Cornelia Yoder was true to her words: the Fractal Universe Calendar 2011 is made up exclusively of her images and retains the traditional name although the publisher has skipped like a stone from Avalanche to Lang to Perfect Timing.  She has also kept up the time-worn tradition of adhering to that tested and true style that, in the words of one editor, “just works”.

Cornelia’s had quite an act to follow; over a decade of lush fractal bouquets, turned this way, turned that way, some with ribbons, some with none at all –but all of them radiating that, je ne sais quoi, that has made the Fractal Universe Calendar a cult favorite and engendered today a very cultish following despite more than a decade of progress in fractal art software and artistic style within the fractal art world.

But I sense the worshippers of this Fractal Universe Calendar style are coming to the end of their creative spiral.  I can see a good number of images amongst those published throughout the years that bear a close resemblance to each other.  Is this the coalescence of a new sub-genre? or the inevitable genetic collapse after so many years of inbreeding?

Some of the images to me look to be minor variations of the same parameters.  For instance: compare 2007-4 and 2009-7, counting from the left to the right.  Now there’s a twisted family tree –one too many “Julias” in that one!  Imagine having no in-laws.

Look carefully; can you spot any other slightly modified duplicates?  A little shift of the hue?  Something spun the other way?  Old tire, new tread?

Can you see any?  Or is it just me?

Fractal Universe Calendar 2011 and past years thumbnail gallery. Click to view larger version at publisher's site

What has it done for fractal art?  It’s brought publishers to the realization that fractal art can be bought in bulk like any other stock imagery they already use.  The years of contests, editors, sorting, sifting, short-listing and final cutting are over; just find someone who knows how to make the stuff and order a dozen.

While Cornelia Yoder might be “flabbergasted” over her recent rise to fame, laying claim to what used to be a highly contested and multi-artist production, I see this sudden development as a sign that the calendar publishers have gotten wise to the over-inflated view that fractal artists have of themselves and their cliche artwork.  Publishers don’t need “artists”, they just need one person who can perform the fractal equivalent of a flower arranger.

Flower Arrangement 2 by Craig Hein Design

CraigHeinDesign.com

Now I know some of you like the kind of fractal art that the calendar features (year after year) but that’s okay because there’s many people who love looking at flower arrangements and they have about as much variety in artistic style as the calendar’s “fractal arrangements” do.  I’m not interested in pointing out what is “good art” and what isn’t, I just want to point out that “fractal arranging” has become a very common skill which is easy to acquire and needs only a little “tweaking”, as they say on the Ultra Fractal Mailing List, to enable one to produce work that can be considered individual.  It wasn’t that way back in the 90s when these delightful, shiny ribbon things first burst onto the fractal art scene, spinning and sparkling in ways fractals had never spun or sparkled before.

Easy and Efficient Online Floral Arrangement Ordering from FTD

FTD.com

I have a funny anecdote to tell: back a year ago when the Fractal Universe calendar was going through some changes and looked to be closing up and then to be producing one last issue without a contest, I thought they had made a new calendar out of old images from previous years.  So I went to the calendar site and compared the latest calendar’s set of images with the archives.  Immediately I was sure I spotted some duplicates!  I searched the archives to find what image and from what year they’d taken it –but I couldn’t find them! The ones I thought were reprints weren’t reprints at all it seemed.  But it was hard to be sure so I went over each year again because I was sure I’d seen a few images from the new calendar that matched ones in the archives.  Finally, I had to go through the process really slowly and carefully: I would look at the new one I suspected of being reused and then look at a single archived image and then look back at the new image again and then repeat the process with every archived image.  It took a while but I was certain I’d find proof that they’d rehashed old calendars.  It was like in the old cop TV shows where they have a witness look over the mug shot books again and again because the detectives can’t believe none of the criminals in the book match the person the witness saw.  Then it dawned on me:  These fractal images are all so similar that they have no distinguishing characteristics –They all look the same!

So, is it any surprise that the calendar publishers have come to the same conclusion?

Publishers now believe that…

• Fractal art is a type of craft, not a type of art
• Fractal art is anonymous because it lacks the personal style that traditional art, like painting or even photography has had, and which gave its creators name-brand recognition
• Hundreds of artists can make those “flowers in a blender” fractals and it’s a nice, safe style for mass consumption because the wall-calendar buying public is primarily looking for decoration and inoffensive gifts, not the latest cutting-edge fractal art
• There’s no reason to pay more than a token fee for fractal art because artists have been lining up year after year just for the thrill of getting offline attention and online bragging rights
• If they ever get into the paper plate business, they’ve got enough fractals to put off hiring a design department for a hundred years

So the next time you hear someone trying to defend things like fractal art calendars because they “introduce fractal art to a mainstream audience”, just tell them the story about the great Fractal Universe calendar and what it did for fractal art.

