A symbolic representation of the BMFAC judging panel.

[Photograph seen here.]

The 2011 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest (BMFAC) finally got around to releasing the names of its judges. They are:

Honorary Presidents:

Michael Barnsley
Aliette Mandelbrot

Panel Members:

Don Archer
Javier Barrallo
Cory Ench
Damien Jones
David Makin
Kerry Mitchell
Samuel Monnier
Paul Nylander
Joseph Presley
Jonathan Wolfe

As usual with all doings of later iterations of BMFAC, the announcement should be met with mixed feelings by anyone who prefers our community’s only major fractal art competition be run fairly and professionally.

Waxing Stuff:

There are no (overt) fractal software authors on this year’s panel — like the two prominent judges-authors who refused to resign from the 2009 BMFAC panel. This change removes significant conflicts of interest from continuing to taint the competition. I applaud this major step to better ensure fairness.

There are more fractal artists on the panel and fewer strict mathematicians. This move is also commendable and displays hopeful cultural evolution.

The shake-up of the selection panel does have some discernable benefits and adds a little credence to BMFAC’s claim that some of the judges are "prestigious." Jonathan Wolfe, for example, is a welcome addition. Dr. Wolfe is an expert in visual neuroscience and an educator known for "teaching diverse audiences about the concepts of Chaos Theory and fractals." Wolfe is also the force behind the flying fractal art balloons seen at Sky Dyes. I mentioned Wolfe in an OT post two years ago about Phase Two fractal art. It is my hope that Wolfe’s presence will help nudge BMFAC into better integrating a broader view of fractal art — one that moves beyond digital creations and embraces all fine arts mediums as well.

Cory Ench is an accomplished artist. I especially like his fantasy art as exemplified by his science fiction book covers and posters like those for Burning Man. I find his fractal art fairly conventional, but at least he works with flame fractals rather than BMFAC’s prevailing Ultra Fractal layered aesthetic. Ench’s presence offers a bit more hope (idiotic huge file size requirements aside) for artists submitting entries made using Apophysis, although it should be said that Ench is no stranger to BMFAC’s winner’s circle.

Between Phases:

The addition of Don Archer is a mixed blessing. One the one hand, I have long respected Archer for his dedicated efforts to bring digital art into the fine arts fold through his stewardship of the Museum of Computer Art (MOCA). Archer is not only a highly skilled artist, but also an established museum curator — something long advocated on OT that BMFAC needed. On the other hand, Archer has some roots in BMFAC director Damien Jones’s (has he dropped the "M"?) early contest enterprises, and that might partially explain why MOCA’s juried fractal art selections (but not algorithmic art) often trended towards the BMFAC/UF camp and featured artists like former BMFAC judge Janet Parke and BMFAC-winner, multiple Donnie-winner Rick Spix. Then again, sad to say, MOCA isn’t as compelling as it used to be. With the advent of MOCA’s AutoGallery, literally anyone with a free membership and uploading skills can now display their very unjuried work. A museum that invites, accepts, and shows all artists without a process of critical appraisal should no longer call itself a museum. MOCA is now something else. It has become, in fact, just another wing of Fractalbook.

Joseph Presley is an innovative artist, and his expertise with Xenodream should insure that entries made with that program might get a fair hearing. Then again, Presley is no stranger to UF conclaves or to BMFAC. You might recall that his 2009 winning entry, Tribute to JP, was an homage to Janet Parke who was, at the time, serving as a BMFAC judge.

Waning Stuff:

The judging panel is, if anything, more UF-laden than ever. By my count, at least seven, possibly eight of BMFAC’s panel of ten have roots in the Ultra Fractal community and/or have a connection to Jones’s close-knit inner circle. One-third of the panel currently does or has done some authoring work for Ultra Fractal. Such continued clinging to UF oversaturation shows BMFAC needs more diversity of software choice. Who will be surprised given the UF-heavy jury, coupled with the UF-friendly entry size requirements, if Ultra Fractal entries once again win the majority of exhibition spots?

I suppose it was inevitable Dave Makin would become a BMFAC judge. He’s long been BMFAC’s de facto spokesperson and chief apologist. In fact, he’s been talking up and about BMFAC a blue streak lately (see his multiple comments in recent OT posts). I guess it’s not unethical for a judge to be so fulsome — probably just tacky. But Makin’s ego won’t be contained, and I now consider him to be the official PR organ and press secretary of BMFAC. As far as I’m concerned, Makin’s word is BMFAC law, unless Jones comes out of his undisclosed location and corrects any utterance of Makin’s public flaking. I suppose Makin’s judgeship is BMFAC’s nod to the 3D fractal new wave. Makin, of course, writes 3D formulas for UF, but I wonder how the 3D artists over on FractalForums feel about the implied suggestion being made that all new 3D work be filtered first through UF.

