My blogging slows down in the summer when other projects get moved to the front burner. But I’m still lurking around.

The 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest exhibition begins in a little over a week in Hyderabad, India, at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians, although (so far) publicity for the event has been zilch.  On the main BMFAC site, there has been no information whatsoever about the exhibition at the ICM — or, for that matter, the two earlier shows in Spain.  The main ICM page also says nothing about the exhibition — even if one searches the site for terms like "fractal" and "Mandelbrot."

I hope the main BMFAC site will eventually put up some documentation about the 2009 show.  After all, why go to the trouble to stage an international fractal art exhibit, and then act like the whole thing is some kind of classified secret?

Unless, for some reason, something about the show does need to be kept under wraps.  

~/~

And this came across the transom of the Ultra Fractal Mailing List recently:

From: Frederik Slijkerman <info@ultrafractal.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 7:14 PM
Subject: [ultrafractal] IMPORTANT: Ultra Fractal mailing list has been moved
To: “ultrafractal@lists.fractalus.com” <ultrafractal@lists.fractalus.com>

Hi everyone,

The Ultra Fractal mailing list has been moved to the main ultrafractal.com server, so it also has a new address:

ultrafractal@list.ultrafractal.com

[…]

As you may know, until now this mailing list was running at fractalus.com, administered by Damien Jones. Damien has very generously offered server resources and his free time for more than ten years now, and I believe it is time for me to take over this task. Thank you, Damien, for everything you’ve done during all these years.

OT readers might recall that the main Ultra Fractal site moved off Fractalus earlier this year.  No explanation (other than what appears above) was given for moving the site and list off Jones’ server.  Last summer, after Fractalus went dark for a time, Jones offered this enigmatic statement on the UF List:

My role as a web site host is no longer required, and I cannot fulfill that role adequately in any case (especially not for those sites that have moved on).

Nothing stays the same forever. Nor should it.

Nor did it, apparently, although, like so many of Jones’ activities, the reasons for this UF hosting break remain strictly hush hush.

But I do see some progress.  At least Jones didn’t resort to his previous tactic of booting folks (who merely disagree with him) off Fractalus by ginning up phony charges of protecting his server from alleged "security threats."

Many people have a favorite sport.  Some follow soccer, others american football or hockey, basketball, baseball, cricket…  I follow hurricanes, the tropical storms or cyclones that form in the Carribean during summer and fall of every year.  There’s never a players strike and you can follow all the action over the internet.  In fact, you really don’t want to buy tickets to see any of these “games” live.  The American National Hurricane Center gives you the best seat in town, or out of town, rather.  There’s only one team but everybody loses.  And it’s impossible to cheat.  It’s a funny sport.

This year was supposed to be much more energetic, which was a great relief after the incredibly disappointing 2009 season.  I’m still waiting for a really big, Category 4 or 5, game this year.  Bonnie was so pathetic the NHC stopped talking about her before she even made landfall which, in this game, is ordinarily the main event.  She just went back to being a depression —tropical depression.

They don’t name them only after women anymore, they’ll use any name.  They ought to let the folks living in the path of the hurricane suggest the names.  But they’ve got more important things on their minds –hiding, dodging, staying alive.

Life is the sport of sports and art is its World Cup.  But that’s coming from a guy who thinks hurricane season is more fun to watch than the SuperBowl.

Back to fractal art:  here’s a piece of fractal artwork by Deviant Art member Sophiiiii that caught my eye just this week and also strongly suggested –hurricane– to me.  (That’s Sophi with five “eyes”.)

– Click on any of the images below to view them full size and on their original site –

Ghosty Frosty by Sophiiiii on Deviant Art

This image (by “Five-Eyed Sophi”) has a number of interesting aspects.  Although, from the title, she probably didn’t intend it to have a marine theme much less that of a hurricane, it fits well into this and I think she saw a similar terrifying weather theme from her choice of the word, frost.  But maybe the spider web is the terrifying theme here?

I guess that’s the thing with “imaginary” art: the image is open to a number of interpretations, each one arising from the personal context the image unavoidably becomes mixed up in when it engages the viewer’s mind.

It was made in Incendia and I suspect has a few other layers incorporated into it, such as the spider web and the cloudy, watery background.

As I was saying about hurricanes, they are “wrathful” creatures that arise almost out of nothing and quickly grow (within days sometimes) into massively destructive beasts.  They are also composed, not of a neat circulation pattern which we see in the simplified diagrams used to explain them, but of broken and winding bands of thunderstorms and sometimes tornadoes spawned by those thunderstorms.  Sophiiiii’s image here, although completely artificial, is an excellent example of such an “extreme weather phenomenon”.

And it looks good too.  Incendia seems to have this nice ability to make grainy images that are more characteristic of real world imagery than the slick smooth world of computers, but I think Sophiiiii has added a lot of her own artistic talent to make this one looks a well as it does.

Tulum, 1988, Acrylic and Pastel on Paper, 18 x 20, by Peter Alexander

Sure.  This one’s not a fractal.  But when you’re floating in the ocean off the coast of Quintana Roo where Mexico meets Belize and the rest of Central America, such things are incidental.  There is the hint of shore in the dark bottom we see through the water, but where is it?  This is the morning after the hurricane.  It’s beautiful.  Out there somewhere is your house, but take heart, there’s plenty of building materials all around you.  One of them must have hit you and knocked you out.

I read an anectdote about hurricane Hattie that erased Belize City back in the 60s.  The author, a young boy at the time, told about how his family had completely lost their house (built on the beach, incidentally) but then a week later his father and uncle were out fishing and found a better one that the storm had dropped off from somewhere else.  I’ll bet there’s a lot of that shuffling of property going on in the wake of hurricanes every year.

Westmoreland, 2009, monoprint, 12 7/8 x 14 5/8, by Peter Alexander

Obviously this isn’t a fractal either, but Peter Alexander has made palm trees into such a separate and well developed genre much like the fractal spiral is in fractal art that they deserve a mention.  Click on the image to see the whole collection.  Very colorful.  I had a hard time picking the best one because they’re all very interesting.  Monoprints are prints that are made with unique characteristics and thus not reproducible merely by making another impression with the plate.  (I’ll bet they sell for more too.)  I think the coloring here is very sophisticated and carefully done.  I don’t like a lot of contemporary art (of the paintbrush sort) but these palm trees are something completely different.  Better than Warhol?

Revived by Sophiiiii

This one is just fantastic.  Color, shadows, lighting, contrast; it’s like a carefully painted old master’s work, laboriously rendered and painstakingly perfected.  That’s what Incendia can do when the right person is clicking it’s buttons.  I guess it’s a bit like paintbrushes: what comes from them depends on who’s holding them.  This is sort of weird, but I think the real beauty of this work is in what the image is reflecting.  It’s the light source that we don’t see.  There’s something golden, shining and radiant in this image –off screen– and it’s all suggested by what we see in the image.  The question is not, “What is this?” but rather, “Where are we?”  This is a great place.

To me this image is sea shells and other sea debris caught in a tangle of branches on the shore after that world cup of storms –a hurricane.  Neatly collected, I see.  Apparently the best time to collect sea shells is right after a storm (the key word is “after”).  That might also be the best time to check and see if your neighbors are still alive, so you’ll have to chose between the two.  Of course if your neighbors are down on the beach… with the seashells…

Sophiiiii added a link on her Deviant Art page to the image she used as the background for this image.  It’s worth looking at too.

Colour Acrylic 20 by Tackon (Deviant Art)

I find it interesting how the background complements the incendia image.  It may seem trivial, but the background layer, even just a colored texture like this, just like the frame on a painting, is part of the artwork and contributes to the viewer’s general impression in ways which I suspect can be quite strong even if they may appear subtle at first glance.  Speaking of frames…

What came first?  The Picture or the Frame?

Flickr’s thesmartestfish (Sophia Brueckner) said “experimenting with some vintage round picture frames I bought on etsy. I was thinking it would be interesting to have a series of paintings in round frames. not sure if I want to keep going in this direction though.”

(Etsy.com apparently is a website that describes itself as “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies.”)

Thesmartestfish really is pretty bright.  Not only is she a Master of Fine Arts student, she also works with javascript to create generative imagery using the Processing platform; a nice combination of skills we could all use.  From this I suspect she either printed and embellished by paintbrush the images in her round collection (similar to monoprinting) or just painted them freehand using their simple but characteristic, generative look as a guide.  Either way she’s produced something quite appealing.

Here they are; nicely photographed, too.

Round Painting Collection by smartestfish (Flickr)

Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish

Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish

Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish

Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish

Javascript-photoshop1 by smartestfish

The round paintings look hand-painted but the bottom image the author describes as “shapes generated by javascript + photoshop with a scanned watercolor background.”

It’s a strange dynamic between frame and picture but there’s more dynamism going on.   Consider the interplay between the digital imagery of the javascript-photoshop process and thesmartestfish’s own hand painting skills.  Thesmartestfish created the javascript which in turn produced the snakey tendril imagery.  But that computer generated imagery in turn went on to inspire the hand made images in the round picture frames.  From such well defined and synergistic rotation often comes a powerful hurricane.  But it has to stay well out at sea, away from land, and feed on  warm waters and also avoid the vertical shearing forces of interfering ridges and troughs which dissipate the force of that rising energy coming off the sea.  Hey, some people like to talk in football or baseball analogies.  I prefer hurricanes.

Finally, everything flows back to where it came.  Solomon remarked on this very thing almost three thousand years ago: “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.  To the place the streams come from, there they return again.  All things are wearisome, more than one can say.”

Ouch.  Here’s a fine illustration of that somewhat depressing/encouraging quotation.  It’s in the form of a video screen capture of a highly talented java applet rendering Fractal Drainage Patterns.  This is extremely fractal.  But I doubt it would have cheered up Solomon: everything is just sinking into the earth and if you watch the applet long enough at the original site, everything eventually fades into nothing.

[flashvideo file=http://ambaka.com/blog/26/drain02.flv width=254 height=252 image=http://ambaka.com/blog/26/drain02.png /]

I think they’re cool.  They’ve got a weird, sci-fi, Andromeda Strain replicating space-virus look to them.  I suppose epidemics and even wars have similarities to sports, just like hurricanes season does.  But hurricane season has a much more regular, reliable schedule than those other disasters even if all the hurricane game dates are impossible to predict ahead of time except by more than just a few days.  I should go check right now.  There’s a new update at the NHC about every four hours.  The next big one could be boiling away as we speak.

I’ve been surfing.  From the noisey beaches of Deviant Art to the silent shores of guano islands.  Every one here’s a gem to me.  Each one gleamed in its own way when I saw it.

Remember this:  There are things that can be bought for a few glass beads in the South Seas that can be sold for a king’s ransom back in Amsterdam.  But remember this also:  there are things that can be bought for a king’s ransom in Amsterdam that are worth nothing more than a few glass beads in the South Seas.

Click on any of the images to see them full-size and on their original website where you can browse more works by the artists.

The Complex by David Makin

Dave seems to make a very wide variety of fractal imagery and works almost entirely, I believe, in Ultra Fractal.  I’ve never seen anything quite like this.  A city of dreidels?  The surface texture suggest some old kind of nylon material.  There’s a strange vintage radio tube feeling to it.  Nice, subtle coloring that reinforces the 20s or 30s Art Deco style (before the time of brightly colored plastics).  A rather unique image with a similarly unique style.

Daniel White Julia Mode by Bent-Winged Angel

Strange electronic vibes and I like strange electronic vibes.  Perhaps an unusual image to draw attention to, but who cares about the usual images?  I suspect this one was uploaded as part of a Fractalforums.com discussion, but that just adds to it’s exotic allure.  Maybe Bent-Winged Angel wasn’t trying to make a piece of art with this one, but she did.  It splashes like water but turns into grains of sand around the edges.  Far out.

Graffiti by Talfrac

Talfrac adds that the image was made with Fractal Imaginator.  This is a program by Terry Gintz that I’ve never tried.  I like the clean, solid, silkscreen rendering style that the image has.  Sharp, crisp colors.  Anyone familiar with fractals will recognize the common organic structure to the image despite it’s very untraditional –vector-like– blocky rendering style.  This looks more “art gallery” like than most of the smooth, millions of colors fractal images normally seen.

20091226-1 by Samuel Monnier

Full color or black and white, a good image is simply a good image.  Art’s funny that way.  Working with the most advanced and feature rich formats doesn’t guarantee anything.  Of course there’s nothing simple or retro about this image here by Samuel Monnier.  It’s another example of his sophisticated pattern piling technique that he’s been polishing over the years and developing with Ultra Fractal.  Click on the image to go to the original site where you can explore the vast algorithmic world which we are only seeing as a mere thumbnail here.  There’s  so many interesting things to see in this one.  It’s like a table of contents for a large anthology.

FRAC-tional Friction by Lenord

This is a mandelbox, I’m guessing.  Not your average type of mandelbox and not the usual style.  Strong design is what makes this one special.  Everything lined up and arranged in a careful display of shape, form and symmetry –but with the usual mandelbox variations and complexity to it.  Look closely, is it really symmetrical?  anywhere?  All an artist really does is help us to see the great scenes going on around us that us common folks don’t seem to notice.  I think that’s what Lenord’s done with this one: he’s helped us to see the simple shapes and the sophisticated patterns made in the mandelbox by cutting out all the usual distractions of surface texture and wild, vast perspective.  Yes, art is complex, but only when you analyze it.  Out in the wild it’s natural and instinctive.  But that’s why it sneaks past us so easily.

Pipe Organ "Klais ' by DeadZero (on Deviant Art)

What are those men doing in a fractal?  Believe it or not, this is actually a photograph of a very elaborately designed pipe organ somewhere in Spain.  Or maybe it really is a fractal and the author cleverly edited the image?  Never let your right eye know what your left eye is looking at.

The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst (1944)

I often feel that fractal art is not really about fractals but is instead about “imaginary” imagery.  In that sense, there are many “pre-columbian” fractals out there; meaning they are graphically similar although completely unrelated in terms of the way they were made.  Fractals just make it easier to create imaginary imagery.  I guess it depends on how you chose to define the art form.  The lack of a fractal formula naturally makes it hard to call  “fractal”.  Well, in the old days fractal artists worked hard.  Try doing something like this.

Incendia Sketch by Kaeltyk (Deviant Art)

This one’s for real.  I stumbled on Kaeltyk’s Deviant Art gallery somehow.  I forget how.  Maybe from a link in someone else’s favorites?  Incendia does some nice things, but I’ve never seen such a good combination of 3D and 2D elements like there is in this one by Kaeltyk.  And it’s black and white, too.  Black and white is a whole new kind of color.  The uber-color.  It’s often thought of as being being feature-poor as opposed to feature-rich.  But all the colors in the world can’t do what black and white does.  More strangeness.

