Vader on Vacation (2007)

This year Tonya will party down
at Helm’s Deep. After car rentals, tummy
tucks at the Salem Witch Museum,
she plans for a better security

video. Carrying all that bionic gear
makes the whole Lord Vader thing look
silly. Our travel agent left bad maps
to the Death Star Bed and Breakfast

and all white plastic employees swap masks
for bermuda shorts and sandals. So I
showed my wife an ugly prequel. She left
me for a whiny emo kid with a raspy voice.

~/~

Image light-sabered out of QuaSZ and mind-tricked to the max in Photoshop. Plus a found poem Yoda-levitated from Google phrase strings imperial-walked from pod races search strings of “vader on vacation.”

Rooms with a View
Blog with a View

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Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, computer art, poetry, found poetry, darth vader

Enemy Combatant 1 (2007)

“Put it all together, and last week’s passage of the Military Commissions Act is ominous for those in the US. As Bruce Ackerman noted recently in The Los Angeles Times, the legislation ‘authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any protections of the Bill of Rights.’ The vague criteria for being labeled an enemy combatant (taking part in ‘hostilities against the United States’) don’t help either. Would that include anti-war protestors? People who criticize Bush? Unclear.”
–Heather Wokusch, “Now That You Could Be Labeled an Enemy Combatant,” CommonDreams.org

Enemy Combatant 2 (2007)

“KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST OF COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN: I want to start by asking you about a specific part of this act that lists one of the definitions of an unlawful enemy combatant as, quote, ‘a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a combatant status review tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense.’

Does that not basically mean that if Mr. Bush or Mr. Rumsfeld say so, anybody in this country, citizen or not, innocent or not, can end up being an unlawful enemy combatant?

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR: It certainly does. In fact, later on, it says that if you even give material support to an organization that the president deems connected to one of these groups, you too can be an enemy combatant.

And the fact that he appoints this tribunal is meaningless. You know, standing behind him at the signing ceremony was his attorney general, who signed a memo that said that you could torture people, that you could do harm to them to the point of organ failure or death.

So if he appoints someone like that to be attorney general, you can imagine who he’s going be putting on this board.

OLBERMANN: Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?

TURLEY: It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn’t rely on their good motivations.

Now we must. And people have no idea how significant this is. What, really, a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values.

It couldn’t be more significant. And the strange thing is, we’ve become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. I mean, the Congress just gave the president despotic powers, and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to, you know, Dancing with the Stars. I mean, it’s otherworldly.”
–Excerpt of a transcript from Countdown with Keith Olbermann, 10-18-2006

Enemy Combatant 3 (2007)

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that enemy combatants won’t be released until the War on Terror is over — and that the war won’t be over until no terrorist organizations of potentially global reach are left in the world. ‘We’re going to cure the common cold before we extirpate political violence from the face of the globe,’ says [Georgetown University law professor David] Cole. ‘And in today’s world, everyone has potentially global reach. So Rumsfeld is essentially claiming that the war on terrorism will last forever — and that they have the authority to keep people forever, without any hearing, without any trial, even without any access to a lawyer.’ “
–Miles Harvey, “The Bad Guy,” Mother Jones

Enemy Combatant 4 (2007)

“Even in the face of a federal court order insisting on an accused being allowed to meet with a lawyer in order to challenge his enemy combatant status, ‘the government maintains that no court has the authority to review that classification.’ ‘To say that the Executive Branch on its own determination can pick somebody up and hold them indefinitely without any procedure or access to a court or counsel or the press is an absolutely staggering thought,’ says Stephen Schulhofer, a law professor at New York University. Meanwhile, the Attorney General insists that misses the larger point. ‘There are no civil liberties that are more important than the right to be uninjured and to be able to live in freedom,’ Ashcroft recently told Time.

[…]

Enemy Combatant 5 (2007)

“It would be easy to dismiss the harm that has been done to our civil liberties in the past year. Most of us do not know anyone whose rights have been seriously curtailed. The 1,200 detainees rounded up after Sept. 11 and held in secret were mainly Muslim men with immigration problems. So were the people the government tried to deport in closed hearings. The two Americans who were labeled ‘enemy combatants,’ hustled off to military brigs and denied the right even to meet with a lawyer, are a Saudi-American man captured in Afghanistan and a onetime Chicago gang member.

There is also no denying that the need for effective law enforcement is greater than ever. The Constitution, Justice Arthur Goldberg once noted, is not a suicide pact.

And yet to curtail individual rights, as the Bush administration has done, is to draw exactly the wrong lessons from history. Every time the country has felt threatened and tightened the screws on civil liberties, it later wished it had not done so. In each case — whether the barring of government criticism under the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1918, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II or the McCarthyite witch hunts of the cold war — profound regrets set in later.

When we are afraid, as we have all been this year, civil liberties can seem abstract. But they are at the core of what separates this country from nearly all others; they are what we are defending when we go to war. To slash away at liberty in order to defend it is not only illogical, it has proved to be a failure. Yet that is what has been happening.

[…]

As the Bush administration continues down its path, the American people need to make clear that they have learned from history and will not allow their rights to be rolled back. The world has changed since Sept. 11, but the values this country was founded on have not. Fear is no guide to the Constitution. We must fight the enemies of freedom abroad without yielding to those at home.”
–Editorial, “The War on Civil Liberties, The New York Times (9-10-2002), seen on The Freedom of Information Center

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As I argued on an earlier blog post, I believe that fractals can be used as activist art. This post is prompted by today’s “Virtual March Against Escalation” — a national Internet protest designed to curb surging escalation of the Iraq War. I’m well aware that some of you will not agree with my point of view. And that’s cool. Fortunately, the Constitution gives you the right to disagree with me and to say so — unless, of course, you are declared an “enemy combatant.”