BMFAC still needs a public disclaimer on its Rules page that any judge who has taught fractal art courses will recuse himself or herself from in any way evaluating or making recommendations on their present or former students’ work. Without such a written statement, potential conflicts of interests could presumably arise. Two of the current BMFAC judges have taught or are teaching such courses at the Visual Arts Academy.

And there was one other thing about the judging panel I was going to mention. What was it? Oh. Now I remember:

What I actually said was: "Math class is tough." See, Ken, you can’t trust the accuracy of anything you find on the Internet these days.

[Image seen here.]

Even if one accepts the premise that fractal art can be a highly technical field, it’s quite a stretch to believe that Jones and his yet undisclosed sponsors could not field a single woman for a slot on the BMFAC selection panel. There are, really, plenty of talented and insightful female fractal artists to tap for the panel. A number of likely candidates can be seen in OT’s own Fractal Art Collection. Without representation from half the world’s gender, who’s going to forcefully argue in BMFAC’s shortlisting sessions for a massively cool potential entry like this:

Hear me, sisters. Math class rocks.

[Photograph by Ritwik Dey and seen here.]

Barbie quit advancing the women-are-bad-at-mathematics stereotype many years ago. BMFAC should definitely follow her lead.

Was this object made with fractal hardware?

Y by Mark Wallinger. Photograph seen here.

Fractal art is a fractal look and doesn’t have to be something rendered from computing a fractal algorithm.
–Tim Hodkinson, Orbit Trap

Two remarks have caught my attention this week. The first was baffling but exhilarating. The second was risible and sadly without irony.

The first had its genesis in a phrase tucked away on the 2011 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest (BMFAC) Rules Page. Under Section 3.9 titled Content, the first sentence reads:

Artwork may be submitted that is created with any tools, software or hardware [emphasis mine].

This juicy tidbit led to the first of two remarks. Kali, over on FractalForums, shakes his head and wonders:

Any tools? software OR hardware? Does a hammer count as a hardware tool? can I build a menger sponge made of wood and then take a photo?

Yes, it certainly sounds like one can do such things and call them legitimate entries. Has BMFAC actually broadened its scope to include Phase Two fractal art? If so, this is unquestionably a major step in the right direction.

Regular OT readers will recall that we have been advocating that the prevailing definition of "fractal art" has too long been limited to works made by artists using computers and software. We have argued that fractal art can also be produced using non-fractal software and even conventional artistic tools — and have gone so far as to advocate that such art is a legitimate form of expression when considering what comprises fractal art.

Tim first defined Phase Two fractal art on OT back in early 2009. He notes:

Phase Two fractal art focuses on the image and not how it was made. Perhaps in Phase Two fractal art the word “fractal” is no longer relevant because the word fractal only has meaning if the artwork exhibits a fractal appearance. Images made from details of fractals or images processed with filters are really derivative works and whether one wants to call them fractal art is really a pointless matter and unresolvable argument. And Phase Two artists don’t care anyway how an image was made. Whether it has that parameter file pedigree or not isn’t as important as whether or not it’s…

Art. Yes, that’s where I see fractal art going. Taking an artistic approach and evaluating the image rather than the software that makes it, is an instinctive next step. It’s instinctive I think because that’s how art has always been viewed and evaluated. No serious critic ever categorized oil paintings by what kind of paint brushes they were made with or whether they were painted by men or women.

Tim then expands on this line of thinking again, in a prescient OT post entitled "Fractal Art without a Computer." He observes that

this could be the beginning in what could become the complete unraveling of fractal art as a genre. After this we will all see fractal art from a Visual Context instead of a Software Context. We will see that Fractal Art revolves around visual appearance and not around the software that made it. Fractal Art will be defined by visual criteria and not by its association (whether it’s noticeable or not) with fractal software.

In short, following such reasoning, fractal art becomes any art that somehow displays or utilizes fractal properties/characteristics. How that art was made is irrelevant and becomes more appropriate for a discussion of mediums. In other words, art made with computers is no more "fractal art" than art made with another more orthodox medium like, say, painting.

I followed up Tim’s hypothesis by demonstrating what Phase Two fractal exhibitions might look like (say, this and this and this). Moreover, in another post, I explicitly argue that traditional artistic mediums can and do create fractal art — and go on to contend that BMFAC, a competition showcasing such art, should broaden its content and accept entries other than those that are computer-generated. At the time, I said:

If fractal art is art that has fractal characteristics like recursion and self-similarity, then the traditional mediums of the fine arts can be used for our genre just as easily as software. In fact, one could build the case that a true exhibition of fractal art would showcase art made using a variety of self-expressive tools — including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphics design, and other recognized mediums. Software utilizing fractal algorithms to generate images would still be included, of course, but would merely be another component in the artistic arsenal, and such imagery might be broken into distinctions like algorithmic art or digital art, depending on the amount of graphic processing an individual artist used. But fractal art would be a category of art, like abstract expressionism or cubism, and not winnowed down to be only the primarily Ultra Fractal images that will win this year’s BMFAC.