Tilings II by Kaeltyk

This one by Kaeltyk was done in Ultra Fractal.  I just like these peaceful drifting snowflakes and the different landscapes they seem to be falling and dissolving into.  It’s hard to crop out just the right piece from among such a huge mass of repeating imagery like this, but Kaeltyk did a good job here.  Very professional looking.  It deserves a classy title and black frame.

Shells by Kaeltyk

I would have guessed Incendia for this one, but Kaeltyk’s notes for this one indicate it was made with Xenodream.  I know these sorts of spirally seashell/horns are common and perhaps even cliche now, but Kaeltyk has managed to create something interesting and appealing even in such a heavily picked over genre.  In Kaeltyk’s own words, “I like how it’s clean and almost carved.”  That’s why I like it too.  The coloring and surface texture adds a lot as well.

Sky by Marco Gervasio (Flickr)

According to notes for this image it was made by “two pictures of the sky that I merged together and then reversed”.  I guess the inverting created the yell0w-orange coloring from the natural blue sky tones in the original.  I include this because it’s another “mind-bender” that show that when we look at graphical imagery and ignore how it was made, we find “fractals” in places we wouldn’t have expected.  Although the shapes and structure of clouds really are a natural form of fractal rendering.  I guess that just reinforces my point.

Sphere by spanzhang (Renderosity)

“FMF + POV-Ray”  POV-Ray is a ray-tracing (ultra realistic) program, but I’m not sure what FMF stands for.  I like planetoids and this one’s got some cool coloring and texture.  Looks like ice cream that’s just about to start dripping.  Incidently this was chosen for a Fractal Window Weekly on Renderosity a year and a half ago.  I visited cgpad.com, the so-called Chinese Fractal Art Society and I think maybe Ferry Man Fractal is the mysterious “FMF”.  I’ve never heard of the program, so maybe spanzhang made it himself?

Rings and Wires by spanzhang

By spanzhang again.  He’s got a gallery at span.cgpad.com.  This one’s made with Apophysis.  Nice design with repeating circular elements and good colors.

Onceinalifetimesingle by Anonymous

Yes, people used to dream of such imaginary, fractal-like imagery way back in the 70s.  But it’s not merely once in a lifetime today; it’s everyday and all the time.  Music’s gotten a lot cheaper now too.  Hasn’t it?  And who needs to pay to get great artwork for their album covers nowadays with all this computer made stuff around?  “And you may ask yourself…” how come nobody sings about having mental breakdowns and emotional decay anymore?

Seed Bead Fractals by Shala Kerrigan

Check out the nice set of instructions Shala has made to go with this example of Fractal Earrings.  “Fractals are geometric patterns that show self-similarity, they can be very complex and really beautiful.”  Doesn’t that statement by Shala answer the proverbial, “What are fractals?” question quite nicely?

You can also bead fractals. This is a pair of earrings that uses a very simple fractal pattern to create a delicate fringe or tassel that resembles some of the fractals you can see in nature like trees or the veins in your body.
The shape I used was 3 lines. Each time you add another set of 3 lines to the ends of the lines, that’s called an iteration.

For folks like myself such descriptions are more enlightening than those of the more technical type.  You’d think by now I’d know what a fractal is.  But I keep finding fractals that don’t fit the formulas.  Never let your left brain know what you’re right brain is thinking.

You’ll only end up slapping yourself in the face.

The original Mandelbox?

I don’t play video games much; just an hour every day of Star Wars Battlefront (original one).  I have friends in Mos Eisley and although they always lose –horribly– they’re always asking me to come out and “play”.

My nephew loaned us his old GameCube and while I’ve never used it because all we have for it are Super Mario games, it’s been there on the floor in front of the TV for almost a year now.   I glance at it occasionally in between ferociously savage bouts of Battlefront ( Dark Trooper… Rhen Var Citadel…shotgun in the sky).

Since the discovery of the Mandelbox by Tom Lowe (Tglad) early in this year with it’s general cube formation and multiple grid and curved structures in it, I’ve looked at the Nintendo Gamecube differently.  They seem to be derived from the same formula.  Could it be true?

Mandelbox Edition: Nintendo GameCube -- no word from Nintendo yet regarding release date. Which one's the power button? (Image by MarkJayBee)

You can see the common structural elements from the GameCube here in this Mandlebox image. Nintendo GameCube: GoldBox Edition. (Image by Timeroot)

The Mandelbox has much improved and much more stylish ventilation ducts than it's predecessors. Does this mean they've added a huge amount of processing power, or is it just for aesthetics? (Image by Tom Lowe)

If Nintendo ever brings the Mandelbox GameCube into full scale production the first one ought to go to the Museum of Modern Art. (Image by Tom Lowe)

Exploring the graphical output of fractal algorithms should give you a floating feeling from time to time as you experience that “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” feeling that Dorothy did when she found herself in Oz.  The world of video games is not so different either;  they’re as real as any movie you can see on your TV screen.  What we find in fractal graphics today would have passed for pure science fiction in the past.  What else?  3D fractals are the best game in town.

Anyhow, I just keep looking at that GameCube and can’t help but notice the resemblance to the Mandelbox.

There’s actually a lot of goldmines out there in the outer reaches of our computer system.  None of us have been to all of them, but we’ve all been to some of them.  I don’t know where exactly this one is, but you can find all the scenes from it here.

This is what’s written at the entrance to the mine:

A gallery of large graphs

graph drawing of matrices in the University of Florida Collection

Graph visualization is a way to discover and visualize structures in complex relations. What sort of structures are people who do large scale computation studying? We can get a glimpse by visualizing the thousands of sparse matrices submitted to the University of Florida Sparse Matrix collection using sfdp algorithm . The resulting gallery contains the drawing of graphs as represented by 2328 sparse matrices in this collection. Each of these sparse matrices (a rectangular matrix is treated as a bipartite graph) is viewed as the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph, and is laid out by a multilevel graph drawing algorithm. If the graph is disconnected, then the largest connected component is drawn. The largest graph (Schenk@nlpkkt240) has 27,993,600 vertices and 366,327,376 edges. A simple coloring scheme is used: longer edges are colored with colder colors, and short ones warmer. The graphs are in alphabetical order. Use the “Search” link to find graphs of specific characters.

from: http://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/GALLERY/GRAPHS/index1.html

The computer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

What page in a mathbook ever looked like this?

I should have been a bag of glowing mesh, gliding across the floors of silent seas

I argued with infinity. I wish I hadn't.

I just like it

Somewhere, this was the topic of an advanced technical discussion

It looks like this

And this too

Why? Why did it do that?

you don't know what you're digging, until it's been dug

1. I got a handle on it 2. I had a handle on it 3. What's a handle?

The machine is humble and efficient. It would draw another picture before it would ever sign its name.

Another picture

This could be a sub-atomic energy cloud, or a map of the universe

It all makes sense, the longer you stare at it

We know art doesn't have to be useful, but do we also know that art doesn't have to be useless?

It's perfect. What does perfect mean?

The elegant effervescence of electricity

It pretends to be a car, and slips away unseen

Can a prison cell be a work of art?

So little, so much

Thanks to but does it float for helping me find the Goldmine.

Alien Ruins by blob on Fractalforums.com (click for full-size)

Such simple rendering and yet, such powerful rendering.  Remember, most of MC Escher’s great drawings were done in pencil, so there’s no reason why a grayscale or monotone image has to be dull.  Just look at the detail in blob’s image, how it’s all over the place in every nook and cranny and has such creative diversity.  This is the magic of great software and those who know how to get the most out of it.

It’s made in Jesse’s Dierks’ free program, Mandelbulb 3D 1.53.  The expression, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” really applies to fractal programs: you can judge them by what users are able to make with them.  As you can see here, Jesse’s program is clearly top notch.  I’m really surprised that such high quality software continues to be made in the fractal world.  I guess the new 3D formulas have inspired programmers like Jesse to create these new things.

Here’s another in the same palette but with more of a carved ivory look to it:

Electron Microscopy by blob from Fractalforums.com (click for full-size)

Again, subtle rendering that magnifies the beautiful designs of the hybrid mandelbox/sierpinski formula.  The top left corner I find to be the most interesting, next to the large round cavity in the center.  Everywhere you look there seems to be something a little different.  I’ll bet one could get completely lost exploring this object and forget all about taking snapshots.  Makes the Grand Canyon look like a ditch.

Just to show some contrast in rendering styles, take a look at these two by Kraftwerk:

the Giant alien Generaator, by Kraftwerk

This is no pencil drawing, but the lavish gold and metallic emerald surfaces look good in this mandelbox.

In his own words:

This is just too much for me, found this yesterday evening, sitting in the garden sun, two different worlds…

These formulas really makes you feel that they are designs from another world… first time I feel that mathematics really can beat the human fantasy… mindblowing…

Thank you everyone involved in this @ fractalforums, I think the things you all found is bigger than anyone of us can imagine!

-from http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=2759

There’s more images like this by Kraftwerk to be seen on his Deviant Art page, they all come from the internal details of this intriguing mandelbox structure:

Alien Generaator Building by Kraftwerk (click for full-size)

I think the starry background has been added in, but it sure fits with this extraterrestrial space temple.  The coloring is really exceptional.  Kraftwerk has a real talent for that.  He’s made some of the best colored mandelbulbs I’ve ever seen.  He’s also using Jesse’s Mandelbulb 3D just like blob.  I find it quite interesting that both of them can use the same program and get equally good results and yet with such widely varying styles.  Fractal programs are bit like musical instruments: it’s not what you play but how you play it.

I can’t resist adding YouTube content to my postings.  So here’s a recording of the original Kraftwerk music group of “The Voice of Energy” which inspired fractal Kraftwerk’s title for this series of mandelbox images.  It’s in German.

Dear Diary,

I’ve been thinking recently about the creative explosion of Mandelbulbs and Mandelboxes.  Sometimes, I think they represent the latest new wave in fractal art.  Other times, I wonder if they are just the latest it iteration.  After a few thousand bulbs and boxes replete the gallery coffers of Fractalbook, will these once novel forms be yesterday’s quats and flames?

I do enjoy looking at them though.

Your Penpal

~/~

Dear Diary,

I’m not surprised that folks gave up trying to talk sense to Chris Oldfield (milleniumsentry) about his production of (I guess) pure fractals in their "native environment" of Ultra Fractal.  Oldfield, like those unknown sources in the Bush Administration, prefers to "create his own reality."  If Oldfield thinks something, that thought is immediately reified as truth.  If Oldfield believes that permission must be obtained to use one of his images, then it must be definitively so.  No amount of time spent pointing out that Fair Use exceptions in copyright law allow such reproduction for the purposes of reviews or satire will change his closed mind.  He’d rather have you believe that Tim and I are rude for displaying images while writing a blog of fractal art criticism.

Likewise, Oldfield has drunk the UF kool-aid from a Big Gulp cup.  UF’s greatest achievement, I think, was winning the propaganda war — that is, building graphic processing features into their software while simultaneously convincing UF users they are not really doing any graphics processing at all.  See, it’s that unique "native environment" that allows UF users to layer fractals like Pringles and import static media like a photograph but still churn out a bona fide "fractal" — even if, technically, the result is now a collage — an algorithmic mash-up. 

And I still occasionally see this proud disclaimer on Fractalbook: "Made with UF.  100(+) layers.  No post-processing."

Let’s see if I understand the dynamic here. Because Oldfield used the Photoshop-Lite features built into UF, his "fractal" is pure as the driven pixel?  But, if I use Photoshop, whose filters also run using algorithms, I’m creating a kind of bastardized, non-fractal, digital-like art?

Not even UF enthusiast Damien M. Jones believes that hype.  

Personally, I agree with Terry W. Gintz’s observation:

It is pointless to continue to argue that rendering layers of fractals is some kind of advanced or superior approach to fractal generation, or that one program is all you need to create great fractals. It is a great selling point for the benefit of fractal novices, and to eliminate the excess fractal programmer population, but it does nothing to advance the science of fractal imaging.

By the way, I wrote this part of my blog post directly in Dreamweaver.  389 words.  No post-processing.

Your Penpal

~/~

Dear Diary,

I’m a little dismayed that at least one of the Bulbers-Boxers reverted to some very old wave thinking in an OT comment.  Ker2x, responding to an image by Oldfield, notes:

Btw… it still look nice, but i have no interest in this kind of artwork.
i like the beauty we can (surprisingly) find in mathematic and chaos.

To paraphrase: My fractal is purer than yours — even if you’ve just spent considerable time arguing how pure yours is.  Mine is 100% algorithmic-mathematical-fractal.  Yours is a "derivative."  Mine is right and true and good.  Yours is "this kind of artwork."

I have little patience for such braggadocio elitism.  It sticks in my craw when the UF cultists pull this stunt.  It’s just as unbecoming when it surfaces in the Boxer-Bulber crowd.

You made an aesthetic choice, dude, revolving around the extent of your use of graphics processing.  That choice doesn’t make you somehow nobler than the rest of us who’ve consciously made a different choice than yours.

Your Penpal

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Dear Diary,

What Oldfield probably doesn’t realize is that I’m actually on his side.  If he wants to produce fractal stratum, whether purely or impurely, I say go for it.  Supercollide your fractals to pulp, for all I care.  My thinking has always been to do whatever’s necessary to get the art you want.  My maxim:  More talk about art.  Less talk about purity.

I’ve already outlined my thoughts about the aesthetic choices one can make while navigating the sliding scale between algorithmic art and graphically processed art in this exchange with Tim.  No need to rehash here.

I have no beef with fractalists who want to mask and layer and process until the seahorses come home.  My gripe is with those who insist their tools are somehow special and thus elevate them to a higher plane where the air is more rarefied than the processed smog we derivative losers are forced to breathe.

Your Penpal

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Dear Diary,

I’ve been thinking about this post (nearly two years ago now) by Tim where he worries that Ultra Fractal is increasingly becoming a program "for engineers only."  Tim observes that

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

I wonder how many of UF’s users lost their bearings in the move from v4 to v5?  How many of those users lack the programming mindset and instead make fractal art by an instinctive process using serendipity?  Are they now cast overboard — left to drown unless they quickly enroll in a Visual Arts Academy UF course in order to re-learn the basic operating procedures for their tools? 

This sounds like a deliberate marketing strategy to me.  Here’s betting that UF v6 will need the coursework for an advanced degree to decode its inner workings.

Or is there just no place for serendipity in fractal art anymore?  If not, then let’s see no more work by artists, please.  The work of the makers of brushes and paints and canvases will be satisfactory enough, thank you.

