image. What you see in fact, is a new image and you can’t go by the thumbnail to find what you’re looking for. In a strange and maybe existential way, the thumbnail is not the image and doesn’t even pretend to be.

I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I say they’re alive, growing, changing, mutating, plotting, scheming…

Perhaps they are “fractal” after all, as far as self similarity and endless resolution goes. What you see depends on how close you are to it and at what size you make it. Or maybe that has nothing to do with fractals.

They started off in Tierazon. Then they met me. And my machine. But their fractal identity can still be traced through their dental records.

Maybe all this is in my head.