Images 1 and 2 were made with Sterling-ware. Images 3, 4, and 5 were made with Vchira. All images were imported into various graphics programs and post-processed.

Please click on any image to see higher resolution.

Terry

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Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, art, enemy combatant, civil liberties, iraq war

Dragonfly Saloon Girls (2001)

We had gunslingers in
deluxe tuxes and knit jackets
with shoulder straps.

We had military
girls and sailor girls but
sexy Red Riding Hood

was a no show. Smothered
in daisies she came out
of the planet of green

love in the late
90’s. Her cowgirl costume
tanked in Jamaica but

in Miss Kitty’s parlor
her fringe dress seemed
sassy as her faith dance

bombed like a laughable
Day of the Dead. Her wings
were pulled off artfully

by redneck plebes. Was that
indiscrete? Rockette like
she kicked off her slippers

as the trail boss dove
off the technological bronk
into waterbeds of whiskey.

~/~

A found poem re-assembled out of phrase strings from a Google search of “dragonfly saloon girls.” The image was originally rendered in Fractal Zplot and post-processed in multiple graphics programs.

Terry

Rooms with a View
Blog with a View

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Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, art, poetry, found poetry, dragonfly, saloon girls

Alien Supplicant (2007)

I go on a quaternion fractal kick for a few weeks almost every year. There’s something very special about these sculpted, rolled in Play-Doh, Tootsie Roll forms. I find them fascinating because they seem more tactile and three-dimensional than most other kinds of fractals. They can also be more visually evocative. Maybe that’s because they occasionally break the restraints of abstraction. Moreover, they sometimes share important traits with literary works: tone and mood.

Out for the Season (2003)

Because fractals are generally so highly abstract, generating a mood along with an image can be an added plus. And while it’s true that other kinds of fractals, like L-System forms, can produce life-imitating shapes like ferns and branches, quaternions sometimes bear a resemblance to more complex living things. But these imitations, perhaps because of the 3-D nature of the forms, are far from flat planes or “stick figures.” Rather, they can contain a powerful, emotionally-charged resonance.

Grieving (2002)

I’m sure none of this surprises many of you. We see ourselves in fractals all the time. It’s not uncommon to find faces peering out from the tiled nooks and accidental recesses of our images. I still remember the first time I stumbled into the main page at Bill Rossi’s Fractopia and saw him and his fractal family. And some fractal artists have produced stunning self-portraits — like these by Jurgen Schwietering and Damien M. Jones. I’ve even made a few fractal replicas of myself — like this one that Stan Hood once told me “looks like I’ve seen the movie The Fly one too many times.”

Beyonce (2004)

I guess it’s the semi-anthropomorphic, I-recognize-that features of quaternions that fascinate me. Maybe the image above doesn’t suggest the pop diva of Dreamgirls to you — but I see her languid body and graceful movements on display. Over the years, I’ve seen so many curious things cooking away on my computer: ravens, dictators, male models, meter maids. So, don’t let anyone tell you — as a painter recently said to me — that “fractals don’t look like anything.” Quat nonsense.

~/~

Terry

Rooms with a View
Blog with a View

All images were made in QuaSZ and mildly post-processed in Photoshop and other graphics programs.

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Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, art, quaternion, quasz

Hordes of Photoshop Jockeys (2000)

This one is kind of an in-joke.

Back when I used to post my images on Usenet on alt.binaries.pictures.fractals (which were either — pick one — the good old days or the dark ages), there occasionally would be some lively (read: flame-filled) discussions. One night, a thread got hot and heavy on the subject of post-processing — meaning, at least in this particular discussion, the further manipulation of fractal images by exporting them into Photoshop or other graphics programs. One writer, who obviously preferred his fractals to be unaltered (pure as the driven pixel?), complained that if post-processing became acceptable the fractal art world would soon be overrun with “hordes of Photoshop jockeys.”

As someone who post-processes with wild abandon, that phrase tickled me. So, naturally, I felt the need to make this image for him and share it.

Strange. I never heard back from him.

~/~

Terry

Rooms with a View
Blog with a View

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Technorati Tags: photoblog-posts, photoblog, fractal, fractal art, Photoshop, Usenet

Deep in the Mines 1 (2000)

Fractals sometimes transcend their parameters. If they are art — and I’m guessing that most of us think they are — then our images reflect some deeper part of ourselves. Our dreams. Our buried treasures.

Tina got me thinking about this standing on the shoulders of giants business. It’s true that someone built the mine by writing a program or a formula. But the artist still has to take that journey to the underworld and cart back the gold or silver.

It’s a dangerous business. Rooting around under the surface for meaning. Sometimes you strike it rich. Other times what you find blows up in your face.

And there’s no drop dead canary telling you when your image glitters or smells like gas.

Deep in the Mines 2 (2000)

I’ve often used the word spelunking to describe my artistic process. I crawl through images — hauling out dirt, clearing a path to see what still lies ahead. It can be claustrophobic. Sometimes I chip away at one delicate section for hours. Sometimes I thrash around blindly. Even a cave-in is better than finding nothing.

Maybe someone caved or carved out parts of this mine before me. But I’m still the one who has to go down there — again — alone — in the dark.

The classics are filled with treacherous journeys to the underworld where ghosts linger and are haunted by their memories of life. Maybe, like Orpheus, my images will sing, and I’ll return to the light with something I love. Unless I get impatient. Unless I turn around to look at what I’ve made before the trip is finished. We’ve read the story. We know what happens then.

I think fractals can reveal memories from the substratum. They flock around Odysseus at the pit of blood. If you risk going underground, they might settle around you like leaves encircling a tree. Or they might mock you from the safety of the shadows.

They are more than “the cold equations” of Tom Godwin’s moving story. They are like engrams. Brain scans anyone can read.

There’s plenty of uranium deep in the mines. With it, you can see inside yourself.