Your Penpal

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Dear Diary,

I worry that Fractalbookers think I dislike them.  I don’t.  Mostly.  But I really dislike the environmental trappings of Fractalbook.

Fractalbook is fine for social interaction — for getting artistic tips and advice — for having your ego massaged daily — for self-declaring yourself a master.  But it’s lousy place to showcase your art.

Especially to outsiders.  As a virtual museum, Fractalbook is far too muddled — mostly extolling social networking accouterments and oodles of self-promotion.  Take deviantART (please!).  How’s your art look against that puce background and officious busyness exploding from every available pixel?  At least Renderosity has the good sense to use a black background.  Now, if only those vampy sorceresses and seductive Indian princesses in their underwear weren’t enticing visitors from the borders of nearly every frame.

I see good art on these places all the time, but I’m reluctant to send OT’s readers into these cluttered lairs of virtual ass-kissing and unfettered commercialism.  Is this really how you want people (and your virtual friends swooning over your every render don’t count) to see your work?  You do have a web site or a blog, right?  A safe and quiet haven where the public can reflect on your work without virtual saturation barrage fire, yes?

No?  Then I suggest you’re more interested in hanging out with your laudatory friends than having art lovers hang out with your work.

Your Penpal

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Tags: fractal fractals fractal art fractal blog fractalbook diaries chris oldfield ker2x terry w gintz purity is overestimated cruelanimal orbit trap  

What exactly does it mean to be un-Cola?  Cola drinks, like Coca-Cola, are dark-colored and contain caffeine.  The opposite would be light-colored without caffeine?  But both of them are sugary, carbonated drinks sold on the same shelf and dropping out of the same vending machine, or at least side by side vending machines (7Up is a product of Pepsico, Coke’s rival).

To those who like soft drinks and don’t like colas, then 7Up is perhaps very different.  Refreshingly different. But for those who are simply thirsty and don’t want to eat 10 teaspoons of sugar while trying to quench their thirst, 7Up and every other soft drink, including all the various members of the vast cola club, are all one thing:  cans of liquid candy.

Mosaics:  The Un-Fractal!

60s Scream, by Village9991

These mosaics, including the so-called mashups that are made of tiny images, are a kind of un-cola with respect to fractal art.  Their ingredients, like 7Up’s ingredients, are fundamentally different and yet seem to have all the same sweetness and fizz of regular fractals.

They look like fractals and from a purely visual standpoint, I enthusiastically declare them to be fractal art and insist they take their rightful place in that great vending machine –shining humming monolith of cold drink correct change worship– called fractal art.

And they’re cool to look at.  And maybe not so hard to make, either?  This one above I believe is a rendition of the screaming woman in the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  There’s something called actionscript which does some really neat things like this.  Flash artists do similar things.  I have no idea how it works.  Wouldn’t it be funny if they used some type of fractal algorithm to scale the mosaic pieces?

You can view a whole bunch of them here on Village9991’s Mosaici page.  He’s Italian and lives in a small village in northern Italy.

Giant Peach by Jim Bumgardner

The full-size (1800×1800) image is here and is worth a look.  The details in this mash-up are quite appealing, unlike most which get ugly when you move up close.

Jim Bumgardner is a Flickr master and has done some prominent things:

I’m a computer technologist / artist / composer in the Los Angeles area. I blog about my various projects at krazydad.com.

I’ve done a lot of mosaic art using the Flickr APIs, and co-authored Flickr Hacks, from O’Reilly, with Paul Bausch.

I’m a little obsessed with circles, radial symmetry and mechanical instruments.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I work amongst an awesome collective of nerd/hipsters at Topspin in Santa Monica.

I did some mosaic posters for squared circle, and a day in the life, here on Flickr:

[see Giant Peach image above]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
One of the first things I did on Flickr was to make a number of fun-to-use Flickr Colr Pickrs. Check ’em out!

I also made the world’s first Flickr Chia Pet, an experiment in collaborative defacement.

– From Jim’s Flickr profile page

I made something similar once, using a photoshop filter called Mosaic Toolkit by Lance Otis.  Over here.

Pearl Glance by Village9991

Whaddaya know?  It’s the same guy as made the first one!  Well, I guess he’s got some sort of program to make these with because it would take a lot of work to draw these things even with a computer drawing program.

The woman, in case you don’t recognize her, is a detail from some very famous painting.  But here her image is made up of all the senseless words that people in art galleries have spoken while viewing the painting.  Individually, the words are gibberish and without any meaning.  But together they “speak” her image in a new but equally appealing way.  Some of the smallest comments are crucial details.  The other deep message in this image is: if you’ve got enough fonts installed on your computer you can do anything!

Time for another one:

Steal a Kiss by Village9991

Well hit my avatar with a digital two by four.  Same guy again.

He says it’s from a Pucca cartoon: YouTube Link.

The image has changed: it’s full of details that have their own (short) story to tell.

After watching a Pucca cartoon I now see the image differently.  I can clearly make out the two Pucca cartoon characters.  Nevertheless, the graphical effect is what makes this image interesting for me.  Those of you who are fans of the Pucca People you might feel differently.  Which is the greater art?

Blogging: The Un-Writing

I never intended to focus on the mosaic images of just one artist.  Incidentally, the way I review these things is a multi-step process and details like names often get temporarily lost in the shuffle.  First I wander around the internet and when I come upon an interesting image I bookmark the page.  This stores the link to the original (obviously) along with the image and any references to a title and author’s name.  Later on when I’m thinking of writing about something I go back to these collected bookmarks and I open up 10 or so from a single sub-folder bearing some (at the time) relevant name.  The folder names are often just dates like “June” or “May” or “3D”.  Digital art in general and fractal art as well is such an eclectic medium that meaningful sub-categories are hard to come up with.  And author names quite often aren’t the common ingredient in a particular graphical theme.

But sometimes they are. For me it’s all about art and not artists.  But you have to include the author’s name if for no other reason than readers want to know who made it.  Sometimes there are legal reasons such as attribution requirements.  Artists are less important in fractal art because individual accomplishment is more about the style of pushing buttons and operating the machine than it is about actually interacting with the canvas in the intimate way that painters do.  If you do what they did then you’ll “make” what they made.

Clearly, no one makes them like Village9991 does!

I’ve been looking at some mash-ups lately on Flickr ….and I was browsing around on Samuel Monnier’s site ….and July 4th, Independence Day in the States is coming up, …which is similar to Canada’s own national holiday on July 1st called Canada Day … I thought, “America Day” …and here’s two images of that great icon of America, the American Flag …and they’re both fractal, sort of …here’s Fractal America …the deeper you look, the more you see ...how close can you get?

20091103, by S. Monnier

United State of Art, by qthomasbower (on Flickr.com)

Click on either one to see a larger version with much more detail.  Samuel Monnier’s image leads to a page where you can view the image in enormous detail.  He uses a special flash applet that allows you to practically explore the image to the same degree you would be able to if you were viewing it in the original fractal program (Ultra Fractal) that made it.  If you haven’t seen one of these before, it’s well worth a look.

Can the image of a national flag (especially the American flag) be purely something to look at and not have political overtones?

No.  Absolutely not.   And why is that?

Because it’s a symbol.  Our minds just refuse to look at it as if we’d never seen it before.

In social situations, if you want to avoid controversy, “don’t talk about religion or politics”.  But the American flag is both  politics and religion to many people –and not just the Americans.

In Canada (where I live) you will probably hear much more said about Americans and America than you will in America and among Americans.  Canadians are funny that way.  And so is much of the world.  No one see America (and Americans) quite like foreigners do.  And no one seems to talk about them as much as foreigners do.  Canadians, however, see America in a more powerful way because we are both foreigners and yet, in many ways, very american ourselves.  I won’t get into it right now because it’s too convoluted and confusing, but suffice it to say that Canadians embrace America with one hand while at the same time trying to get in a punch with the other.  It’s very hypocrital and juvenile and, I’ll come right out and say it: it’s very colonial.  Colonial-minded peoples are afraid of independence —they think they’re going to lose something.  Americans, on the other hand, enthusiastically fought for independence –because they thought they would be gaining something.

And there, in a nutshell, is the difference between Canadians and Americans.  Canadians like to complain about the government and you can’t do that when you’re independent because you’re only complaining about yourself.  Americans like to fix the government and to do that you need independence and self-government.  America wrote it’s own constitution.  Canada was content to let the British Parliament do it for them.  As a Canadian I’ve always found it surprising that my fellow Canadians don’t seem to see this as a huge national embarrassment:  Canada is an act of British Parliament. America was a reformation of the acts of British Parliament (“new and improved”).

See?  Already things have gotten political.  I’m so glad that art doesn’t have to be that way.  Let’s talk about art instead.

Samuel Monnier says that fractal art doesn’t have to embrace social and political themes in order to be considered “serious art” and that if you browse through artworks of the past you’ll find many examples of good art in which these sorts of themes are not involved.  Maybe he didn’t say it exactly like that, but he’s right.  The works of Joan Miro and Paul Klee would be considered “serious art” and yet they (rarely) had any connection to what one would call social commentary.

Of course it would be a great compliment to fractal art if it also had some artwork that did engage in social commentary.  It’s not necessary (as Sam says) for fractal art to be earn the label, “serious”, but it would add another dimension to the genre.  And political themes can be quite engaging and thought provoking.

Back to the art:  Sam’s “pattern piling” version of the American flag is really without any sort of intended meaning (assuming that’s possible with the American flag).  It really is just an interesting, richly detailed, experiment with the geometric qualities that this flag possesses.  He does the same thing with the Swiss flag (Sam is from Switzerland) although the results aren’t quite as interesting because the Swiss flag’s elements are all right-angled and lack the variety that the stars of the American flag give to it.  And there’s an extra color in the American flag which in turn provides for more combinations and permutations when pattern piled.

Qthomasbower’s flag is, on the other hand, a deliberate attempt to provide social commentary:  A vast mosaic of many artworks forming (by overlaying an image of the flag) a diverse but united nation waving majestically in the wind.  I think the technique is easier than it looks.  Nevertheless the result is fascinating.  It really has the detailed and intricate wonder of an image made by the iterations of a fractal formula.

Qthomasbower has some more of these on his Flickr pages.  Unlike Monnier’s image, Q’s doesn’t look so hot when you zoom in.  It’s kind of like the “digital zoom” on a camera;  the picture just becomes chunkier and cruder as you move in.  I’m sure he’s not implying that the state of American art only looks good from a distance and when covered by the imprimatur of The Stars and Stripes.

Two of Arts by qthomasbower (on Flickr)

I find these mash-ups of Q to be very interesting because of the detail and texturing they give to the image when viewed at large.  I think almost any sort of half-decent image would look fantastic when treated this way.  It gives a large-scale and massive appearance to the image because of the non-repeating and highly detailed texture all the individual image “tiles” contribute.  The mash-up contributes really only a texture layer, but the effect, as I’ve said, is very impressive.

So.  Is America a fractal?  Does it have self-similarity at many levels?  Do parts of it descend down to zero while others escape to infinity? And why does a Presidential election with only two candidates take so long to render?

I don’t dislike everything.  The OT faithful probably know from past posts that I often see fractal art works I find interesting.

When Tim and I were first forming Orbit Trap and discussing its possibilities, one idea we knocked around was to post an occasional fractal art photoblog — that is, allow the blog to function as a kind of virtual gallery by offering images without comment.  Any reaction to the art works would come from OT’s readers in the form of comments.  Today seems as good a day as any to start.

So, here are a few pieces that have have caught my eye lately.  Some are Phase One works, and others are Phase Two.

Disclaimer: I might have a bigger-tent sense of what fractal art constitutes than you do.

Like or dislike, and, if so moved, feel free to say so:

Deep Sea Monster by Maria K. Lemming.  Seen on her web site.

Tvivla by Robert Töreki.  Seen on the Ultrafractal site.

Toy Fracture by Bermarte.  Seen on Fractal Forums.

Digging You Up Again by 2BORNO2B.  Seen on deviantART.

Cries from the Wetlands by Gaiadriel.  Seen on Renderosity.

The Water Tree by Hector Garrido.  Seen on Armonia Fractal.

Iguana Eyes by Michael Kern.  Seen on Fractal Enightenment.

Fractal Recursive Spiral Pottery Pattern by Quasimondo.  Seen on Flickr.

Julia Bead Tapestry.  Seen on In Bits Mosaics.

Vent #3 by Thomas Briggs.  Seen on his web site.

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Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, digital art, computer art, maria k lemming, robert toreki, bermarte, 2BORNO2B, gaiadriel, hector garrido, michael kern, quasimondo, thomas briggs, photoblog 1, cruelanimal, orbit trap

The first time I saw an image made in FractalWorks it was in the gallery section of Fractalforums.com.  I was impressed and yet, I couldn’t quite figure out why I was so impressed.  There wasn’t anything really special about it and yet there was something really special about it.  It was one of those “height field” fractals, a (somewhat old) trick to give flat fractals a 3D appearance.  They’re all over the place and have been for years, but this FractalWorks one was different: more polished and more stylish than I’ve ever seen.  It also seemed to have a slightly surreal and mysterious quality to it –a strange kind of silence.

Stone Path by Duncan Champney, Made in FractalWorks. (The first one I saw. I sensed something eerie; like an approaching Minotaur.)

A comment by Paul N. Lee, the veteran fractal archivist, lead me to Duncan Champney’s website and to the incredible discovery that not only had Duncan made other images like the first one I’d found, he also made the program, FractalWorks, that they were created with.

There’s a long tradition in fractal art of people performing the roles of both artist as well as programmer.  Duncan Champney joins that royal list and furthermore offers his excellent program free to anyone who wants to share his passion for exploring what his super fractal machine can do.  But before you head off to download it I should mention that it’s for Macs only.

3D view of Mar2310lma1c by schimkent, made in FractalWorks

From what I’ve seen the program’s forte is 3D fractals of the height field, or geographical terrain,  “relief” -variety.  However, as simple and plain as that might sound in these modern days of Mandelbulbs and Mandelboxes, FractalWorks does this one thing very, very well.  These sorts of old-style 3D fractals made in other programs can be rather kitschy to look at, but FractalWorks manages to achieve a quantum leap in rendering quality that gives this old technique a new and vibrant appeal.  But of course as with almost any kind of fractal program, it still requires an artistic eye and the relentless persistence that only an enthusiastic explorer can possess to produce really good work with it.

Ordinarily I’d just shrug off stuff like this as eye candy but FractalWorks has elevated this simple type of fractal to a new level of sophistication.  There’s something fresh and different here.  Like I said when describing my first encounter, there’s something special and captivating about these FractalWorks works.  Some have a fairy tale look to them and others suggest a landscape that is much more surreal and haunted.  Don’t let the fruity, frosty renderings fool you; there’s more to some of these FractalWorks images than mere graphical sweetness.

