Year: 2008

3 min 0

Image of the Week: Polyscene

  • Tim
  • 20 June, 2008
I stumbled on another interesting find over at Flickr.com: Fractal Origami. fractal by polyscene Although I’m sure work like this is painstaking and requires considerable skill in the more advanced origami techniques (there’s a special…
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7 min 0

An "Our Ears Are Burning" Update

I’ve been experiencing hot flashes around the ears lately. I think a round-up of the latest buzz reactions to Orbit Trap might be in order. Let’s start with Keith MacKay’s most recent exercise in pouting:…
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3 min 0

Disappeared Art

Disappearing should be an art form, a seductive way of leaving the world. I believe that part of disappearing is to disappear before you die, to disappear before you have run dry, while you still…
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2 min 0

Fractal Universe Calendar …In Retreat

  • Tim
  • 15 June, 2008
Funny, I was Googling something a week ago, and while following a link to the 2009 gallery of winning images for the Fractal Universe Contest I found myself looking at an error page. These things…
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1 min 0

Fuzzy Times in Fractalville

  • Tim
  • 12 June, 2008
My apologies to jamfancy, Funny Bunny and tibiloo, but I found this online vignette was just too precious not to share it with the loyal, die-hard, though thick and thin, grassroots supporters of Orbit Trap…
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4 min 0

Manas Dichow – Image of the Week

  • Tim
  • 5 June, 2008
“After 85 gazillion fractals, I broke the camera out.”-Manas Dichow on his Flickr site Egold: “Love this one but it’s pity that yo’ve gone into “fractals” dream.” Manas Dichow: “egold, Photography isn’t dead yet. Fractals…
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17 min 2

What We Know and What We Don’t Know

Six Images from The Fractal Universe Calendar 2010 Break out the cheese dip, fractal artists. Your 2010 Fractal Universe Calendar (hereafter known as the FUC) has finally arrived. You might not have noticed, though. Although…
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3 min 0

Image of the Week: Paul DeCelle

Moment in Blue by Paul DeCelle Ultra Fractal is certainly versatile but too often images produced with it quickly lose their freshness to my eyes. The reason is found in its composing process in which…
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5 min 2

Contests for Dummies

  • Tim
  • 30 May, 2008
Chapter One: What is a contest? “an occasion on which a winner is selected from among two or more contestants”wordnet.princeton.edu “A contest, is an event in which two or more individuals or teams compete against…
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4 min 11

Darts for Keith

  • Tim
  • 21 May, 2008
Welcome back all you faithful Orbit Trap fans to this week’s episode of, “Image of the Week”. Well, as you may have guessed from the title, this review is not going to be pretty. Keep…
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3 min 0

Image of the Week: Stacy Reed

A Farewell to Regret by Stacy Reed Popular fractal programs certainly take their share of hard knocks. Apophysis, for example, seems to fiind itself frequently floating in critical backwash, and here on OT we’ve been…
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2 min 0

Spleen

Spleen (2008) [Click on the image above to see the view with binoculars.] The first section, entitled “Spleen et idèal,” opens with a series of poems that dramatize contrasting views of art, beauty, and the…
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2 min 0

To the Reader

To the Reader (2008) [Click on the image above to see the view with binoculars.] The poems [in Flowers of Evil] found a small but appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their…
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3 min 3

Kudos to Kerry

  • Tim
  • 8 May, 2008
We’re starting a new weekly feature here on Orbit Trap. Every week we’ll be reviewing an interesting piece of Fractal artwork. This is nothing radical, of course; many sites do this sort of thing, but…
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3 min 0

Fractal Art is mainstream now!

  • Tim
  • 28 April, 2008
Yes. Apparently all the diseases and infirmities that I’ve been complaining about in the Fractal Art world are widespread and commonplace — in the mainstream. The Fractalbook people that I said were obscuring the really…
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12 min 1

Never a Discouraging Word

Blue Buffalo (2001) Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority, then privileges, and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second, and dies in the third.—Vicomte De Chateaubriand It will surprise…
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3 min 0

Geomo de la Fyre

  • Tim
  • 21 April, 2008
Fyre embedded parameter file Lately I’ve begun to seriously question whether using the term, “abstract” to describe any piece of artwork can be realistically used. I think the term abstract is itself an abstraction and…
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2 min 0

The Inner Workings of Walls

  • Tim
  • 18 April, 2008
Fyre 1.0.1 embedded parameter file Most have never looked beneath the surface of a wall, or even considered doing such a thing. A wall is not seen as an object of substance, and therefore not…
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3 min 0

The Arabian Nights

  • Tim
  • 14 April, 2008
Sterli18.loo Just like fractals, there is a special allure to the stories of The Arabian Nights. And also like fractals, I think that special quality that makes them attractive comes from their unique origin: fractals…
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7 min 0

An Open Letter to Avalanche Publishing

April 10, 2008 Avalanche Publishing, Inc.P.O. Box 55Delafield , WI 53018 Attention: Publishing Team for the Fractal Universe Calendar Dear Publishing Team: I am writing you out of concern for the protocols used to solicit…
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3 min 0

Ich bin ein Bernini!

  • Tim
  • 11 April, 2008
The Ecstasy of St Clickism It’s not exactly a single photoshop filter, “bernini.8bf”, but rather a syndrome of filters (to use a pathological expression). The sierpinski effect from multicrystal.8bf (Ilyich the Toad) produces the sharp,…
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6 min 0

Snorkeling in Wool

Hyperbolic coral forms by Christine Werthiem and Margaret Wertheim. Photo by Alyssa Gorelick. From the “Goings on about Town” section of The New Yorker, 4-7-08: Crocheting the Coral Reef: The Institute for Figuring, a Los…
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4 min 0

The Prose Poem

  • Tim
  • 8 April, 2008
I remember the great arrival of the prose poem. I was taking a poetry “workshop” and there, suddenly, on a page in the poetry anthology was a clump of text without any explanation. This fragment…
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1 min 0

The Continued Fall of the House of Usher

  • Tim
  • 4 April, 2008
All text taken from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe, more or less… Technorati Tags: Fall of the House of Usher, Illustration, gothic horror, gothic lying, Edgar Allan Poe,…
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1 min 0

Crumblescape

  • Tim
  • 2 April, 2008
All text from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (in case you thought I wrote it…) Recipe for Crumblescape-Take any image, process 7 or so times with multicrystal.8bf (by…
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2 min 2

Better than Escher?

  • Tim
  • 30 March, 2008
Yes, but let’s give the old guy credit for having to work with such primitive tools — like himself. That’s right; I don’t have to calculate or plan anything in my own head like what’s-his-name…
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2 min 0

Nobody said a word, but I knew

  • Tim
  • 29 March, 2008
There was a time when the radio made pictures. There was a time when you could see the sounds you heard. You could look at the radio waves. Abandoned now, the memories still exist. Ask…
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2 min 7

Are you ready for bubbles?

  • Tim
  • 27 March, 2008
bubbles03.loo I don’t know what made me pick up Sterlingware again. After a year or two of experimenting with the formula parser in Inkblot Kaos and Tierazon and a whole bunch of photoshop filters, Sterlingware…
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12 min 0

Incoming

Incoming (1999) Duck and cover, Orbit Trappers. There’s been some shelling this week on the Fractal Universe Calendar front. Although I noted that the current Fractal Universe Calendar editor should presume she has been contacted…
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1 min 0

Post-Card

  • Tim
  • 18 March, 2008
Technorati Tags: fractal art, digital art, illustration, postcards, say it with flowers, say it with insects, slugs, confucious, art judges, contest judging, art contest,
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