And see through others, too.

Deep in the Mines 3 (2000)

Mine.

Mind?

Dig still deeper…

Deep in the Mines 4 (2000)

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night. I have bits of poems or images partially unburied in my head. I’ve learned to get up immediately and start shoveling with my pen or keyboard. If I don’t, those whispers from the Muse will vanish like Eurydice.

Here’s something I wrote in my notebook several years ago in a semi-sleepwalk:

The mine
is darker than
the last thing you
said
to me
ten years ago
today.

Someone probably said something similar before me. Maybe I should have left this lump of coal resting under tons of rock.

But we don’t, do we? We open our notebooks and our programs — and, with dim light pouring from our foreheads, we start digging.

And, sometimes, if we persevere and are lucky, we uncover something.

A nugget pick-axed out of the ore.

A diamond hewn from the darkness of the subconscious.

Rare chunks of art hauled out from deep in the mines into the open air for all to see.

Chump Change (2006)

The way I saw my art changed when I started working with a master printer to make poster-sized Giclees of my own work. I began to see my images on the wall rather than on the screen.

My work habits shifted noticeably. I started creating in the largest sizes my poor computer could tolerate without coughing and crashing. Each new image became a canvas, and my eyes adjusted to looking at sections of a big picture work-in-progress rather than conventional monitor sizes.

And, suddenly, the details and nuances of texture became paramount.

Upper left corner detail of Chump Change

Size became whatever I could muster. Memory became my enemy. My work computer has four gigs of RAM, and I can work at 8000 x 8000 pixels — usually — unless I want to post-process heavily.

And I do — with extreme prejudice — which cuts down my comfort zone closer to around 6000 x 6000 pixels. But I can thrash about in Photoshop or Painter with wild abandon and still layer/render away at a steady clip.

And why post-process? It’s really not for the fractal. After all, it’s already there (or, at least, what’s left of it).

I post-process for the art.

Accusers (2006)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning.

I didn’t get into fractals for the math. I took them up because — finally — I saw a way that I could make art.

I’d tried before. I took a beginning art class when I was college. It was a frustrating experience. I couldn’t make my paintings look anything like what I saw in my head. The professor eventually suggested I drop the class — while adding, for good measure and for the benefit of my long-term self-esteem, that I “probably had no talent.”

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t say it.

But the prof was right in one sense. I couldn’t deal with the conventional tools of art. The brush seemed pudgy and awkward. I always felt like I was stabbing the canvas with a cucumber. I never could gage how much or how little paint would produce the desired thickness. Everything dried too fast or dripped too much. And the smell of the chemicals gagged me and made my head feel like a cinder block.

I gave up — and took up writing instead. The pen felt just fine in my hand, and I had an overdose of images already in my head.

Then, one day in 1997, I saw my first fractal on Usenet.

And I’ve been playing with fractals ever since. At first, I just churned ’em out like an assembly line. I was fascinated by how minor adjustments produced subtle changes with each subsequent iteration. Sometimes, I felt more like a machine than the computer itself.

But I slowed down considerably once I began to post-process. I started to labor over images and refused to be satisfied until each was either finished (abandoned?) as the closest approximation of my head shot — or every layer was sent kicking to the Recycle Bin.

And that’s when I realized I’d found a way to begin painting. Fractals became my base canvas. I wasn’t afraid, to the consternation of some, to mess everything up. The fractal forms weren’t sacrosanct to me. Only the final result mattered.

I believe making art is like a knife fight. There are no rules. You either survive the ordeal with something from nothing to show for it. Or your vision dies.

Sorceress (2006)

So, now, I was “painting” regularly, composing more carefully, and doting over textures — at least, those I could see working within a scale of 800 x 600 pixels. Still, I found myself wondering: Am I making art?

And how would I ever know unless I could really see what I was doing?

But, as I said, everything changed after I met with a professional printer and saw my first poster-sized Giclee. I had new improved eyes — and with fresh sight came further adjustments in my process. I worked even more slowly. I realized my early images were like a cup of black coffee. The latter ones became like a tongue-twisting, labor-intensive specialty coffee from Starbucks.

Thinking big is like making the jump to high-definition television. Textures matter. Every pixel shows. And once that mindset took hold, I finally felt like I was thinking like an artist.

I’m glad I worked with a professional printer — an artist himself — because he had the experience and the equipment to make a museum-quality product. Acid free inks and papers make a difference. And although photographic prints are lush and can scale up quite large, I was drawn to the gentler (as in less saturated), smaller Giclees. Surfaces in Giclee are remarkably tactile — with brush strokes evident and raised and indented areas becoming peaks and valleys. And the first time I saw an image printed on canvas and covered with a chemical wash, I knew…

…I knew I was looking at a painting.

A program like Fractal ViZion (which I like, by the way) can produce endless fractals with one mouse click. It doesn’t need us to produce fractals. Besides, nature’s already doing a fine job of churning them out — thank you very much.

And, although I don’t use Ultra Fractal, I think I understand (at least in part) why so many fractalists are drawn to it. The software can produce striking, intricate textures. I know that’s why I was excited to help beta-test XenoDream. It wasn’t for the 3D forms. It was for the incredibly lush and complex textures.

I’m not advocating my way or the highway, you understand. I’m just encapsulating my journey to finding art in fractals.

I do believe fractals can be more than what math wrought.

And much more than decoration.

They can be fine art — and all that goes with it.

So don’t be afraid to paint — whether in-house with UF or XenoDream or outsourced to Photoshop et. al. And don’t shy away from seeing the small screen as the big picture on your wall.

Yes, we have the tools. But we also need to cultivate the vision — along with the talent and patience to bring it into existence.

We put the art in fractal art.