Duncan Champney wrote the program and started up a Flickr group to get people interested in it as well as to offer advice and encouragement (I’m just guessing).  Although Duncan produces some of the best images made in FractalWorks, I discovered from the Flickr group someone who also makes work that is equally good: schimkent! I think the proof of a really great program is in what the users of it can do and not just the super results the author can get with it.  Shimkent (and others) have shown that Duncan has created a very capable and creative fractal art tool in FractalWorks.  Even if it is only for those Starbuck sipping, sophisticated Apple computer users…  They ought to have at least one good fractal program, shouldn’t they?

Fractal Stimulus Plan, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks

Schimkent: I think his real name is Kent Schimke (hence, the clever screen name —schimke-nt).  Kent’s LinkedIn profile says that he is “…helping a developer create a fractal generating program called FractalWorks for macintosh computers.”  I think it’s pretty safe to say he’s the guy.

Kent’s got a really good eye for color and also seems to have a good grasp of what makes for a good 3D FractalWorks scene.  Both he and Duncan have made some very eye catching and interesting images.  I would never have thought such a simple 3D height field program could produce such a wide range of creative works but I guess, as Kent says, “You just don’t know what you can’t do.”  Well,  Kent seems to have excelled in pushing FractalWorks’ envelope and taking us to new places.

Touch of vertigo, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks --see what I mean by schimkent's great eye for color?

In addition to his own Flickr gallery, Kent has also recently had a wall calendar featuring some of his FractalWorks images published by Browntrout entitled, Chaos Fabulous Fractals 2010.  This is not the Cafepress, self-publishing, print on demand type of thing (the one at a time whenever someone buys one), but rather the traditional editor/publisher/press-run type of publishing.

Apr06wja1b, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks

Teed Up, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks. (I really like the perspective in the blue objects in the top area. Extraterrestrial garden.)

FractalWorks was released a couple years ago and since then it’s been upgraded a few times.  The most recent upgrade was just recently, May 4, 2010.  I’m sure the reason for such continuous development has been the impressive results users have achieved with the program.  That’s what usually drives fractal program development.  As the Flickr group message says:

FractalWorks is a free, high performance fractal renderer for Macintosh computers.
You can download fractalworks and try it yourself at the FractalWorks download site.

04 May 2010: Version 0.6.2 has expired. I just uploaded a new version, version 0.6.3 to the link above. Please upgrade to the new version.

-from the Flickr Group, FractalWorks site

I majored in Geography back in my university days and I think one of the things that drew me to that subject was all the imagery that one ends up studying, particularly the Remote Sensing images.  Perhaps part of the appeal that these FractalWorks images has for me is their similarity to maps and especially aerial photographs, something which the Wikipedia defines as “the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position“.

3D view of Aprwmc1a, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks. (It's autumn in fractal country.)

Fall Colors, by schimkent, made with FractalWorks

Another legacy of my geography days was the slowly developed ability to view stereo pairs of aerial photographs without the special lenses that make it easier for your eyes to perceive the 3D effect.  In digital art circles this special 3D imagery seems to be called “cross-eyed” stereogram.  I take it from this stereogram set posted on Duncan’s site, that FractalWorks is able to produce the paired images that produce this three dimensional illusion.  Here’s another also made in FractalWorks but slightly different in that you need red-cyan 3D glasses to view it (the old-style 3D movie glasses).  And here’s an even better one.  Wait!  This one too!  Go out right now and buy a pair of red-cyan 3D glasses so you can see this one!!!! (try the high res version on Flickr for an even biiiiiiger thrill).

FractalWorks produces a kind of high-quality imaginary aerial landscape.  Of course, that was always the intent I believe of the height field effect in fractal programs.  It’s just that FractalWorks has come along and achieved much better results than any other program that creates these kinds of fractal images, at least of all the ones that I’ve seen so far.  Although I’m sure Ultra Fractal or Chaos Pro could be programmed to produce similar smooth and richly colored images like this, no one seems to have attempted it yet (although there have been good examples of a mild form of 3D relief imagery created with them already).

3D view of Sep13lmb1d, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks. (This is the enchanted forest. Can you find Granny's house without getting lost?)

Well, three cheers for Duncan Champney for making this Mount Everest Machine of fractal programs and taking us right up to the top of it along with him.  And to Kent Schimke, his agile sherpa for showing us how great the views can be.

3D view of Jun16wmb1d, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks. (I know this is a pretty ordinary fractal, but what is it about FractalWorks that makes it look so cool?)

3D view of Feb12wja1b, by schimkent, made in FractalWorks. (If color was a flower, this is what it would look like.)

Well, I could go on and on doing this.  These FractalWorks images are really something.  Too bad I don’t have a Mac.  Oh well, we can still look at the results.  You can browse the entire Flickr group at this link.  And should you happen to own a Mac, why not download the free program and try it out while you’re sipping your Starbucks coffee and looking as stylish and hip as Mac folks always do?

I want to talk about the money in fractal art.

Where in the fractal world is there any sort of commercial success?  I don’t mean someone making some trivial amount of money, I mean someone making enough money to, as they say, quit your day job, kind of money.

Is this the financial forecast for Ultra Fractal sales?

Of all the artists, programmers, publishers, online instructors and other types of individuals in the fractal world, who would you say would be the most likely to be making some serious amount of money?

My first guess would be Ultra Fractal author, Frederik Slijkerman.  Ultra Fractal currently sells for $69 US for the standard edition and $129 US for the full featured, animation edition.  It’s a very popular fractal program and has been for ten years or so and is an ongoing concern as they say in business circles.  But has it made Frederik so rich that he’s moved into a castle and spends most of his time in his counting house counting all his money?

I don’t think so.  As far as I can tell, Frederik spends most of his working time at a regular (non-fractal) programming job.  (His Linked-in profile) I’m sure he’s making something off his sales of Ultra Fractal, but even if there were 500 paid-up users of UF5, and I think that’s a gross overestimation, that works out to about $35,000 US.  But put that in “earning a living” terms and it’s not much of paycheck compared to a regular job.

So, Frederick, of all people in the fractal art world who I would guess to be in a commercially viable position is probably making more money at his day-job than at his “fractal-job”.

I wrote a post last year entitled Is The Name Of Our Hero Benoit Mandelbrot Being Used To Market Ultra Fractal?.  But now I’d say that even if anyone ever had the idea of attempting to promote UF via this contest (and why would anyone think that?) that now it’s obviously a waste of time.  There simply are not enough users of fractal art software to generate even a modest income on an ongoing basis.  In short, I think Frederik’s motives in creating and selling UF are more personal than commercial.  I’ll bet he could make much more money with the time he spends developing UF by putting it to use on projects of a purely commercial and straightforward business nature (i.e. his day-job).  The fractal art world would have to change considerably, such as grow significantly in size and become much more trendy for this to be any different in the future.  And who’s to say most of those newcomers wouldn’t opt for the freeware program ChaosPro?

“More personal than commercial“.  I think this sums up all the rest of the fractal world from a money-making perspective.  But let’s look at online instruction anyhow, which, like UF,  is something that has had ties to the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art contests via the judging panel.

No, there’s not much money there either!  Courses were about $25 US for a ten week course (two and a half months) and twice that for double semester courses.  Assuming you were a very keen instructor and you taught four course semesters a year and had a full class each time (not likely) what great pile of cash would you be rolling in at the end of the year?  Ten students a course, for instance, four times a year, and you (the instructor) get what?  Well, you wouldn’t get the whole $25 tuition, you’d have to split some of it with the online school who have their own administrative expenses to cover (and they want to get rich too, right?).  How about you get $20 per student at 10 students per semester and four semesters a year?  That would be (a whopping) $800 US per year.

Look before you leap --into the riches of online instruction!

Of course, if you’re trying to cover the rent  and buy groceries (you can’t get rich if you die on the way) then you might consider teaching more than one course.  Say you managed to teach 3 per semester.  3 x 800 is $2,400 US per year.  This is beginning to sound like a Get Poor Quick Scheme.  If money’s an issue then you need another job or you’d better just stay with a day-job.

Not surprisingly, none of the current or former judges of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest are teaching online courses anymore.  Did they make too much money and decide to retire?  I don’t think so.  Their interest was, again, “more personal than commercial”.  I suspect they simply wanted to explore the option of teaching UF skills in an online environment.  Sure, there’s some money to be made, but it’s a token amount which might be some compensation for the instructor’s efforts but not a serious way to make a living or elevate one’s standard of living.  Would such a fractal-job income mean anything if you were applying for a mortgage? or a business loan?  Or how about bragging rights at a cocktail party?  “Hey, that’s nothing, man!  I’m a professional online fractal instructor and I made eight hundred bucks last year!”

Now how about selling artwork?  That ought to be worth something.  Hey!  Isn’t that how Picasso and Warhol got rich?  Ironically, I think this is probably the least profitable enterprise in the fractal art world.  And why would I say that?

Well, for starters, fractal art, like all digital art, is not collectible.  You can’t buy an original fractal print like you can an original painting.  You could print a limited edition of images and then (honestly say) you’re destroying the digital files (image and parameter files) just as print-makers destroy the original printing plate for art prints they sell after printing a numbered series of prints.  Throw in your (really famous) autograph into the package and then charge a bundle.

But the big problem with fractal art is that there’s so much of it around and it’s so easy to make.  People can shop around and find similar stuff for sale cheaper or even make it themselves. Can’t do that with Picasso’s paintings or Warhol’s silkscreens.  And of course fractal art isn’t as popular and as critically acclaimed as such traditional artworks are.  There’s probably money to be made in selling prints or fractal art for illustration purposes (book-covers, magazines…), but again, it’s some money, not enough to live on much less get rich at.  Yes, I think we’re back to the “More personal than commercial” aspect to things.

Alright.  Now I come to my main point in all of this:  Issues in the fractal art world are not taken as seriously as they would be if there were commercial interests at stake.

For instance: nobody really cares how the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests are run because winning or losing is purely a (temporary) matter of online status and has no impact on art sales or any other fractal commercial enterprise in any really significant way.  Maybe a few more UF licenses get sold because of the publicity, but I doubt it has any significant effect on anyone’s personal wealth or lifestyle.  (Actually, there is very little publicity generated by the BMFAC, isn’t there?)

I’ve seen artists advertising images on their websites as “Winners” in the BMFAC, but the real commercial opportunity would be selling prints right at the exhibitions themselves or at least taking orders.  Despite the other failings of the BMFAC, they have succeeded wonderfully in preventing the contest from becoming commercialized.  They don’t even sell a simple $10 souvenir poster or  wall calendar.  They could easily do this online from the contest site as well as from a table at the exhibition (hey, who needs a table? just stand by the door and sell them like newspapers).

Yes, the fractal art world is almost ascetic in it’s attitude towards fractal art and community events like contests.  We’re all in it for the art or for other things that have never had any commercial value like the social scene.  I believe that will change if fractal art ever develops a serious commercial side to it.  Until then it’ll continue to have the casual atmosphere of a community art club where even the big names are involved for reasons that are “more personal than commercial.”

Have I mentioned what a great addition to the fractal world Fractalforums.com is?  As someone who likes to review exciting new things in fractal art it’s really made my job much easier.  Before, I used to wander around Flickr or check out links on the UF mailing list or just stumble on something while surfing around.  I’ll probably have to go back to that again sometime, but until then I’ve got this alien planet filled with fractal treasure to report and review on.

It's more than a forum, it's a wild alien planet of the UNEXPECTED (image from Coverbrowser.com)

There’s been a lot of development in the area of 3D fractals and the results, as I’ve been saying lately, have been impressive.  But one can still create interesting 3D work with some of the older methods.  The Stone Path is a good example of one of the older 3D techniques called height field (or something) and gives the impression of perspective though a special rendering trick.  These sorts of images aren’t usually very interesting, but this one by the username, Duncan C is a tasteful combination of subtle coloring and a well chosen perspective.  It’s not a marvel of cutting edge fractal rendering, but that makes it even more of an accomplishment because Duncan C is using well established techniques to produce an image that is equal to the others in it’s overall impression.

Stone Path by Duncan C, 2010

Buddhi seems to have created his own unique style of fractals in these smudgy, glowing 3D creations.  If you look carefully you’ll see lines on the x or y or z or whatever axes.  It’s a nice, technical, lab-diagram, touch in an image with such strong artistic style.  I reviewed one of these types of images before.  They’re really stylish and not like anything else I’ve seen.

Trigonometric 3D Mandelbrot by Buddhi, 2010

Here’s an interesting Mandelbox by Dave Makin created in Ultra Fractal and titled New Rome detail.  The name I’m sure comes from the similarity the image shares with the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome.  The three dimensional details in this, and the excellent coloring which makes them stand out and look like such a carefully constructed and ornamented building is what caught my eye in this one.  It’s got amazing photorealism and shows how vivid and tangible these sorts of 3D fractals can be.

New Rome detail by Dave Makin, 2010

Elephant Canyon by bib, is another example of the older 3D style –or at least what appears to be the more traditional 3D style in fractals.  I think this is actually a “slice” of a Mandelbulb.  The contrast between the smooth, golden plain of the slice and the rough, craggy cliff of the edges is what gives this image its effect.  To me it almost suggests something about fractals themselves; that one often discovers things by accidentally falling off the edge or by traversing some huge empty plain and discovering at the horizon an abyss filled with rich and limitless detail.  This image was actually posted in a thread, Re: Problem replicating Mandelbulb power 2 and intended to be merely an additional illustration of the problem.  This comment by bib, accompanied his posting of the image: “Yes it’s always difficult to properly render the power 2, there too many chaotic shapes and calculation artifacts. When I saw this post I wanted to try again, so I did this image called “Elephant Canyon”. Nothing very original, but I like it “

Elephant Canyon by bib, 2010

Frozen in space. That’s what I think when I look at this one.  Another by Buddhi and having the same touch of the schematic style to it.  There’s an interesting structure formed by the repeating “bits” that form in a line off the major “pieces”.  Although this one is relatively monotone (one color), the lighting and surface texture effects are actually enhanced by the simple coloring.  That’s what makes art such a strange bird to capture and study: sometimes simpler things have a more powerful effect and sometimes they’re just simple.  The central core of the main object, back in the dark area, has an almost paint brushed appearance.  I guess that dark shadowed area is what draws our eye into it, but who can really say?  Trying to explain what makes an image impressive can often be futile as well as not being terribly exciting to read.