The only way fractal art will ever become mainstream is by becoming mainstream.

We’ve all heard of blur.  It’s one of those basic graphic effects that every graphics program, and even some fractal programs, automatically include.  Most of us though are probably more familiar with the sharpen effect which does the exact opposite which is to get rid of, or at least reduce, blur.

Few digital artists, and for that matter, few artists of any kind, would deliberately blur an image, especially an entire image.  Fewer still would do it again and again pursuing on a large scale such a passive, mild-mannered effect which is usually only employed on a small scale.

I should point out that the images here are not digital works.  They’re combination prints which are photographs made by combining negatives to make a single image.  It’s just like layering, in fact it is layering in it’s original, literal sense.

The artist who made all of these images is José Medina and they come from his Transitions series of combination prints made this year.  I found these images at cramart.ca and since they are all displayed in a flash applet along with the works of many other artists it’s impossible to link to them.  Strangely, they don’t appear anywhere else on the internet except as these small thumbnails in the flash applet; perhaps they are unique to Medina’s work at the CRAM collective.  I first saw the images in a Niagara Region (as in Niagara Falls) travel magazine and was immediately impressed with their strong artistic qualities and unique style.  Like the Mandelbox, they just looked so incredibly cool.  I Googled the artist’s name and found some more wondrous examples on the CRAM site.

About CRAM:

CRAM was founded in February 2006 and is located in the heart of Niagara on the second floor of 24 James Street in downtown St. Catharines, Ontario, between Christopher’s Magazine & Smoke Shop and The Office Tap & Grill. The CRAMplex is home to Canada’s smallest art gallery, CRAM Press, and Marinko Jareb’s DJ Service, Fine Art & Design Studio & Collectible Designer Toy Shop.

CRAM Gallery showcases a collective of professional artists with ties to St. Catharines and Niagara who advocate regional ideas from outside metro and international centres.

CRAM Press was established as Canada’s smallest independent print workshop in 2009 by Co-Directors Tobey C. Anderson and Alan Flint with the installation of Harold Town’s old etching press. In August 2010 the CRAM Press was expanded to accommodate an American French Tool etching press and, while no longer Canada’s smallest print studio, it remains Niagara’s only print facility.

from http://cramart.ca/about.html

Like I said about the blur effect, it’s hardly new and exciting but these images are new and exciting.  Like Colombus, I think Medina just sailed a little further than the rest but it was sailing over the horizon.  Now, of course it all looks so simple because he’s shown us where we too can go.

Digital or not, we can all relate to work like this and learn from it.  Or just appreciate it, “stumbling in the neon glow” as Aristotle would say.

José Medina 2010

“Less is more.” You’ve heard that I’ll bet but here you’re actually seeing it.  That’s the minimalist trick.  On the other hand less can also be a lot less and even nothing, but done carefully the object in the image become a mystery (mist-ery, ha, ha,) and it’s no longer something we recognize, it’s something that may be, or something almost imaginary.  Blurring can be transformative –in a good way.

I assume this image above is a lighthouse but that’s mostly because the next image is obviously a lighthouse and most artists work with themes.  But it doesn’t matter because the object is interesting even if I can’t say for sure that it’s not a concrete parking barrier or a lawn ornament.  And that black crackly thing on the right is almost fractalish even though I suspect it was placed there deliberately to balance the composition which would otherwise be somewhat empty on that side.  I think the distant hills in the middle foreground are, ironically, more distinct than the top of the lighthouse.  And how about the way the lighthouse dissolves into the sky?  It’s almost like a detail view of an old renaissance oil painting with its subtle but careful features.

José Medina 2010

This one has it all: dream-like details; dissolving boundaries; ghost-like horizons; colors that drift across the spectrum; and a few smudgy mysteries.  I particularly like the little window halfway up the lighthouse below the balcony railings.  I think it’s been deliberately not obliterated.  Good artists cheat like that.  Photoshop filters never do.

Although the method used is composite printing, Medina’s images here use that particular method to achieve a strongly blurred style of image.  Other composite prints look like normal photographs, crisp and in focus.  They just combine features and imagery in the same way we layer images in a grpahics program.  But Medina’s composite prints are characterized by a heavily blurred artistic style and that’s the effect that impresses me the most with them.  You could say they’ve been post-processed in just the same way we would make a fractal image and blur it in a graphics program.  Although, of course, most of us wouldn’t blur a fractal, we’d sharpen it.  It might be worth trying the blur thing if we could get results like this.