Homage to Andy Warhol (2000)

From artrepublic:

In 1960 Warhol began to replicate a range of mass-produced images, beginning with newspaper advertisements and comic strips before turning to packaging, dollar bills and more. He is probably the most famous member of the Pop Art movement. Virtually any image that was in the public domain was a prime target for the Warhol treatment. In 1962 he had his first one-man show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and in the same year exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York. This was the year of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961-1962). Soon after his sculptures of Brillo soap pad boxes, Coca-Cola bottles and replications of popular icons such as Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and most famously Marilyn Monroe were to appear and secure his reputation. The silk-screen process he favoured allowed for infinite replication, and he was opposed to the concept of a work of art as a piece of craftsmanship executed purely for the connoisseur; in Warhol’s own words, “I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.”

Thus Warhol’s work was intent on dehumanising his subjects whether they be images purloined from mass-culture or depictions of atrocities such as car crashes. He turned out his works/products like a manufacturer, going as far as naming his studio The Factory. As well as paintings, he published the long-running celebrity magazine Interview, managed the rock group The Velvet Underground and achieved great notoriety as an underground filmmaker with lengthy films such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). In their silent and almost completely static images Warhol raised monotony to new heights, as he said at the time, “I like boring things.” Andy Warhol has become one of the icons of the 20th Century, putting as much effort into publicising himself as promoting his work. He was finely tuned to the tedium of modern mass-culture, conveying and indeed revelling in the banality of the images proliferating around him. His stance was on the one hand distant and voyeuristic and on the other totally immersed in the culture of spectacle. He was able to both comment upon and completely embrace the materialism of the Sixties. Bernard Levin sums up the essence of Andy Warhol perfectly, “[He was] one-man demonstration of the triumph of publicity over art.”

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Warhol’s aesthetic turned up in a poem I wrote in the mid-1990’s:

Mechanical Drawing

Art is debasing and elitist say
many conservative critics pointing
fingers that never held a brush
at powdered wigs and highback chairs,
at icons drowning in tinted urine,
at showing the body to the public
but Warhol felt that one image
replicates another and puts distance
between creator and object via
machines. Use one model
for a statue then break the mold–
kill her like a pyramid attendant
then sketch the once removed marble
over and over until like endless
photocopies the original blurs
back to blankness. Anyone can
safely understand no statement
at all but art becomes little
more than a camera shooting stills for
a docudrama and in the process
the source is lost. Aesthetics are easy
as paint by numbers then. My curator
is a senator from a new school:
expansive minimalism. Obtain
perspective from a computer poser
and crunch canvases like a series of zeros
and ones. The null set will seldom
offend when the paintings in every
museum are supplanted with mirrors.
Listen to the tour guide and leave your
clothes on. Never look at yourself.

Homage to Alexander Calder (1999)

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
—Alexander Calder

From the National Gallery of Art:

Alexander Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components. Yet his invention of the “mobile” — a word coined in 1931 by artist Marcel Duchamp to designate Calder’s moving sculpture — was only one of Calder’s achievements. In his early wire figures and in his “stabiles,” static sculptures in sheet metal, Calder created innovative works by exploring the aesthetic possibilities of untraditional materials. As a major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder’s stabiles and mobiles challenged the prevailing notion of sculpture as a composition of masses and volumes by proposing a new definition based on the ideas of open space and transparency. With the giant stabiles of the latter part of his career, Calder launched a new type of public sculpture — one which proved so successful that many of these works have become landmarks in cities around the globe.

And from the Joslyn Art Museum:

Alexander Calder, America’s first abstract artist of international renown, is forever associated with his invention of the mobile. Born into a Philadelphia family of sculptors, he studied first as a mechanical engineer and then as a painter in the style of the Ashcan School. In 1926, Calder left for Paris, then Europe’s cultural capital. There he attracted the attention of the avant-garde with his amusing performances with a partly-mechanized miniature circus of wire and cloth figures. By 1930 he had developed freely moving sculptures of arcs and spheres. Calder’s mobiles were squarely within the spirit of the times, from their engagement with machine technology to their use of abstraction as a universal language of creative truth. Linked to Dada and Surrealism by playfulness and chance arrangement, his sculpture responded to Constructivism by energizing art’s elements in the viewer’s space.

Calder, fascinated by the mechanical possibilities of his materials, successfully merged engineering and art. His innovative, abstract work is industrial-tinged and aggressively modern. He saw sculpture as dynamic — as filled with the motion of life as electrons gyrating around a nucleus.

Homage to Niels Bohr (2004)

From Nobelprize.org:

In the autumn of 1911 [Bohr] made a stay at Cambridge, where he profited by following the experimental work going on in the Cavendish Laboratory under Sir J.J. Thomson’s guidance, at the same time as he pursued own theoretical studies. In the spring of 1912 he was at work in Professor Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester, where just in those years such an intensive scientific life and activity prevailed as a consequence of that investigator’s fundamental inquiries into the radioactive phenomena. Having there carried out a theoretical piece of work on the absorption of alpha rays which was published in the Philosophical Magazine, 1913, he passed on to a study of the structure of atoms on the basis of Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus. By introducing conceptions borrowed from the Quantum Theory as established by Planck, which had gradually come to occupy a prominent position in the science of theoretical physics, he succeeded in working out and presenting a picture of atomic structure that, with later improvements (mainly as a result of Heisenberg’s ideas in 1925), still fitly serves as an elucidation of the physical and chemical properties of the elements.

[…]

Bohr also contributed to the clarification of the problems encountered in quantum physics, in particular by developing the concept of complementarily. Hereby he could show how deeply the changes in the field of physics have affected fundamental features of our scientific outlook and how the consequences of this change of attitude reach far beyond the scope of atomic physics and touch upon all domains of human knowledge. These views are discussed in a number of essays, written during the years 1933-1962. They are available in English, collected in two volumes with the title Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge and Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, edited by John Wiley and Sons, New York and London, in 1958 and 1963, respectively.