Hypercomplex Julia by Buddhi, 2010

I guess it wouldn’t be called Mandelbox castle if it wasn’t a Mandelbox.  Once again the title really catches the essential quality of the image.  I particularly like how the moonlight (it’s nighttime) shines on the floor under the arch in the area to the right of the center.  If you’ve ever played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (video game) then you’ll probably immediately think of the part of the game where the Prince had to walk along the tops of stone walls, fight big birds and then get into the room above the gate where the gate opening mechanism was.  Or others.  There were so many nighttime scenes in that game featuring different parts of an Indian castle.  Maybe game developers will pick up on the Mandelbox and produce a game that actually takes place inside one.  You could change the castle just by starting the game with a new set of parameters.

Mandelbox castle by bib, 2010

A pretty unusual color palette in this one by Jesse entitled Teeth but it works really well.  I would never have thought florescent yellows and greens could look so natural.  This is the “S2 cube”, which I assume is a variety of the Mandelbox.  Reminds me of a man-made planet in a sci-fi story.  Here’s another one with the same coloring and looking just as natural and appealing too.  Jesse seems to make some of the most unusual and offbeat versions of these 3D fractals.  He’s obviously experimenting with more than just the coloring, although he’s done a great job just with that alone.

Teeth by Jesse, 2010

This is another by Jesse taken from his Supercubes gallery section on Fractalforums.com.  Have you ever seen such a freaky fractal and with so much bizarre and yet carefully constructed detail?  They’re like egg cannisters and they grow on the sides of the bigger egg things in strange patterns and all over the place too.  I remember back in my early days of using Sterlingware, I was zooming into a fractal that seemed to be made of red velvet curtains.  The “curtains” were quite intriguing but then while zooming in further I discovered shiny eggs growing under them.  All this makes it rather difficult to define what a fractal is or to explain to someone what fractal graphics look like.  There’s just too many freaky things to be found.  There’s fractals and then there’s “freak-tals“.

Birth by Jesse, 2010

Xenodream has not been left out of the 3D fractal craze here.  This one is by xenodreambuie and had the label, Triplex Z=rcosphi Julias.  I think a better title would be Catalog of the Fractal Brains.  They’re all very rich in well rendered, three dimensional details and colored well even though I think the method is a fairly basic one.  The numbers are in there for technical reference of course, but I think they add a nice artistic touch as well.  This would make a very appealing wall poster.  I’ll bet if you showed this image to people and asked them what kind of textbook it came from they’d all guess it was Biology and not Math.

Triplex Z=rcosphi Julias by xenodreambuie, 2010

Arch detail by Tglad (2010 Nobel Prize Winner, incidently) is interesting for the, well, details of this arch it shows…  Another great title.  See how the section in the lower right appears to be eroded away?  That’s all algorithmic.  The main arch structure off center to the left is interesting too with its floating triangle center.  The coloring gives it all the impression of being carved from wood or some sort of soft stone.  There’s always something new to see in the Mandelbox.  I think it’s going to be a popular formula for some time.

arch detail by Tglad, 2010

I said 10 fractals and a movie and here’s the movie.  I forget how I stumbled on this one.  I think I saw it amongst the entries in the current Fractalforums.com contest in the animation section.  However I didn’t actually view it right away (that’s a problem with animation, you can’t just take a quick glance at it).  I only looked at it for the first time while visiting subblue’s website (subblue.com).  For those of you who often skip videos if you don’t happen to like the title picture, this video features a very good soundtrack which straddles the categories of sound effects and slow paced instrumental music.  Also featured is some of subblue’s special, black and white, polished steel renderings of the Mandelbulb.  It’s some of the best video rendering of the Mandelbulb actually.  Anyhow, with good graphics and a smooth professional soundtrack, it’s worth taking a look at.

The music is actually not by subblue but by The Formula.  Here’s a link to subblue’s blog which has a larger version of the video and has a bit more information as well as a very long string of glowing comments.

The Formula from subBlue on Vimeo.

Well, there you go; 10 fractals and a movie.  And it didn’t even cost you 10cents like Tales of the Unexpected comic books did fifty years ago.  The internet is just a such a great and wonderful thing.  Let’s hope it stays that way.

I continue to dig through the treasure trove of fractal visions over at Fractalforums.com.  In fact, lately it seems to me that the center of the fractal world has shifted to Fractalforums.com.  It’s become the Paris/Milan/New York/London/Tokyo for new fractal fashions.  Is there anything new and exciting in the fractal world right now that doesn’t have its roots in Fractalforums.com?

Sequence, by Knighty 2010

Although the obvious sequence of parameter adjustments is what this image is all about, and I think it was posted merely as an illustration in a Fractalforums.com thread on Kaleidoscopic (escape-time) IFS fractals (KIFS, for short), the color palette really makes this image much more than merely functional.  I think Knighty realized this too since he’s used this same palette quite a bit.  It’s one of the best I’ve seen on this new fractal frontier.

[Knighty starts this new topic, May 1st, 2010]

Hello,
Here are some renderings of a class of fractals which I call “Kaleidoscopic IFS”. There is a big variations of shapes one can get with this method.
I began with this algorithm to get DE for symmetric Sierpinski tetrahedron:

[From Fractalforums.com, Kaleidoscopic (escape time) IFS]

Just like the early Mandelbox renderings by Tglad, the KIFS made by Knighty showed real graphical promise right from the first batch posted.  Here’s one that of the first few that received quite a bit of praise:

"last picture" by Knighty, 2010

[Knighty responds to the initial comments:]

There are many other known fractals that may appear from nowhere. I’ve already met the Koch curve, cantor dust and others I don’t know the name. The variation of possible shapes, from geometric figures to organic forms, still amazes me. The possibilities are infinite  , not only by changing the parameters but also by changing the algorithm.

What I’ve described in the O.P. is actually what I’ve explored so far. The main ingredients are the folding and the stretching, that is, kneading the space . Then add some salt and spice. Seriously! In the case of this class of fractals, folding are done about planes and stretching is an homothety. The rotations may be the salt and spice. I realize now that one can insert as many rotations between the foldings. In principle other transformations than a rotation can be used (but I may be wrong). The nice thing with rotation (and other orthonormal transformations) is that the distance estimation remains very simple and the generated distance field is continuous. I guess because they don’t add stretching.

I think the kneading process is what is done to generate escape time fractals in general… but this is a little bit off topic. I’ll start another thread.

PS: Most ideas behind these fractals were found in this forum.

[From Fractalforums.com, Kaleidoscopic (escape time) IFS]

If you read the forum thread you’ll see that many other people get involved.  In fact, according to Knighty’s remark, “PS: Most ideas behind these fractals were found in this forum” there’s been a lot of collaboration going on already.  The sort of group exchange of code and ideas which seems to be the hallmark on Fractalforums.com immediately starts to take place.  In addition to the regular 3D fractal enthusiasts, the venerable Jos Leys (of 3D Kleinian fame) joins in as well.  Only a truly great knight would have so many squires and inspire so many others to join in his exploits.  Is there an Order of Sierpinski?  An iterated knighthood?

Subblue charges forth with these surprisingly monochromatic but still very exciting renderings:

untitled by subblue, 2010

untitled by subblue, 2010

With more sublime renderings Knighty produced this family portrait of the Royal (3D)House of Sierpinski:

.

Tetrahedra-Sierpinski-family by Knighty, 2010

There’s more.  In fact, you ought to just go over to the gallery section of Fractalforums.com and view Knighty’s Kaleidoscopic IFS section.  But here’s two of the more interesting ones so you don’t miss them:

Pagode, by Knighty, 2010

Pagode is an interesting construction.  Although a higher resolution rendering would probably be even more impresssive, even this small version shows the sort of intricately detailed and vividly rendered imagery that Knighty has discovered with his KIFS fractals.  Like the Mandelbox, these KIFS are very creative in that they seem to have an almost endless number of variations depending on how one folds and twists the characteristics of the formula.

Pandora_seashell by Knighty, 2010

You know, I suppose if you’d seen this Pandora_seashell lying on the lawn in your backyard you might just think it was a rotting leaf.  But sometimes the “art” is in looking more closely at something that we’d otherwise, uh… step on.  Art is on the boot of the beholder.  Math is a very natural thing and for that reason I think it’s easy to make assumptions about mathematical, or algorithmic, imagery.  Such as assuming that it’s repetitive or predictable.  But I think Knighty’s recent discovery of these Kaleidoscopic IFS fractals shows that there’s still plenty of things to be discovered in this area (it only started at the beginning of this month, May 1st, 2010).  Maybe there’s no end to all of this and this is merely the beginning?

Well, it’s all happening over at Fractalforums.com, so stay tuned to that forum if you want to catch the next great event in the fractal world.  Perhaps some day all the rest of the fractal kingdom will be mere footnotes to Fractalforums.com.  While Knighty and his other fellow members of the Round Table feast on roast boar and crash their flagons together in an endless round of toasts and heroic tales of fractal exploits.

I often find myself preoccupied with justifying fractals (and other types of computational imagery) as art; trying to link fractals with the larger stream of visual art that has flowed and enriched (and provoked) our culture since pre-history.  I don’t know why it nags me so much.  I don’t think most fractalists are very concerned with what outsiders think about fractals or how they may label them.  Maybe that’s a more sensible attitude to have than the one I have which seems to keep wanting to write an Art Manifesto, Bill of Rights or a Declaration of Independence for fractals.

My latest inspiration to write a fractal Magna Carta occurred when I saw this Mandelbox image by Pauldelbrot (Paul Derbyshire, I think) posted at Fractalforums.com.

Escher's Eiffel by Pauldelbrot, 2010

It’s weird, but I hear things when I look at this image.  I don’t really mean I hear audible sounds (that’s nuts!), but the image suggests to me the sound of icebergs bumping against each other underwater:  Great, massive objects in motion.

Or mountains.  Does this image not make you look up and see the distant, towering faces of whatever that smooth-sided thing is?  Is there a basement of the mountains, where the roots and feet of them are exposed and we see where they come from and what they stand on?

Yes, Pauldelbrot’s Mandelbox image here is every bit as expressive as a great Ansel Adams photograph or one of the Group of Seven landscape painters whose impressionistic and semi-abstract style displayed the raw, muscular beauty of the Canadian wilderness.

A few disjointed thoughts about fractals and art:

• The images speak for themselves
• They are what you see (and hear)
• It doesn’t matter how they were made
• They’re as much an art form as Paul Klee’s work is
• They express themselves in a language of shape, form, color and pattern
• They have a symbolic kind of expression
• Good art is the stuff you keep coming back to look at
• Design and ornamentation is visual music
• Serious art is any kind of art you take seriously
• Fractals are captured, not painted
• Fractals are an abstract and imaginary type of imagery like Abstract Expressionism or Surrealism
• Fractals are an interesting world just to explore; you don’t have to take your camera with you
• Fractals don’t have to be fractals, they can be landscapes, sacred smudges or forbidden cities

Here’s two more by Pauldelbrot.

Moss by Pauldelbrot, 2010

The moss-covered stone ruins are a good example of the imaginary kind of themes that fractals seem to instinctively display.  It looks realistic, but the strange patterns in the stones are unreal.  Can you spot two cavities or spaces in the stones that look the same?  This shows the enormous creativity of the Mandelbox fractal: everywhere you look there’s something new.  That’s what creativity is all about: new things.

Trusses by Pauldelbrot, 2010

How about: Grendel trashes the mead hall? Amazingly photographic.  Note the glinting reflection of light on the truss in the foreground.  Would a professionally taken photograph of a ruined temple be clearer or more vivid than this?  There’s great imagination at work in the construction of these trusses and it all comes from a fractal formula (and an enormous amount of computing).  There’s a touch of the surreal in this image; its as if it was the illustration to one of those H.P. Lovecraft stories about million-year-old, pre-human temples of the cosmic elders.

Well, I haven’t finished my odyssey, but Pauldelbrot’s recent Mandelbox images posted to Fractalforums.com have certainly moved me on to the next island.  Actually, I don’t care if a voyage like this never ends.

For his work in discovering the Mandelbox formula of 3-D fractals, the winner is Tom Lowe, better known on Fractalforums.com as Tglad.

Now some might ask why Daniel White and the Mandelbulb Team weren’t this year’s Nobel recipients, but while the Mandelbulb discovery was truly the most exciting event in the fractal world this past year, and possibly the past two years, and has certainly received much more popular attention and interest, I felt the development of the Mandelbulb was an achievement of a more technical and scientific nature while the Mandelbox represents a development with a much greater impact and influence on fractals as an art form.

Paul Lee (Nahee_Enterprises on FF) recently made this remark here on Orbit Trap in a comment:

Yes, the Mandelbulb really became quite “famous” back in November, but the recent variation of the Mandelbox has added a lot more to the visual aspects on the current trend in fractal imagery. There are so many good examples to choose from that it is difficult to fully represent what can be done with the new set of programs and algorithms available.

There are so many examples because many others have noticed the potential of the Mandelbox formula and since these things have been so freely shared without restriction with other fractalists, the formula has been incorporated into a number of programs such as Krzysztof Marczak’s (Buddhi) Mandelbulber and Mandelbrot 3D by Jesse (I only know his screen name), both of which are freely available.  Furthermore, thanks to the help of veteran Ultra Fractal programmer, Dave Makin (alias David Makin on FF) the Mandelbox formula is available for UF as well.  In fact, I believe UF is what Tglad used for both his current and early renderings of the Mandelbox.

The Mandelbox didn’t exist until February of 2010, which means at his point it’s only been around for about three and a half months!  Like the the great Mandelbulb discovery, you can follow the development of the Mandelbox from it’s earliest form as an idea in Tglad’s head (inspired by a related group of 3D fractals) to it’s final incorporation in the three programs I just mentioned.  It all happened on Fractalforums.com and one can at least speculate that without Fractalforums.com and Christian Kleinhuis’ (Trifox) sponsorship and management of that online fractal forum, such advances in fractals may not have occured or would have been greatly hindered.  It’s also possible, I think, that the excitement and attention which the Mandelbulb event stirred up, also attracted and brought together the people who developed the Mandelbox.  I’m still reading through the archives of all these threads over at Fractalforums.com (and trying to keep the screen names straight) so I’m not as up to speed on these events as others who’ve been following them for longer may be (i.e. I could be wrong…).