José Medina 2010

I’m guessing this is the CN Tower, Toronto’s great claim to fame for many years which has subsequently been overshadowed by even taller, free-standing, feats of engineering like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.  But how many of those have been immortalized like this?  Yes, greater than that great icon is this new icon by Medina.  Towers of art will never be topped.

José Medina 2010

I don’t think a digital filter would produce such irregular blurring here.  In places you can make out brick work and in other places the edge of the building itself has dissolved away.  This is what I mean about the selective, hand-made blurring effect seen in these images.  The rooftops have been quite obviously, for lack of a better word, gaussian blurred as we know in the digital world.  I didn’t really notice it until I looked more closely at the edges of the building.  Or maybe it just came out this way?

José Medina 2010

A word about Craquelure.  Not the French candy, the cracking that old, hundreds of years old, paint in paintings do.  It gives an old, worn look which in this case accentuates the blurred, renaissance, faded, dissolving look.  I’m sure there’s a filter that does that too, but here there are some finer touches to it.  Note the dark “crack” in the lower mid section of this one and the 3D appearance to the other cracks.  It’s subtle, but then blurring is all about subtlety.  Subtle subtlety.

José Medina 2010

Well done blurring is hypnagogic.  We are seeing the image as it slips away into sleep.  But no, it’s us, the viewer who is dissolving away.  I say, “Well done blurring” because blurring is a tricky thing really.  It’s hard to straddle that ideal twilight zone of majestic illusion without falling off completely into total attenuation and pigmentary nothingness and at the same time not playing it so safe that we stay well within the everyday realm of legibility.  Blurring is a fine art and I show these images here because I think they’re the finest examples of it I’ve seen.

Is this image a palm tree?  Maybe.  But the regularity of the branches suggest something possibly mechanical.  Maybe an amusement park ride that spins around with swings hanging from it’s arms.  The swings are outside the picture and the chains that connect them are too small and thread-like to show up.  Look more closely and I think I see a roundish trunk and the slight presence of sunlight coming from the right hand side.  Some wind too.  Voices?  Sounds?  Asleep again…

José Medina 2010

I think blur is a kind of minimalism; it’s the transition zone between the usual, detail-driven and intelligent focused artwork that most artists make (and most viewers look for) and the incoherence of things like painting with white paint on a white canvas.  We can make out water and by deduction coast, possibly sand, a sandy beach, and a few dark objects along it, possibly rocks which would suggest those dark areas inland are trees and that this is a remote or more remote place or is that green haze in the right foreground a well-mowed lawn in a public park?

José Medina 2010

“Stumblin’ in the neon glow.”  That’s the sort of thing I mean.  And “purple haze” is not too far off either.  They’d make great names for filters that do this.  Neither of the authors would object to the use of those titles, I’m sure.  Does Jim have email?  Or Jimi?  What?  Jim and Jimi?  That’s almost a verbal blur.  “Grasshopper!  Now do you see it?”  “I see nothing at all master!”  “Good, good.  You have done well, Grasshopper.”

Again, I see water and from water comes shore.  The strange shapes in the foreground are rocks and since they seem to clash with the shore I’d say they’re part of a breakwall or shore project to reduce erosion.  The trail in this urban project looks familiar and I’m thinking that maybe I’ve even been to this place.  Medina is based in St. Catharines which is only 2 hours from where I live and since he seems to have included a photo of the CN Tower it’s possible that he visited the city and took this photo at one of its many lakeside parks that are characterized by these urban garden-isms.  On the other hand, it could easily be Cuba.  Blurring gives anonymity to things and yet the result is we claim them as our own.

The Master and his Iron Photoshop, José Medina

Sure, it’s an Iron photoshop.  Just look at the roller in his hand.  I think there’s a roller tool in Photoshop.  I’ve never used Photoshop actually.  I’m guessing that it’s the same as the Gimp and it has a roller tool and a smudgy finger tool and of course, several kinds of blur effects.  Gaussian is nice, but it’s not as sophisticated as the blur effect in the images here that I suspect have been done by hand, selectively, more in some areas and less in others.  Of course you can do that too in a graphics program.  You’re just using numbers instead of using your hand.  Not as much fun as working with the Iron photoshop, but then you’re not working with zero levels of undo like they are in the Iron world.  (And when have you ever gotten your clothes stained with fractal ink?)