[…]

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War II, Bohr escaped to Sweden and spent the last two years of the war in England and America, where he became associated with the Atomic Energy Project. In his later years, he devoted his work to the peaceful application of atomic physics and to political problems arising from the development of atomic weapons. In particular, he advocated a development towards full openness between nations. His views are especially set forth in his Open Letter to the United Nations, June 9, 1950.

As a Danish Jew, Bohr barely escaped being arrested by the Nazis. Later, when he came to Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb, he hoped that the weapon would prevent future atrocities by other would-be Hitlers. He also hoped the terrifying nature of atomic weapons would destroy not nations but the very possibility of war itself.

From Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

The weapon devised as an instrument of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the memorandum Bohr was writing in sweltering Washington emphasized; it was “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future conditions of warfare.” When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war (532).

Paging Dick Cheney. Please carefully re-read that last paragraph.

Oppenheimer had a different view — especially as he watched the Trinity Test. The atomic bomb would not eradicate war; instead, it was “the destroyer of worlds.”

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On the lighter side, I remember an episode of The Simpsons where Bart is drawing a comic book based on Homer’s funny antics when he becomes angry. In one bit, Homer is watching television and flies into a rage when he learns that a show he enjoys, When Dinosaurs Get Drunk, is being replaced with one called The Boring World of Niels Bohr.

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The image was originally rendered in Sterling-ware and post-processed with mad abandon until its physical structure was first decimated, then reconstituted.

The Familiar (1999)

I’ve always been more interested in using fractals to push ideas rather than to serve as decorations

Still Life with Dracula (2002)

and this approach has sometimes proven very handy at Halloween to illustrate horror themes

Back to the Blair Witch (2000)

because although fractals can treat by assuming forms that are strikingly beautiful and infinitely lovely

Ghost Rhetoric (2003)

they also occasionally trick by mutating into forms that are awful and terrible and horrible and icky

Dandy Werewolf (2004)

but, of course, and by an artistic process combining both treat and trick, only in a frightfully fun way.

Jar Jar Agonistes (2006)

Gollum is way better.
I evoke birthday blight and snakes
to haul home. I stoke vitriol
and hollow men to guess the price

of my money pit. Sad to be
pitied more than Lieberman or
other juggling carpetbaggers. I seem
a nasty senator, a recycling

smattering of acting and idiot
clowning. Executable. Embedded
face down in a chemical treatment plant
to erase all screentime tribulation.

Decline the first glass coffin.
Meesa never asked to be born
or a racist Barney. I’m a rubber schema
and uncomfortable comic relief.

I must be expunged from all prints.
Even my death will annoy you.

~/~

This is a “Google poem” — a found text compiled by bits of search phrase strings from Google searches of agonistes and jar jar.

Wikipedia explains the term:

The word Agonistes, found as an epithet following a person’s name, means “the struggler” or “the combatant.” It is most often an allusion to John Milton‘s 1671 verse tragedy Samson Agonistes, which recounts the end of Samson’s life, when he is a blind captive of the Philistines (famous line: “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves”). The struggle that “Samson Agonistes” centers upon is the effort of Samson to renew his faith in God’s support.

Probably the most famous post-Miltonic use of Agonistes is by T.S. Eliot, who titled one of his dramas Sweeney Agonistes, where Sweeney, who appeared in several of Eliot’s poems, represents the materialistic and shallow modern man. Another well-known example is Garry Wills’ 1969 political book Nixon Agonistes, discussing embattled president Richard Nixon.

Tiffany Lamp Gone Bad (2001)

May West liked good salmon.
Her bedroom had dark panelling

and lava lamps. Over her tables hung
racks of critics behind the bar

where bad service is largely blamed
on Texas. Her rental limo

was toothless and made me think of
camp. Such dim jerky tastes

survivalist or maybe all the songs
about trendy green plots gas up

through hanging smoke. Her hip
inquisitor makes a great square

room addition. I hear her voice
calling me claw-footed.

Her old man gives off a soft glow
low and sexless. Victorian.

Well cut by Jack like shards
of sour cream on a white plate.

~/~

This is a “Google” poem — a found text pieced together by search hit syntax snatches from a Google search of the phrase tiffany lamp gone bad.

Unattainable (1999)

An impossible self help question
will wait
check out
be home
unless you are a fan

of stupid networks. One of the tightest
going nuclear photographs cuts

waste and overlooks ad agency
ethics. To understand more

toast the Broadway stage with
handgun exits, silent designs

before clicking to play
shut the books
cool detachment
self protection
when the Coca Cola intelligentsia

stumble in household income
and brain drain your

favorite photos. Who is
that artist in the break room mirror

found in prison? I have a prop
like yours: a picture with problems.

~/~

This is a “Google poem” — a found poem pieced together from syntax snatches uncovered in Google search results of the word unattainable.

Mandelbrot Among the Gypsies (2001)

Gaston Julia, recovering from injuries caused by a hospital, was named king of the gypsies in 1917. He had darned some socks for corpses and driven a hawthorn stake through his soon-to-be famous set. Much of his initial groundwork was spent decapitating computers on a finite area of the X-Y plane. Female vampires might have been more helpful in seducing his theory, but Pierre Fatou was a familiar who was missing a finger. He used melons to free up computer time. Of course, they dripped blood. To ward off vampires, gypsies used computer-generated cremation grounds. In 1979, Benoit Mandelbrot himself could reproduce after he made noises and calculated Kali. The goddess drank his image — all his blood was drained but none was spilled, thereby the “Mandelbrot Set.” The values of IBM went from C to mullo (one nomadic perimeter of a large, complex ghoul). The discrete boundary of this formula is very loyal to dead relatives, both inside and out. In 1982, Mandelbrot’s soul re-entered the world, and he published a book similar to ours only very different. It was called In the Fractal There Is No Death. His soul, kept crated in wooden boxes, stayed more around his publisher than his body. This was actually seminal, for undead followers soon generated and sprang out of the ground. They believed only in dendrites and Slavic primacy. Later, after deep zooming and (re)animating irregular shapes, interesting patterns like animal appendages emerged and wandered the countryside. These beautiful images were a surprise, and intestines and a skull combined to make an apparition that drank only coloring gradients. So, yes, Bram Stoker spread his work at high magnification. By 1000 AD, computer artists with their powerful PCs had settled in Turkey. All culture and contemporary simulation seemed to stop shortly afterward.