Here’s the main thread about the Mandelbox entitled, Amazing Fractal.  It starts out, just like the Mandelbulb quest did, in a very simple and low-key way:

This is a new fractal that is member of the fractals described in http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-generation/continuous-conformal-mandelbrots/msg12464/#new

The formula is simple:

[ from Fractalforums.com ]

Even the very first examples of the Mandelbox were visually attractive.  Right away anyone can see the strong design qualities and rich variety to the Mandelbox.  Look closely and you’ll see very little of the self-similarity or repetition that most other fractals have.  This is a very un-fractal fractal, figuratively speaking.  Here are the first three posted by Tglad at Fractalforums.com on February 1st, 2010:

By Tom Lowe (Tglad) Feb. 1, 2010

By Tom Lowe (Tglad) Feb. 1, 2010

By Tom Lowe (Tglad) Feb. 1, 2010

Tglad has put together a small online gallery for the Mandelbox and it’s best for you to go there and read his explanations of the Mandelbox since the technical side of fractal art is not my forte.  One thing I can mention however is that the Mandelbox exhibits something which is a rather uncommon sight in fractals and that is a great amount of non-self-similarity.  This, of course, is what makes the Mandelbox so much more interesting (from an artistic perspective) than the famous Mandelbulb.  Tom has involved two features that I think I understand: Julia sets and Folding.  What it comes down to is that you don’t see the same shapes, forms and patterns everywhere in the Mandelbox just as you don’t see the same shapes and forms in every Julia set of the Mandelbrot formula.  Julia sets are one of the easiest ways to produce graphically appealing variations of the Mandelbrot set that’s part of the mix found in the Mandelbox.  The folding feature Tom has introduced just adds to the creative powers of the Mandelbox while at the same time maintaining it’s strong design qualities through rigorous and careful combinations of patterns (folded over on each other and rendered together).  How’s that for a non-technical description of the Mandelbox?

One other thing:  Like the Mandelbulb and probably all 3D fractals and other types of 3D graphics, the Mandelbox will make good use of all the processing and memory resources your computer has.  If you’ve been waiting for a good reason to upgrade you computer, this could be it.  But as you can see, even from these prototype images of the Mandelbox, the rich results make all the time and processing power worth it in the end.  Take a look at this internal exploration of a Mandelbox done by bib (Jeremie Brunet) which was based on a series of images posted by Tglad to FF.  I’m sure this took some time to make, but again, well worth the effort, I’d say.

Since that day in early February, 2010 there has been a lot of rendering variations of Tglad’s original formula but Tglad’s own work still ranks among the best that I’ve seen.  Although Fractalforums.com may not be, as Christian Kleinhuis (Trifox) himself stated in a comment here at Orbit Trap, a fractal art site but simply a fractal site with an associated image gallery, many of the images there have strong artistic qualities and fulfill the role of art as much as they do the role of illustrations embedded in their related discussion threads.  Tglad’s posted work is one of the best examples.  From his earliest examples of the Mandelbox formula to the one below, posted 2 months later, he’s demonstrated that in addition to his technical skills of a formula developer, he also possesses a real eye for art, particularly color and composition.

Helicopter Ride by Tom Lowe (Tglad), March 30, 2010 (click for full-size)

In closing I’d like to say that I think the Mandelbox and the other 3D fractal types have ushered in a new era of fractal imagery.  A lot of the older, 2D stuff looks pretty stale to me right now and I don’t think it’s a temporary feeling.  I noticed this particularly while browsing the Fractalforums.com gallery.  The old stuff looks even older to me now.  I’ll have to confess that over the last few years I’d become rather bored with fractal art in general.  The only thing that really interested me was my own work and that of Samuel Monnier’s “Pattern Piling” technique.  The Mandelbox and other 3D experiments on the Fractalforums.com site have changed all that for me.  Fractal art is exciting again and it’s because of these new algorithms and formulas and the great imagery they produce.

It’s more than just being “3D” instead of “2D”.  It’s not like all of a sudden the images are exciting because they’ve been enhanced with some new feature or gimmick.  What the 3D algorithms have added to fractal imagery is much more substantial than just another kind of enhancement.  What’s new and different are these fresh new designs, forms and shapes that the 3D algorithms generate that the old 2D algorithms couldn’t make.  Of course, ultimately, everything becomes a flat, 2D image on a computer screen (unless it’s a 3D stereo image set) and whether the depth and perspective in the image comes from a system based on 3D voxels or just 2D pixel rendering tricks (height-field; bump-map) it all has the same effect of giving fractal artists more tools for use in their creative pursuit of making fractal artwork.  To the fractal scientists however and the formula developers, these differences in the underlying mechanics have more meaning and subsequently attract more of their attention (i.e. not everyone pursues fractals for the same purpose).

It’s a fractal renaissance. And if I had to pin an award on just one of the many people who have played a role in bringing it about I’d choose Tom Lowe.  Or rather, I’d start with Tom Lowe.  I’ve got many more awards to give out, a Nobel prize is just the beginning.  I’ve also got a:  Knighthood; Oscar; Medal of Honor; Purple Heart; Court-Martial; ye olde forty minus one…  There’s more.  A lot more to come.

I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden there’s a new crop of 3-D fractals sprouting up and they’re seriously amazing.  I’ve seen 3-D fractals before but these Mandelbulb and Mandel-box things have taken 3-D to a whole new level of sophistication.  The best phrase I can think of to describe them is Majestic Panorama.  It’s like a glimpse of a new world and not merely a new rendering technique or formula.  There’s a depth and style to these types of 3-D images that I’ve only seen in photographs and oil paintings and never before in digital art.  I found them all in the Gallery section of Fractalforums.com, my latest re-discovery in fractal art.

Is it only eye-candy?  or 3-D video game backgrounds?  Or is it the start of a new genre of fractal landscape and panorama that began with programs like Terragen, Bryce and Xenodream but has only now reached a level of sophistication and creativity that sets it apart from everything else ?  It’s this kind of powerful algorithmic creativity that first got me interested in fractal art and then led me to look elsewhere as most fractal artists headed off down the dead end road of endless layering.   Yes, what a breath of fresh air these bold new 3-D things are –however you may like to label them.

One thing I should note:  Many of these images are snapshots of work in progress and early examples of newly developing rendering techniques.  They weren’t necessarily intended by their authors to be finished artwork for display or exhibition.  I’ve reviewed them here simply because I think they’re extremely interesting and worthy of greater attention and viewership.  Also, I’m not up on the technical side of the Mandelbulb and Mandelbox stuff because it’s very new to me.  I’m not even familiar with the software.  Hey, I just like looking at computer made pictures.  Here’s some cool ones…

mandelbrotbox-experiment-1 by ker2x (click to view in majestic panorama mode!)

— update: 05/12/2010: click here to view a much higher resolution version of ker2x’s mandelbrotbox-experiment-1

Like all of these images, you really have to view them fullsize which you can do by clicking on them.  This one really shows the freaky, sci-fi and particularly three-dimensional awe and wonder aspect to these types of images.  The landscape itself is intriguing but the hovering island (and copper/emerald color palette) makes this image simply monumental.  Also, the hazy, “aerial perspective” accomplished in the rendering makes this image look extremely polished and as carefully created as if it had been painted by hand in oil paints.

Retro Metal Cathedral 3 by MarkJayBee

Click it to check out the larger version at Fractalforums.com.  What makes the detail in images like this so spectacular I think is the depth and incredibly realistic lighting.  Although ray-traced images can be intensely realistic and almost “perfect” looking, they don’t have that “aerial-perspective”, that vast expanding background and distance that this images demonstrates so well.  This reminds me of something painted by the old masters like Raphael in his The School in Athens fresco.  Of course no 3-D fractal will have the expressive human figures and all those sorts of things that human painters depict, but they can like this one match the magnificent perspective and three dimensional design that Raphael’s setting and background has.  Actually, I think MarkJayBee’s image here is better in that respect.  Sorry, Mr. Raphael, but you just didn’t have the Mandelbulber program to help you back then.

before the rain, by Tglad

Doesn’t this have a certain Maxfield Parrish look to it?  I don’t know what all the programming and rendering tools were that went into this one, but the results are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before made digitally.  I don’t just mean the lighting and 3-D look, I mean the creativity in the image itself also.  This has the variety and unpredicability of a real, natural landscape.  It doesn’t have the repetitive look that most fractal formulas have.  There’s recursion here, but it’s not carbon-copy or of a purely repetitive nature like say, sierpinski objects have.  You could wander around in this small sample of landscape for ages and not have explored every detail.

Thing by knighty

Here’s a good closeup of the exquisite and wondrous detail that these 3-D “things” have.  Such things as this, although they look realistic enough, could never be made (gravity’s not a problem in the Mandel-Worlds like it is here) but if they could they would rival the sculpture and design of any human made temple or architectural wonder, at least from a design perspective.  Knighty chose a good title as the image speaks for itself and who could ever give this a fitting name?  I saw a lot of very intriguing architecture and 3-d works in the Star Wars second series of movies, but this kind of imagery exceeds that in quality and creativity.  And these “things” can be animated, too.

Aztec Farms by Timeroot

Here’s an even bigger version than the one you’ll find at the Fractalforums.com gallery.  You can clearly see by the “Evaluation Copy” watermarks that this image is fresh from the laboratory.  I’ve included it because, like all the others, it’s such a majestic panorama.  I was really stunned when I first stumbled on this one.  It’s got the level of detail that only electron microscope or satellite photos usally have.  The title is quite appropriate too as it does resemble a vast area of farmland in the desert like a kibbutz in Israel.  There’s so much variety and well rendered details in this one that I just had to include it even though it’s got all those watermarks on it.

The Golden Hour 1 by MarkJayBee

You can’t get a better example of perspective than this image.  This is like those Grand Canyon photographs that one sees in every travel magazine: you just want to dive into the picture and fly away.  Artists used to spend a lot of time and get paid good money for making spectacular scenes like this.  We’re really living in a golden age of art, or if you prefer, visual imagery.  We’re seeing things every day that most explorers and world travelers could never imagine or hope to visit.

entrance to the hole, by Tglad

Reminds me a bit of Dave Makin’s video tour of the inside of his golden sierpinski temple which I included in a previous posting on animation.  Again, look at the incredibly lifelike perspective shown in the mouth of the “hole”.  These images are so vividly rendered and yet also so full of rich algorithmic details.  The green, “tarnished bronze” coloring is a nice touch too and adds a subtle outline and resulting perspective to the image.  I keep expecting to see someone walk up to the balcony railing and begin to issue a royal proclamation.  This would make a nice model for rebuilding the Jedi Temple.

Bulbox3 by Jesse

This one really needs to be view full-sized to fully appreciate it.  What I find most impressive about this one is that although everything looks like it’s been roughly chopped out of stone, there is a precision and carefully laid out design that it all fits into.  Very intricate and yet having a primitive style to it at the same time.  Also, although the image has a reflective or mirror-image quality to it, if you look closely you’ll see that very few of the opposing and apparently “mirrored” structures are actually identical.  The plain background is a nice touch and shows off the rest of the image quite well.

Plastic Mandeltoy by MarkJayBee

The smooth plastic texture in this one is unique.  I find it gives the impression that the details have been exposed by chipping the plastic matrix away rather than being carved from it.  I guess it’s probably a simple image in some ways since it’s just a cube, but as with all these Mandelbox things, there is never anything simple about them.

Inside Tglad's Cube by buddhi

I think the best comparison one can make to an image like this is a fossilized plant.  I’ve seen plant fossils in museums and they have the same delicate detail and stone like qualities to them.  I take it that “Tglad’s Cube” is a formula made by Tglad.  Buddhi, the author of this image, also made the program that created it, Mandelbulber (just for Linux).  I tried it out on my ancient computer (P4 2.26 Ghz “single”-core) and it works perfectly although I wasn’t able to make anything approaching the cool stuff these folks I’ve reviewed here have.  You can see the sort of synergy that been developing over at Fractalforums.com with this 3-D fractal experimentation.

Exploring fractal planet by bib

You see here?  Everything these 3-D fractal programs generate is awesome.  Even this crevice in the side of  this larger (I’m guessing) Mandelbox planet is cool to look at.  It’s like the whole thing is one gigantic carefully carved piece of art.  And I’ll bet every cave and crevice like this one is different in some way or another.  Very nice coloring.  The texture looks genuinely rock-like and the darker tones gives a nice shadowing and relief to the imagery.  Nicely composed too.  And the shadowed area to the right of the center suggests there’s more to be explored if we wander in –unless of course something lives in there.

So there you have it.  For the first time in a long while there’s something I find that’s genuinely new and exciting in the fractal world.  I’ve got more to show you, but I thought I’d just focus on the Majestic Panorama genre for now.  In the meantime I suggest you check out the Gallery section yourself over at Fractalforums.com.  It’s a pretty good collection all on it’s own created by the contributions of the many forum participants that have gathered over there.  It’s not the usual sort of fractal gallery and I think you can see from what I’ve reviewed here that it’s got some really great works in it.

I found this email in my inbox just yesterday and quickly felt my fractal art commentary sap rising boldly in my branches.  Here, read it carefully and see if it has the same Spring-Time for Fractaland effect on you:

FractalForums.com Spring 2010 Fractal Art Competition Submission Period has Ended

The Entry Submissions time frame for the “FractalForums.com Spring 2010 Fractal Art Competition” has now ended.  This submission period set a new record for Member Activity on the FractalForums, with around 650.000 Page Views!!!

We would now like to enter the voting period, which will last until the end of May 2010.

We have a total of 130 entries to the three different competition sections.  And due to the large amount of entries, please take your time to review each of the submissions and give a reasonable vote for what you consider “best” images per category.

Only the Gallery votes count for the results.  So, no external embedded video Sites Rating system is taken into account.

The ranking will be as follows:
– highest average rating
( if tied for same position, then )
– most votes
( if tied again, then )
– sharing of winner placement

Again, we ask that you please take your time and review each category of the competition, the sections are as follows:

•  Mandel Brot  —  Only views of the standard z^2+c Mandelbrot set and Julia Sets where allowed, and this section has more than 47 spectacular entries:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;cat=38

•  Fractal Fun  —  Contains computer generated fractal art of any kind.  This section was the most popular with more than 64 entries.
It is a vast mixture of state of the art Mandelbulb renderings and beautiful 2-D creations:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;cat=37

•  Fractal Movies  —  For the first time in the Forums’ history, there was a movies/video section, with a total of 19 entries.
You will encounter interesting new locations of the Mandelbrot, plus amazing 3-D fly-bys and inside explorations. Enjoy a total of 40 Minutes of extraordinary Fractal pleasure:
http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;cat=36

Voting Period will end on:
1.June 2010

Well the internet is a wild and wooly frontier place of lawlessness and I intend to judge this here contest right here!  But before I pull out my six-shooter to choose the winners (and scatter the losers), I’d like to ask the question, “What’s up with this FractalForums.com place?”

It’s been around for a couple of years and that’s the strangest part of it.  Fractal forums and other community venues almost always fold up after the intoxication of the opening event wears off.  That’s about 3-6 months, I’d say.  That’s how it was for Orbit Trap’s campfire singalong days.