Is DNA an algorithm?  Can its renderings be presented as Algorithmic Art?  Will they jump down off the wall and attack the well-dressed gallery patrons?

Consider the humble jumping spiders of Oklahoma:

Jumping Spiders of Oklahoma composite from the work of Thomas Shahan on Flickr

As always, click on any image to view it on the original web site or in full-size.

It’s easy to define (and limit) fractal art to the renderings of fractal formulas, but then that also focuses our attention and our consideration on just that kind of imagery.  That makes a lot of sense at first because really, aren’t insects and weird microscopic creatures a completely different sort of visual thing than computer rendered fractal formulas?

On the other hand, we raise no objection to the inclusion of the complex creations of layering and other graphical manipulations when they’re labeled as fractal art even when their (assumed) fractal formula qualities are hard to recognize.  (Well, they at least started out as fractals.)  Perhaps the boundaries of any genre start to look arbitrary and fuzzy when we try to defend them.  Maybe visual imagery is more about what it looks like than how it was made?  In that case:  what does “fractal” mean?

After attending every live concert ever given, this Grateful Dead fan was spontaneously transformed into a hairy spider and now waits patiently on a tree leaf for the End of the World.

Aztec Flying City by arias on Fractalforums.com

Yes, arias combined the products of several formulas to create this very natural and stylish image.  This is a masterpiece of layering, and not the usual monstrosity that often results.  Check out the high resolution version (6000 x 2326 pixels) and you can marvel at the rich detail in this well composed image.  Note especially the mandelbox details near the middle edge on the right.

Arias is Bernard Bittler, has a professional art background and I believe lives in France.  I’m sure he’ll be making many more 3D fractal images because he’s obviously very good at it.

Cube Guardian by bib (Jermie Brunet)

This one is also even more impressive viewed full-size.  I like the subtle, blue-gray coloring and of course the velvety texture of the “clock faces” or “drums”  that are silent and yet ever-watching this tiny mandelbox neighborhood.  I might have titled this one “fungus clocks”.  It looks very natural and is proliferating with the growth of these round clock faces that to me resemble the smooth velvety surfaces of some tree funguses.  The fine detail to the left and right of the main Cube Guardian is a great presentation of the endless recursion of fractals.

Fractal forest by Power 8

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what I find so captivating about this image.  There’s some surreal mood to this image and the title, Fractal Forest, is a good one as it really has the look of a strange, but forested, place.  The red-green coloring is very creative and works well despite being so unusual and unnatural for such a suggested “forest” scene.  You’d never guess this was a mandelbox (and I’m guessing) but it just shows how powerfully creative fractal art can be when you’re ready for the unexpected.  There’s a old, oil painting, Renaissance feeling lurking around down there.

Caves by Prokofiev

This image I found in a thread on Fractalforums.com discussing the “Hausdorff dimension of the Mandelbulb”.  I have to confess that although Fractalforums is an extremely rich environment for the discussion of all sorts of concepts and technical matters related to fractals and their rendering, all I mostly do is look at the pictures.

Perhaps this image was not intended by Prokofiev (a screen name, I assume) to be a powerful work of fractal art but rather merely to function as an illustration of some concept or technical issue?  Well, in that case it succeeds at both.  I’d like to title it, “Unzipping Infinity”.  Art doesn’t have to be lavish and complicated, it just has to push a few buttons in your mind.

Method by Far

A cellular automata triptych (three panel) made in Ultra Fractal.  Although cellular automata aren’t anything overly complicated to render, I didn’t know UF could render CA images.  I like the triptych style; it suggests something carefully made and designed to be set over top of an altar —sacred renderings.  Click on the image to see the cosmic details as well as things that cannot be explained.

CA have some interesting fractal and not so fractal qualities to them.  For one, there’s always a large scale structure to the image as well as a myriad of small, tiny scale structures.  This gives CA both a macro as well as micro appeal.  CA are the busy ants of the fractal (or something) world and this set by Far is a reminder that the creative possibilities are far from over for them (no pun intended).

Time for a movie.  Here’s an excellent fly over of a special area of a mandelbox that Kraftwerk (aka Mandelwerk on DA, aka Johan Ason) has been exploring recently.  This fly over is particularly well done and much more engaging than most I see because there is a specific subject or point of interest in it, that being the “Cheops” collection of structures which are also particularly interesting as still images in their own right.  Much more of “Cheops-ville” can be seen at Mandelwerk’s Deviant Art site (aka Kraftwerk).