~/~

Using the “cut-up” composition method popularized by William S. Burroughs, two blocks of text were run through a virtual cut-up machine. The result: a randomly scrambled “found” text mirroring chaos theory and yielding new meanings.

The two texts used here and merged were:
1) an article about the beginnings of fractal art–
2) an article on gypsy vampire superstitions–

~/~

I sometimes try to write poetry using similar steps to the way I make fractal images.

My process for creating a fractal-like poetry begins with the “cut-up” theory of writing popularized by the late Beat writer William S. Burroughs. It’s probably written by elves Wikipedia describes cut-up composition as follows:

I then try to add two new dimensions to cut-up composition: 1) collage software and 2) bits of fractal theory.

My compositions begin by pasting two existing text excerpts into a virtual cut-up machine. This is software designed to scramble and splice texts to make new, “found” texts. But I use the software in a very specific way — and for a very specific end: to create a kind of “fractal poetry.” There are, indeed, some connections. Chopping and rearranging (layering?) the same two “set” texts means subsequent cut-up(s) will always be “self-similar.” The field of available words never changes and syntax replicates but is altered with each iteration. In theory, the cut-up text could be infinite — if I could live forever and constantly keep mashing up the same two select texts. Fractals are also infinite in theory, but a graphic viewer capable of a never-ending deep zoom has (to my knowledge) not yet been created. Moreover, by placing all of the cut-up machine’s settings on “random,” chaos theory comes into play. So, the resulting cut-up texts do have some fractal characteristics — computer generation, self-similarity, theoretical infinity, and influence of chaos theory.

I am not the only writer to link fractals and poetry. Poet Alice Fulton has discussed “fractal poetics” in her book Feeling as a Foreign Language (Graywolf Press, 1999). She writes:

Naturally, Fulton has her detractors. Michael Theune disses her ideas in an issue of Pleaides:

Fulton applies fractal theory to existing free verse patterns in hopes of discovering a middle ground of exciting expression poised between sense and nonsense and for extracting (deep zooming?) new meanings. Fulton is less interested in generating poetry based on fractal components than she is concerned with applying fractal theory as a critical tool to decode and validate what she sees as super-charged free verse poetry. In contrast, I am more attracted to using pieces of fractal theory as a mirror and a map to generate new “found texts” that are somewhat fractal in both compositional method and structural design. Ideally, such new texts can truly inhabit Fulton’s “third space.”

And that’s where I want to be. In that third space suspended between chaos and order.

Fulton goes on to say is poem is not a fractal because poems aren’t “complex adaptive systems.” True enough — but if a poem can be spliced and diced to embed at least some fractal characteristics, and each subsequent stage of that cut-up is a new iteration, doesn’t that evolving new text demonstrate traces of complex adaptation? Or is the inclusion of deliberate randomness in my cut-up process an adaptation buzz killer?

Portrait of George W. Bush (2004)

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
—Theodor Adorno

A poem that calls us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confession, by its consequences, not by our ability to verify its truth. In fact, the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence.
—Carolyn Forche, “The Poetry of Witness”

Artists do not create in a vacuum; they are indisputably coupled to the society and times in which they work. It may well be that an artist can realize aesthetic triumphs while ignoring society, but willful unconcern regarding social matters is also a political position.
—Mark Vallen, “Why All Art Is Political”

The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?
—Phillip Guston, Writing in the mid-1960s

The common wisdom is that people should not talk about two things. This is one of them.

I don’t think your everyday entry-level fast food French fryer and one-day-in-the-future museum patron thinks much about the possibilities of incorporating political statements into fractal art. A fractal, to those blessed enough to recognize one, is likely more akin to eye candy — saturated swirls seen on a calendar in Barnes and Noble. Or something vaguely tied to mathematics — more like a theorem than a painting — or a pretty picture intersecting with irrational numbers but never with social, economic, or political concerns. Fractals can be visually stunning — but can they stun others into epiphanies — or just say anything to anyone about his or her life? Should they be used to comment on world affairs, social concerns, or even popular culture?

There are some, both proletariat and bourgeoisie, and convinced that fractals have no grounding in the world, who would find such questions absurd. I remember a day last winter when I dropped by to pick up some Giclees from the photographer who handles prints for me. His wife, a painter, studied the fresh prints briefly before laughing. “Well, there’s certainly nothing like this in nature,” she said confidently. “Don’t be so sure,” I replied, pointing to one of the studio’s windows. Outside, the bare branches of an oak tree were reaching skyward to obscure a bank of self-similar clouds.

A hypothesis then. If fractals are of this world, then they can also be utilized — politically activated, as it were — to comment upon what happens in it.

The Enron Board Meets for the Last Time (2002)

If one accepts the premise that fractals can be art — and I do — then all the historical/philosophical paradigms and puzzles about the nature of art apply to fractal art as well. Artists, fractal or otherwise, who dabble in and dab on politics to their renders walk some fine lines and climb some slippery slopes. Is one’s art serving as a cry for social reform while still displaying elements of Keats‘ Siamese twins of truth and beauty — still providing a gesture that calls the soul upward? Or does such art become reductive, didactic, polemical — a blunt instrument to bludgeon the viewer into accepting the artist’s point of view?