But FractalForums.com is still singing and the campfire isn’t going out.  What is FractalForums.com doing right that Deviant Art, Renderosity, the Ultra Fractal Mailing List and so many other community venues  (largely dead and forgotten) have been failing at?  Half the postings there on FractalForums.com annoy me and the other half seem unimportant.  Is that the magic combination for a vibrant and self-sustaining community site?  Something for everyone and a steady stream of provocation?

The web-rings are no longer breathing.  They were a great idea in the 90’s but Google has done a better job of locating fractal art sites for the last 10 years.  The community art sites are brain-dead; Flickr’s beginners out-perform Deviant Art’s masters on a regular basis these days.  I have no idea why FractlForums.com should be thriving in such a wasteland, but it is.  Maybe there’s something about the social environment at FractalForums.com that draws in people from the old stuffy places? –and keeps them coming back.  Something nourishing and enticing?  What could it be?

Even I’ve joined in on some of the threads over there and I almost always avoid opening my mouth in a forum these days.  If a place like that can engage someone as jaded as me then there must be something special going on, whatever that invisible quality might be.  I’m even reviewing their contest and I find art contests distasteful.   Based on all that, I guess I ought to say that the first prize should go to FractalForums.com themselves in the category of Most Relevant Fractal Art Community Site.

The email tells me that there’s three categories to the contest and that they’ve been carefully defined.  But the first lesson in judging art is to stop listening to the people around you and ignore the boundaries they’ve constructed.  Trust no one.

I’ve made up my own categories and the first is a general one and I call it the At Last! Something I Wish I’d Made And Could Take Credit For –category.

And the winner is…

My Secret Garden by SaMMy. Click to view full-size at FractalForums.com.

My next category is one which most fractal artists will immediately relate to.  I call it the Astonishing Thing That I Cannot Describe –category.  The winner is obvious, but only if you view the image full-size.  For that reason I’ve only included a link.  No thumbnail or fair-use version can do justice to this great golden vision.  You have to go there and see it life sized or not at all.

Next, a category for which there was really only one serious contender.  The Best Rendition of Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead I’ve Seen Recently –category.  The author calls it “Mandel-blob” but remember: when judging art stop listening to others even when it’s the artist themself speaking.  I think this one’s my favorite.  But that’s not a category.

Mandel-blob by Buddhi

Hey!  It certainly is the year of the Mandelbulb, isn’t it?  My next category is the Best Rendering of the Mandelbulb Formula, Now Let’s Move On To Something Else –category.   This one really is very nice.  I’m not being sarcastic; the coloring and shadows and detailing is very well done.  Congratulations, Kraftwerk, for making something new out of something that’s become rather stale very quickly.  Nice screen name too.  That isn’t a category but might be one worth adding next time.

Living Ornaments by Kraftwerk

Did I saw let’s move on from the Mandelbulb?  Next category is Second Best Rendering of the Mandelbulb Formula, This Could be a New Genre and the winner is Kraftwerk, again.  Maybe it all depends on how you render these formulas and not the formula itself.  There’s something majestic about this image.  It’s got something impressive and attention grabbing about it.  Back in the old days of vinyl records this would have made a great album cover.

Golden and Delicious by Kraftwerk

Next up is the Hey, I Like Those Colors But I Bet No One Else Will –category.  I don’t know why palettes like this are so uncommon.  There’s a real retro Sci-Fi mood to anything using these sorts of muted colors.  Maybe it just doesn’t appeal to the young folks? (I’m 45).

Thistledown by Dave Makin

The final category, the You’re A Better Man Than Me Gunga Din –category.  It’s an animation.  Two weeks of rendering?  For me, two minutes to render something is too long.  The winner is Buddhi with Flight Through BulbBox a very detailed and extensive 3d fractal tour.  Two weeks!  He must have more than one computer.

Wait, one more category:  Not Really Part of the Contest But It Should Have Been.  I guess these stills in the animation section were just meant to be placeholders or something, but this one looks great.

Dangerous Spaceship by "bib" (not bub!). Click to go to FractalForums.com page for video.

I’d say Dangerous Spaceship is one of the top five images.  And I’ll bet it’s not even part of the contest, technically speaking.

Well, contests are like that.  The winners don’t always win.

Another program from the extensive digital treasury of Terry Gintz.  Unlike Fractal Vizion which contains, metaphorically speaking, a full fractal orchestra, Hydra is a solo performance where the star is the quaternion, a richly talented Pavarotti of the fractal world who needs not even a piano for accompaniment.

I mixed Time with Space...

Perhaps the label Michelangelo of the Fractal World would be better since quaternions are 3 dimensional –or more correctly, 4 dimensional– and therefore resemble sculptures more than paintings.  There’s been a lot of excitement lately about the (so-called) 3D mandelbrot, the Mandelbulb, but here’s something I find more visually exciting as much as it’s practically ancient as far as fractals and fractal art goes.

Quaternionic algebra was introduced by Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843. However the use of quaternions to describe rigid body orientations has a much older history dating back to at least 1776 in the work of Euler.
Hamilton knew that the complex numbers could be viewed as points in a plane, and he was looking for a way to do the same for points in space. Points in space can be represented by their coordinates, which are triples of numbers, and for many years Hamilton had known how to add and multiply triples of numbers. But he had been stuck on the problem of division: He did not know how to take the quotient of two points in space.
The breakthrough finally came on Monday 16 October 1843 in Dublin, when Hamilton was on his way to the Royal Irish Academy where he was going to preside at a council meeting. While walking along the towpath of the Royal Canal with his wife, the concept behind quaternions was taking shape in his mind. Hamilton could not resist the impulse to carve the formulae for the quaternions i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1 into the stone of Brougham Bridge as he passed by it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion#History

Most fractal things (are quaternions fractals?) take their origin from the work of Benoit Mandelbrot in the latter part of the 20th century, but here’s something dating back to 1843 and in part to 1776.  Euler?  Yikes.  He was Ancient Greek or something, like Pythagoras and Copernicus.  Close enough.  Let’s get to the pictures.

Thanks to Mr. Gintz’s programming expertise all we have to do is push some buttons and play with the color palettes.  I’m not really sure what a quaternion is, but that just adds some magic to the recipe.  Here’s a quote that shows I’m not the only person a little disoriented by the concept of a quaternion:

Time is said to have only one dimension, and space to have three dimensions. […] The mathematical quaternion partakes of both these elements; in technical language it may be said to be “time plus space”, or “space plus time”: and in this sense it has, or at least involves a reference to, four dimensions. And how the One of Time, of Space the Three, Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be.” — William Rowan Hamilton (Quoted in R.P. Graves, “Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton”).

Actually, that helps a bit: “a reference to four dimensions”.  It’s got four numbers instead of three.  Like a tricycle with a steering wheel.  Hypernion, on the other hand, doesn’t even bring up a page on the Wikipedia and a Google search for it just suggests that I’ve made a spelling mistake.  Anyhow, on to the pictures.  Or videos, rather…
[flashvideo file=http://ambaka.com/blog/26/hydra22.flv width=360 height=296  /]

I like this one.  I like it a lot.  And I don’t care if it does look like the stopper from a  champagne bottle.
[flashvideo file=http://ambaka.com/blog/26/hydra06.flv width=340 height=360  /]

.

I did a video capture to show you the interesting way in which they’re made.  The color gradient silhouette is just a draft of the final image, but sometimes that temporary image has interesting qualities of it’s own.  There’s not a whole lot of animation really, just a slow revealing of the silhouette, so for simplicity and better image quality I saved a few silhouettes to compare with the final images.  Just like with Fractal Vizion’s L-system and Fractal Landscape creation, Hydra’s quaternion images have an extra dimension to them, that being the cool way in which they’re produced.

Temporary Silhouette

Final Image

Sihouette

Final Image

Here’s a few more to give you an idea of what the program can do.  I should mention that Hydra comes with a nice Help file but that I didn’t look at it until after I’d made all these images.  The program is pretty straightforward and hides the complexity of quaternion creation behind a couple of menus with easy to chose options.  Another nice touch is the addition of a random generation button which seems to be a trademark of Terry Gintz’s programs.  He really makes it easy for you to get started right away and then to start experimenting.  That’s the kind of algorithmic art programming that I like.  These next two are Hypernions.

I like the ancient artifact look

The hypernions have squarish characteristics

The coloring is great to work with.  Open the palette editor and just click on the random palette button.  After that there’s a few simple adjustments you can make to alter the palette.  The images you see here are custom palettes I made this way.  The whole thing is pretty intuitive.  Not all fractal programs are this easy to use.  Here’s my two palettes if you’re interested in trying them out in the program: bluewrap.pqz and yellow-clay.pqz

I think it's map of North America

Ice cream, but true-colored ice cream

More ice cream

Sometimes Hydra makes some really surprising things

Sometimes they're just interesting stones to collect

This one looks rather fractal and very lifelike. Reminds me of the wind carved stone formations in the Southwest U.S.

This is one is a zoomed-in detail from the surface of a quaternion

Some experimenting. Hydra does very nice texturing. They really are like sculptures.

Different palette. Hypernion formula. Whatever that is.

Just a nice rock to add to the collection

Hypernion. A square version of the image from the start of this blog posting.

I find these clay constructions quite intriguing and I want to try out every formula and its variations. That's how I found this one.

Well, what else is there to say or show?  You can rotate the quaternions just like any other kind of sculpture and view them from different angles, lighting, surface texture and other variable characteristics.  It makes Ice Cream and Islands; Bubble Gum of the Gods; Brush Stroke Drafts and something new that I’ve termed computoids after the word asteriods in the sense of exotic computer made rocks.  Perhaps you have to be a bit of a rock collector to really enjoy this program.  It’s got a real natural style to what it does.  And style is what I think is very important in fractal art and algorithmic art programs in general.  Hydra produces imagery that is visually appealing.  There’s other programs that can render the complex formulas you find in Hydra, but they don’t render them in the same graphically appealing ways as Hydra does.  Great programs like this take more than just technical talent to make they take artistic talent as well.  There’s a lot of artistry that programmers like Terry Gintz put into programs like Hydra.  That’s why it’s so easy for people like me who just push buttons to make interesting stuff with them.  There’s an awful lot of power in those buttons.

Of all the things that the Genetic Art java program Kandid does, I had always found (until recently) it’s cellular automata features to be the most enticing and the most disappointing. The cellular automata, true to their synthetic, space age name, looked very computer-ish and although the high contrast color palettes complimented this quite well there was one big problem: everything it came up with all looked the same.

This is a common problem with generative art, but with some persistence one can often find ways to direct the machine in more profitable directions. Kandid being a genetic art program, it works by choosing two images and creating a new generation of images based on variations of their parameters. In Kandid these parameters, sensibly enough, are called chromosomes. You can’t play with the chromosomes but you can combine them (i.e. breed them) with another set and adjust the environment in which this happens by altering the values for mutation, cross-over and scale.

Unfortunately, cellular automata (CA) images aren’t scalable due to the nature of the mechanism by which they’re made; you’re stuck with the size of the image and that appears to be limited to about 427×427 pixels. Fractals have the ability to redraw the details within an image at a larger size, that is, you can zoom into them, but CA actually create a unique pixel collection that is a function of the size of the image. So they’re pretty much a what you see on your monitor is all you’ve got. I found this out by trying to “breed” a little one with a big one. It’s nothing like breeding horses or dogs.

After a few runs that simply repeated the usual boring results, I started to get reckless and contrary to what common sense would dictate, breed the ugly, sickly, lame ones with the good ones. That was how I made my break-through. Sometimes I would breed what looked to be a completely empty image, nothing but a solid square of color, with something more appealing. Other times I would add something really simple and dull to the gene pool. These new combination lead to new outcomes and I think that’s one of the keys to working with these generative/computational/algorithmic programs: explore and experiment.

All of these images here are entirely the result of the genetic art breeding process of selecting two images and clicking on the “generate next generation with sexual reproduction” button. The other button is “generate random next generation” which amounts to just randomizing the chromosome parameters (I guess) instead of creating variations from the chromosomes of two selected images. The entire image, color, lines, texture –everything– was purely the result of just pushing buttons. I didn’t even alter the hue or anything else in a graphics program. So what you’re seeing here is exactly the sort of results anyone would get if they made the same selections as I did. (I also played with the environmental variables too, in order to, if I understand them correctly, increase the mutation rate, cross-over and variety of scales: longshot/closeup sort of thing.)

Moral questions abound: just look at this hideous notification which appears when you close the program:

There’s something I find appealing about these CA images. They’re rather simple (and rather small) and yet after spending a half hour or so in the virtual breeding laboratory, the simple style and high contrast color palette starts to grow on you. They’re kind of like what miniatures are in painting and sculpture; a sort of specialized sub-genre. I like the harsh, technological look, which brings me to the second part of this posting:

The Creativity of Computational Art

While human intervention can take computational imagery and rework it into a more attractive form, the artist most often erases or dilutes the very aspect of computational imagery that makes it unique and stand out from the rest of the “art” world, which is its mechanical creativity. It might “look better” when the artist gets done, but ultimately the effect is to produce imagery that is already common place and lacks the freaky appeal that is the direct result of the  non-human and untouched by human hands computational process.

I think perhaps that fractal artists can be separated into two camps: those who seek the wild, untamed imagery that grows ready-to-pick from cold, mechanical algorithms; and those who want to use that sort of imagery, domesticate it, so to speak, and utilize it as the raw material in their own creations.

Except it isn’t really their own or really very creative. In fact, I would say that such a traditional approach to creating art is more imitative and results in images that resemble “typical” artwork. This probably sounds strange to many artists because isn’t expressing one’s “creativity” what art is and has always been about? Yes, that’s true, but now there’s something better. I believe that better art, more “original” art, will be made by artists interfering with the machine less and spending their time trying to find good imagery instead of trying to construct it themselves. I think the forte of fractals and other types of computational imagery is their artificial, mechanical style and that this contrasts greatly with the human touch which artists, well-meaning but misguided, want to add to “make it art” or to make it “personal”.

Computational art is more sophisticated. Picasso’s Guernica, a fine example of “typical art”, is quite predicable and follows the well worn trails of tradition. Picasso expresses the horror of the bombing and captures the human tragedy and suffering and manages to place the actual historical event of Guernica unavoidably in the middle of our collective town square, literally like a billboard, so that it will never be forgotten. The style in which Picasso painted was new back then but now it’s old. The lasting impact of Guernica is the way it memorializes that historic and shameful event and exemplifies the power of art to express and influence social and political thought.