Dyske Suematsu, in “The Paradox of Political Art,” leans to the latter position:

The most apparent problem I see with today’s political art is its deterministic nature. Art often raises salient questions, but when a political artwork is morally motivated, its questions become moral directives disguised as questions. That is, they are rhetorical questions. As such, there is a right way and a wrong way to look at it. A correct answer is always already provided for you by the artist. The questions and the discussions it provokes either support the answer or refute it. And, the value of the work is contingent on its dialectical outcome. From the point of view of the audience, the experience of such political art resembles that of reading an op-ed column in a newspaper.

Point well taken. Why are you reading Orbit Trap? Presumably to see and read about fractal art, yes? If you wanted political discussion, you would have pointed your surfboard to Salon or Slate or Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs? Hippie jerk blogger. Bring on more spirals.

Maybe it is best to be careful before one gets all socially aware. Suematsu has other complaints with political artists. They assume a ethical superiority but are not required to show that their own expressions are ethically pure. After all, why did I do the piece above about Enron? Was it because I was outraged by the scandal and appalled that the company’s employees were cheated out of their pensions? Or was it because I figured seizing a hot button political topic could help further my career as an artist? And if I lampoon Enron’s directors, don’t I have a reciprocal obligation to show that my motives are not just as crass?

And what form would such proof take? How can political artists demonstrate that their intentions are sincere? Testify before a Congressional committee? Undergo short-of-organ-failure questioning while being waterboarded at Guantanamo? Donate all the money made from their fractal art (haaaa!!!) to Feed the Children? Will such philanthropy in turn make my intentions for lashing out at Enron execs as selfless as those of Mother Teresa in your eyes?

Dream of Napalm (2006)

But can any artist or artwork completely wash its Pontius Pilate hands clean from the stink of politics. After all, George Orwell, in Why I Write, asserts that all art is political and notes: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” So, since art cannot be apolitical, should artists serve as “witnesses” for the times they live in — especially if other information agencies (Fox News, cough cough) increasingly editorialize and are openly biased to particular political viewpoints. Should the studio, or the fractal generator, be an ostrich hole? Or does the artist have an obligation to record injustices and atrocities and document corruption and cultural insanity? If not the artist, who? Will governmental records accurately portray a regime or does such a historical record run a greater risk of being sanitized? Moreover, will any state-sanctioned archives be told more convincingly than the visual language art can speak? Take, for example, this:

A child’s drawing of arriving at Terezin Concentration Camp where 15,000 children died.

[Image seen on Children’s Art of the Holocaust]

Some artists sense the pull of history deeply and feel self-expression through art can be constructive towards spurring social change. Art Hazelwood, speaking earlier this year at a panel discussion on “Political Art — Timely and Timeless” said:

Over the last several years I’ve talked to lots of people about political art and there has been a gradual shift. Before the Iraq War there seemed to be an attitude that political art was out of date or people had a general hostility towards it. But recently I’ve noticed a shift in people’s attitudes. People I have talked to are changing their minds. There are still the purists who believe that any concession will debase the temple of art, but their voice, once supreme in the art world, is now growing weaker. And it is obvious why. Political art might always have a place but in a time of war, and in a time of a rising police state political art becomes a necessity.

[…]

Some people say that political art has no effect in changing people’s minds, that it is preaching to the converted. To which I would answer…no one ever measured the value of a painting of the crucifixion by how many converts it made. Political art is cumulative in its effect. Its not merely one political print that changes the world. It is a part of a cultural movement.

Others, like Jed Perl writing in the New Republic, observe that art cannot always be expediently insulated from life.

The artists who find it difficult to turn from the horrors of the morning news to the specialized problems that confront them in their studios are confronting an authentic dilemma, for even ivory towers have doors and windows. While dropping the day’s headlines into the middle of a canvas may never be a way of making a painting, an artist’s far-flung experience must be allowed to seep into the studio, if only in a dialectical way — as a tumult of feelings to which the orderly spirit of a still life or a geometric abstraction offers a much-needed riposte.

Legacy of Exxon (2000)

Am I wrong to show President Bush as a faceless blank slate — as an empty vessel to be filled up with NeoCon nonsense by those shielding him in his no-bad-news bubble? Have I degraded my art or pummeled your temples because I suggest the Enron board is a pack of dogs and that Exxon’s legacy is a horrific oil spill in Alaska. Maybe.

Not all of my art is political. I can (try to be) funny. I sometimes wander into nature. But some days the news of the world intrudes into my generator. Maybe I’m poisoning a percentage of my audience — and foolish to hope for cultural awareness and progressive social change — and admit that my ethics and morals could probably use a thorough questioning. But there is one thing I can say for certain about those days when politics creeps in to my fractals…

I sleep better on those nights.

~/~

Bush: Generated in QuaSZ. Minimally post-processed.

Enron: Generated in Fractal Zplot. Heavily post-processed.

Napalm: Generated in Sterling-ware. Heavily post-processed.

Exxon: Generated in Dofo-Zon Elite. Heavily post-processed.

~/~

Cross-posted to Blog with a View

The Passion of R2D2 (2006)

I know what you’re thinking. Why does the Stars Wars droid who burps in squelches deserve a passion? Passions are reserved for gods and geniuses. Christ. Van Gogh — or, at least, Kirk Douglas playing him in Lust for Life. Bardot. Charo. Camille Paglia. Courtney Love (or is the passion aligned against her?). But R2 of the metallic blinking swivelling head? Surely not.

Au contraire. Trust yr. blogger. There’s more than cuddly Ewoks in the dark pockets of the Net. Dare we venture where the Force is no match for the dressed-in-white-plastic armies of sarcasm?

From Big, Fat, Stinking Software — the complete review of Sim R2D2, v.2.0:

Randomly plays R2D2 sounds.

Use it to annoy your coworkers.

Got it? I suspect that’s the same feeling I experienced when a “friend” gave my young daughter one of those cheapo cassette players with a plastic mic.

What’s sadder, I suppose, is that my daughter is now heading off for college — but I still sometimes haul the Belle boombox to my poetry readings — for, you know, enhanced “360 stereo sound” effects.

Meanwhile, the anti-R2 League of Extraordinary Geeks has a full battery pack of complaints:

Like this comment in the form of a short screenplay by Star Wars Commentary — seen on Robot Tees who ask “Is It Okay to Kill Robots?”

Darth Vader: Luke, I am your father.

Luke Skywalker: NO!!!!!!!!!!! Wait. What…?

Darth Vader: I said I’m your father.

Luke Skywalker: I heard what you said, but a Robot can’t have a human son, silly Darth Vader. Therefore, you must die.

Darth Vader: NO!!!!!!!!!

Sound Effects: (Darth Vader dying) Slash! Whoom! Clash!

Luke Skywalker: Took you long enough. Heh…

R2D2: beep beep blop bloop blep (Why have you done this? Why did you kill my father?)

Luke Skywalker: You have seen too much now you must die.

Sound Effects: (R2D2 dying) Slash. Sparkle.

Luke Skywalker: Stupid Robots. Anyone else?

Please can you stop the noise
I’m trying to get some rest…
–Radiohead, “Paranoid Android”

[Image seen on “The Graveyard” at BattleBricks]

And you don’t want to know some of the enhanced interrogation techniques Jar Jar gets put through.

But to actually have a capital P Passion, R2’s iconic circuits must fail less than Windows and have profoundly influenced popular culture. Imitators abound — from Buck Rogers‘ cloying Twinkie to James Cameron’s “I’ll be back” (in California) Terminator to the new improved Battlestar Galactica‘s sexy, boltless, buff Cylons. But what influenced George Lucas to power up his feedback-gurgling robot in the first place? From we just make it all up as we go along Wikipedia:

Some people believe George Lucas got the look for his robot from a vacuum cleaner. It was Rexair’s Rainbow model D2, sold between 1959 and 1969. This was parodied in an episode of That 70’s Show in a Star Wars themed dream Eric Forman was having. In the dream, Kitty Forman, dressed as a Rebel pilot, is using R2D2 as a vacuum cleaner before using the blue dot on top of R2D2’s head to turn it off so she could answer the door. This is also parodied in the opening sequence of Tripping the Rift.

Suck it up, boys. I clean the galaxy for no (hu)man.

[Image seen on Images de Star Wars!!!]

So, clearly, spirit and funds willing, Mel Gibson could easily have another “passion” smashed film project. Just be sure to take his keys before he insists on driving the X-Wing Fighter home.

~/~

Today’s image is fairly new and rendered in QuaSZ before being beat around its titanium temples in Photoshop and Painter. Buzz Pro and Lucis’ Sculpture also helped to prevent rust.

Cross-posted to Blog with a View.

~/~

I know Tim will jump on soon and post his own welcome, but while I’m on the line here…

I’d like to greet everyone and say thanks — to contributors, to commenters, and to readers.

You know what’s really cool? Tim and I never officially “opened” Orbit Trap. As people agreed to give of their time and participate, they took the initiative — forged ahead — started posting. I love that. Meanwhile, Tim and I are playing catch-up and still “tweaking” both the blog’s look and the contributor’s list. Look for more on both fronts in the days ahead.

So, now that we’ve started, what can you expect to find on Orbit Trap? Well, our main banner says (or will shortly — we’re still decorating) “revolving around fractal art.” The broad scope is deliberate. Still, in general, give us a hint as to what kinds of postings might pop up? Here’s a few possibilities we mentioned to potential contributors:

Fractal Topics: –math, –programming, –software review, –theory, — history, –research, –ties to other disciplines, –links with the natural world, and so on.

Fractal Art Topics: –examples/images, –discussion, –commentary, –process descriptions, –website reviews, — art communities, –promotion, –prints, –standards, –ethics, — favorite works, –idle musings, –funny stories, and so on.

Digital Art/Computer Graphics Topics: — post-processing, –tutorials, –formulae, –enhancement/rendering strategies, and so on.

But there’s nothing prescriptive — no etched stones. The contributors have carte blanche to explore and examine on their own terms and using whatever creative methods they wish. I think it’s a safe bet readers will be viewers, too. And there won’t be any shortage of art. Or writing either — whether technical, expository, creative, or other. Or tones. Or ideas. Or, sometimes, disagreements. Or, ideally, mutual respect.

Tim and I hope readers will also feel free to participate and collaborate in our lively experiment. Comments are switched on for a reason. And I really like what Lynne said earlier about feeling the loss of fun. Fun. I remember fun. Bring it on.

One more thing. Shakespeare once asked, “What’s in a name?” Tim and I thought about calling this place something practical like The Fractal Blog or whatever. We kicked around some ideas and finally settled on Orbit Trap. As Tim said to me in an email: “Orbit Trap is quickly identified by fractalists as being fractal-related. Also, to me, Orbit Trap suggests a collecting or gathering of different, diverging movements into a single place, and that’s one of the purposes of the blog: to bring together members of an artform that is diverging but still has a common origin.”

What he said.

But…we did consider a few other potential blog names that were voted off the island. Here’s a short list:

Recurse
Iterate This!!
Seahorse Valley
All Brots, No Wieners
Let’s Bitch About Julia
BailOut Now
MySelf Similar
Deeper Zoom
Hyper But Complex
You Don’t Know Quat
Biomorph Hunt
Spawn of Newton
Lsystem Failure
A Semi-Solid Guess
Z-Real Thing

See? The atmosphere could have been much much worse…