A noble thing to do, but from my perspective also a rather primitive one. Artists are always doing these things, noble though they may be, they are also less interesting because they are so common. I actually feel that paintings that are difficult to understand have more lasting appeal because they’re perennially open to new interpretation (or any interpretation). Pollock’s drip paintings have that eternal quality. Computational processes lack the intelligence of the human mind, the mind of an artist, and thereby produce things that are unpredictable and unconnected, unrelated to traditional art and (when they look good) produce works that are refreshingly unique and much more creative. I like to think of computational art in a musical sense as being “strange new chords” –combinations of notes that musicians, especially well-trained musicians, would never create or attempt to create, but once we hear them we marvel at their ingenuity. Bold and new –that’s the essence of creativity.

The opening chord to the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, was created haphazardly and today is difficult to reproduce because even John Lennon, who composed it, couldn’t actually remember the precise combination of notes he played or how he strummed them to get that same sound. I heard this in a documentary where Ringo Starr recounted the original event that took place at a recording studio. What makes machines so “talented” is that they don’t really know what they’re doing: they are unreflective and unthinking. That’s why I say that artists who use fractal imagery to contruct more elaborate images of their own creative designs are hopelessly doomed to repeat what others have done. Once in a while someone constructs something interesting, but the artist’s contribution most often obscures fractal art rather than enhancing it. (This is part of what Terry was getting at when he noted that many DA artists made better work in their early days.) Machines have no such bad habits, or any habits at all, and the best ones are idiot savants performing amazing feats of computation and yet unable to draw the simple pictures that any child can.

The job of a computational artist is to push buttons and turn dials. Everything else is folly.

For those of you young-er folks who have grown up with computers and the internet and consider all that technology and online media to be normal, you don’t know how really dull and boring things were before home computing came along.

My biggest technological thrill when I was growing up back in the early 70’s was owning a short-wave radio.  I was like 8 years old and  I remember tuning in some Eastern European radio station that seem to play nothing but a station identifier composed of a short sound bit of an orchestra playing a few notes.  It was a real magical experience.  It drifted in, then out, and just when you turned up the volume to hear it better it came blasting back again, bouncing off the ionosphere or something.  Nowadays we can watch webcams from the other side of the world.

Another big thrill for me was taking electronics apart and just seeing what happened when I shorted out parts of the circuit boards.  Things would click, lights would go on or off, and once in a while some smoke would appear.  As long as the thing was only powered by batteries it was perfectly safe, I guessed.

I owned a cassette tape recorder the size of two bricks, the kind with big white piano-like keys to control it.  I got a real technology thrill from recording friends and family members and playing it back to them.  They got a thrill from that too.  An even bigger thrill came when I discovered that if I touched parts of the solder covered side of the circuit board with my bare fingers when a blank cassette was in play mode, various musical squeaks would jump out of the speaker.

Roy Orbison, a musician from West Texas was once asked by an interviewer, “Why have so many talented musicians come from West Texas?”  Roy responded with something to the effect that, “There’s not much to do in West Texas so people have to come up with ways to entertain themselves.”

I’ve always wondered if silence and emptyness was actually more inspiring for creativity than the constant chatter of “important artists” and one’s “helpful friends”.  It’s true that artists will sometime get ideas and inspiration from the work of others but too much inspiration from the work of others leads to nothing more than imitation and rigid, inbred “styles”.

And now back to the creative abuse of technology:  Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics (“the friendly ghost in the machine”) had been doing some very advanced tinkering with common electronic equipment.  His own words and his two YouTube videos here say it all.  It’s something to think about when we leave this little bit of West Texas and head back to the New York City of Fractal Art.  I’m not talking about where you live but where your mind is.  The online Fractal Art world is mostly a little social club devoted to self-congratulation, as I think Terry’s recent series commenting on the folks over at Deviant Art has shown.  If you’re already in West Texas then I’d suggest you stay there; you’re not missing a thing.

Image by Pete Edwards at Casper Electronics.

Pete Edwards writes:

This is a modified Nintendo video game console. It is a very simple bend and is a lot of fun to play with. To bend this unit I simply added a patch bay to a handful of points on the video processing chips. The Display can be tweaked by either connecting points together or by feeding in external signals, like audio or voltages from my modular synthesizer. the video shown above is an example of how the visuals can be controlled using clock signals from my modular synth.

-from http://casperelectronics.com/finished-pieces/nintendo/

I guess it works a bit like a light organ.  Here’s a video Pete made showing the setup in action:

Here’s another of Pete Edwards giving a live performance.  It’s not too visual (because it’s rather dark) but the music, or sound sculpture, is interesting.

Now, we all know that it’s our DNA that controls our physical characteristics.  DNA contains the information which determines how we develop from fertilized egg to adult.  DNA, in turn, is literally coded instructions similar to binary computer code.

DNA is encoded using sequences of four different amino acids grouped into pairs.  The arrangement of those four variables ultimately controls the synthesis of proteins and all other more complex structures and assemblages which together make up the entire human body or the body of any living thing.  What you look like (and other physiological things) is the result of this simply constructed, but lengthy and intricate, DNA code.  The code creates the body.

Now imagine doing experiments with that code and then being able to quickly see what the results would be.  Swap a few genes to change your hair or eye color.  Or maybe, load your DNA code into a text editor and do search and replace on sequences wherever they happen to occur.  Swapping this for that wherever “this” appears.  Or maybe just picking any arbitrary sequence and replacing it with the same sequence in reverse order?   And then quickly being able to see what sort of mutated creature results.  Wouldn’t that be fun?

Jpeg files, as anyone who’s accidentally opened them in a text editor knows, are just such a collection of codes, although, once again, not exactly the same as DNA, but having the same effect.  The various numbers and symbols in a jpeg file are the stored information that tells your computer monitor what to display –the code creates the picture.

Glitch-Nine by Luke Roberts, 2006 (Originally a wall texture photo)

Alright, now imagine doing search and replace on the jpeg code, swapping hexadecimal symbols with other symbols and then viewing what the altered file now looks like.  This is literally changing the DNA of the jpeg image like one would roll dice because surely one has no idea whatsoever what the results of such reckless scrambling of the encoded image information will be.

From the Flickr page:

A series of images created by modifying the code of JPEG images.

Created with Hexplorer mostly by using the “find and replace” tool to find a certain hex combinations (usually about two characters works best) and replacing them with something else.

items are from between 08 Feb 2005 & 21 Jun 2006.

Here’s a few screenshots of Hexplorer from the Hexplorer page at Sourceforge:

Hexplorer Screenshot from Sourceforge

Hexplorer Screenshot from Sourceforge

I’m sure there’s other programs that can be used to edit hexadecimal code, but this is the one Luke Roberts used to create the images displayed here.  I assume all one would have to do is save the altered file and then reload it in an image viewer to see the results.  Just like editing the html of web pages and viewing the changes in a browser.  This is literally, “painting by numbers”.

Glitch Three by Luke Roberts, 2006

Luke Roberts has this to say about Glitch Three (from his Flickr page):  “With Hexplorer, if you replace 1 with 0 or something similar to that (like 2 with 8 or something) this is what the image usualy turns out like.”

Only in the digital medium could such Frankensteinian methods be used.  It reminds one that the digital medium is in many ways nothing at all like the traditional, hand-made medium of oil paintings and clay sculptures.  Digital is much more fun and rewards those who experiment.

Glitch Eight by Luke Roberts, 2006

Glitch Eight: “My favourite of my glitch works so far. It’s a self portrait originally. I like the colours and the fact that you can see a bit of hair and my eye. ”

Glitch Four by Luke Roberts, 2006 ("another self portrait")

Glitch One by Luke Roberts, 2006

Luke Roberts calls this “Glitch” art, but I think a better name is Jpeg Engineering (or editing) because to me it more resembles Genetic Engineering than the reckless crashing of electronic devices which is what I would normally expect in the creation of Glitch Art.  Although I guess the unintended consequences of editing the hexadecimal codes is in keeping with the malfunctional nature of glitches.

This is just an amazing idea and I’m going to have to try it out myself.  I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.  The hexadecimal code is really like the parameter file of the picture and controls the pixels.

When it comes to digital art, think pixels, not pictures.

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If you’re interested in looking at more of Luke Roberts’ work, his Glitch Art set is here where you can view all 12 images in the set at a larger size.  His main Flickr collection is here which contains photography which, as it turns out, is what his main artistic interest is and not the editing of jpeg hexadecimal files.  He also has a website at lukeroberts.us.

WormSpiral_1

I don’t like slick computer art but I like Daniel Eaton’s Incendia gallery. The more polished and “professional” computer art gets the more it reminds me of advertising and other kinds of soulless, slithering graphical lifeforms. But Daniel Eaton (aka “Apophysitis”) has somehow managed to construct creative and appealing imagery with a program I had considered to be just another eye candy machine. Maybe Incendia is something special in the world of 3D graphics or maybe Daniel’s success with it just shows that it’s not what tool you use that matters but how you use it.

Although these images are, for the most part, simple and lacking the “wow” factor that most 3D galleries seem to indulge in, they have a real appeal to them. Their simplicity gives them their style. I think most computer artists tend to pull out all the stops and do a “glitz-blitz” on their images. But I think making good digital art is as much an exercise in using restraint as it is in getting the most out of the software.  I think that’s why I found Daniel Eaton’s Incendia work so interesting.  I’ve selected an even dozen to review here.

20080815113333_1

20080815113333_1: Fractal Philishave? Nicely done and not overdone. Note how the simple coloring enhances the look of the smooth metalic surface and allows the perforated detailing to be appreciated.  Or were they just the default settings?

CircleCity Perspective_1

CircleCity Perspective_1:  This one has a real 3D look to it and the simple sky and lighting all fit together to create something quite vivid.  The coloring is good too.  Notice the grainy, “sand spray” texture.  Daniel uses that quite effectively in some other ones I’ve reviewed here.

Circle City_1

Circle City_1: Chariots of the gods?  It has an Eastern look to it.  The fuzzy glow makes it interesting and combined with the ray-traced appearance that the lighting and shadow gives, the effect is one of mystery and transcendence.  I’m starting to hear chanting, so let’s move on.

20080821005011.bmp_1

20080821005011.bmp_1: Another fractal assemblage and it ought to be a fairly ordinary image except, once again, this one just seems to shine in a special way.  Maybe I ought to check out more Incendia galleries.  I know Xenodream makes 3D fractal images like this, but I don’t remember seeing so many interesting images like this in a Xenodream gallery.  But again, I’m guessing the difference is made by the artist and not so much the program.

20080812211300_1

20080812211300_1: I don’t know why this one made my short list from the 435 images Daniel has on display in his gallery.  Yes, that’s four hundred and thirty-five.  And those just the ones he uploaded to Picasa.  Digital tools tend to make us all very productive.  It would have taken a lot of time  and considerable expense for a painter to produce 435 paintings.  But that’s just the way digital art is.  The old palette and beret crowd just can’t keep up with us, space-age artists.

20080816200011_1

20080816200011_1: Enough of what I have to say.  Let’s hear what Jack Williamson said about Daniel’s 20080816200011_1 in his short story, The Lake of Light, from the April, 1931 issue of Astounding Stories:

At our feet the glistening river of fire plunged down again in a magnificent flaming fall. Below, its luminous liquid was spread out in rivers and lakes and canals, over all the vast plain. The channels ran through an amazing jungle. It was a forest of fungus, of mushroom things with great fleshy stalks and spreading circular tops. But they were not the sickly white and yellow of ordinary mushrooms, but were of brilliant colors, bright green, flaming scarlet, gold and purple-blue. Huge brilliant yellow stalks, fringed with crimson and black, lifted mauve tops thirty feet or more. It was a veritable forest of flame-bright fungus.

What_Lies_Beneath___Full_Size_by_djeaton3162_1

What_Lies_Beneath… Far out, eh? Jack’s got something classic pulp sci-fi to say about this one too:

In the center of this weirdly forested subterranean plain was a great lake, filled, not with the flaming liquid, but with dark crystal water. And on the bottom of that lake, clearly visible from the elevation upon which we stood, was a city!

A city below the water! The buildings were upright cylinders in groups of two or three, of dozens, even of hundreds. For miles, the bottom of the great lake was covered with them. They were all of crystal, azure-blue, brilliant as cylinders turned from immense sapphires. They were vividly visible beneath the transparent water. Not one of them broke the surface.

GreenCandyBowl_1

GreenCandyBowl_1: Jack never envisioned anything like this silver-topped, metalic blue wedding cake, but then who could have envisioned the sort of imagery that digital artists produce today back in the 30’s?  Even now it’s hard to describe how digital art like this is made and relate it to the more traditional, hand-made methods of making artwork.  One thing I like about computer art –and this image is a good example– is the unrealistic, alien, spacey appearance that the imagery often has.  The sides of this “cake” look metalic like the foil covering of a satellite.  Not to mention, of course, that it’s hard to say what it is, or even label it.  Computer art is quite creative in that sense.

20080811152915_1

20080811152915_1: It’s got the rainbow colors that normally look pretty tacky, but combined with the sand spray and the little knives –all on a simple gray background– the overall effect is a good one.  How many 3D artists would dare to use such a plain background when they could chose from any number of textures?  But the simple background here is what I think makes the whole work look balanced.

Sand dollar_1

Sand dollar_1: This and the last one are my favorites.  The graininess complements the 3D imagery by adding some variety and complexity to what would otherwise be another shiny plastic clone.  Sand Dollar_1 has a Da Vinci, Renaissance look to it I find.  Very subtle coloring and a style that is rather non-digital.  I guess sometimes fractals, even 3D fractals, just need a little extra rendering help (or a few accidental effects).

RustBowl_1

RustBowl_1: A very simple structure and yet intriguing.  Notice the small glowing line inside the ball; that’s the sort of subtle touch that I think sets Daniel Eaton’s work apart from the other.  The simplicity to this image almost makes me think it’s non-digital and something silk-screened.  Everybody’s got their own tastes when it comes to digital art –especially 3D artwork– but I find Daniel’s work to have a style all its own and one worth taking a look at for why it’s so effective in a medium that seems to thrive on excess and complexity.

Daniel’s work is significant because, as I mentioned earlier, I believe the better, more interesting –more creative– work will be made by artists like him who can get a good grasp on how to use their software tools, experiment with them and use their features when they serve a purpose and not just as defaults and requisites. I’ve come to realize that computer programs are not like the traditional hand held tools that painters and other artists use. Getting creative with computer programs requires an experimentalist type of personality that instinctively pursues new and sometimes oddball ways of using a program –not to make art but to just explore and experiment.   Computer art is an art form of remote control: driving robots and controlling machines in a place we can’t go.

Mastering established techniques and having great self-discipline is not necessary in digital art like it is in the traditional arts. Digital art favors people who like to goof off and just have fun. That’s what’s wrong with fractal art: hard work never pays off and that’s why so many are so poor. A good program, a playful attitude and at least one good eye; that’s all you need to make good computer art. Funny thing though, there don’t seem to be that many people around like Daniel Eaton who can do that.