However, if Kali and I are reading the 2011 rules correctly, this year’s BMFAC has radically changed the playing field. Over the years, I have been one of BMFAC’s harshest critics. But I will be the first to commend BMFAC’s organizers if they are indeed accepting submissions of fractal art from all artistic mediums. I applaud such a bold and provocative action, for it surely marks a substantive leap in the evolution of fractal art as a bona fide discipline. I would even argue that such a broadening of fractal art content represents a paradigm shift of staggering proportions. None of us may ever again be able to look at fractal art through the narrow lens and exclusive mindset of art that is limited to images created with algorithms and computer software.

~/~

The "Prestigious" BMFAC Judging Panel

[Photograph seen here.]

I said when I started this post that I stumbled upon two attention-getting remarks this week. The second came from the furiously-pounded keyboard of Esin Turkakin as she chided Tim and his last post for "smearing" the BMFAC jury, for "questioning its ability to judge 3D," and, worst of all it seems, for

attacking the jury in the process with no ground…

Oh. It is to laugh. To the point where my sides hurt. Because:

a) It’s appropriate for Tim to speculate on the make-up of BMFAC’s 2011 selection panel since the names of said jurors have inexplicably not yet been released. It’s unprecedented, not to mention bizarre and amateurish, for any (serious) fine arts contest to announce and promote itself without simultaneously revealing its judges and funding sources. What’s stopping someone from prematurely entering the competition and then later being tapped as a judge? Presumably, such an entry would be disallowed, but, given that we’re talking about BMFAC, don’t expect to see such a circumstance (or much of anything else constituting ethical weirdness) officially barred in writing on the Rules page.

b) It’s appropriate for Tim to worry whether 3D images coming out of fractal art’s new wave will get a fair shake from BMFAC. All three past panels have been top-heavy with mathematicians (and nothing screams art expert like a mathematician) and director Damien M. Jones’s Ultra Fractal-using cronies. What are the usual suspects’ (Jones, Mitchell, Townsend, Parke, et. al.) qualifications concerning and comprehension skills about the latest 3D phenomenon that allow them to be placed in a position to judge such entries? Or, better yet, since BMFAC appears to have now embraced Phase Two entries, how much do these same UF users/software makers and math geeks know about painting, sculpture, ceramics, or mixed-media installations created using fiber? This year, it seems more imperative than ever that at least some members of the panel be versed not only in the newer 3D variations, but also in the more conventional artistic mediums.

c) And past BMFAC panels have given all of us "no ground" to fret or even attack them? Seriously? You mean, the same folks who two out of three times finagled their own art into the "contest" exhibitions — the same fractal-software-making folks who last year blew off clear conflicts of interest — the same for-educational-purposes-only folks who taught fractal art/software courses and later saw former students turn up the winner’s circle? Those same folks? Please, spare us your righteous indignation. Past juries haven’t exactly been paragons of ethical purity and models of moral goodness.

But…thanks, Esin. I always appreciate a good belly laugh.

Things More Pleasant Than Thinking About BMFAC Again

Dave Makin sent me a personal email to let me know the 2011 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest (BMFAC) has been announced.  I guess he wanted to be sure I got the good news.

If you read this blog regularly, you already know how we feel about this so-called competition.  If you aren’t an OT regular, then please search "BMFAC" and immerse yourself in the contest’s history of corruption, conflicted interests, unprofessionalism, hypocrisy, and insufferable self-promotion.

If you still support BMFAC after objectively examining all that we have painstakingly outlined, then nothing more I say will sway you.  You are obviously comfortable putting your own potential self-interests over everything else — including professional ethics, private morality, a sense of fair play, and the best interests of our art form.  In this regard, you will fit in nicely with the people who administer this contest.  Like you, their chief concern is to feather their own nests and further their own self-serving agenda.

~/~

But since Makin took the trouble to reach out, I might as well take a few general questions from the gathered crowd:

Why have the sponsors and the "selection panel" not yet been announced? 

I don’t know.  The directors of BMFAC are known for being highly secretive.  I guess they figure the less you know the better.  I do know that any fine arts competition that won’t tell you up-front its funding sources or who is judging the entries should be regarded as suspicious.  How can one best cater an entry while having no idea who will be reviewing it?  If the sponsors have not been finalized and the judges are not yet selected, then the contest should never have been publicly announced.  But BMFAC rarely operates under conventional or professional protocols.

Perhaps BMFAC director Damien M. Jones is just getting ahead of himself.  Or maybe he wants to deliberately delay the announcement of the judges for his own purposes.  Twice before he’s allowed BMFAC judges to show their work and gobble up half of the "contest" exhibition space.  Last year, when only the contest winners were hung, might have been less than satisfying for Jones and his crowd who had to swallow a bitter pill and forego their usual self-promotion spotlight.

Will the judging panel again be riddled with blatant conflicts of interest?

That depends.  Will Jones again allow software authors (like the creators of Ultra Fractal and Apophysis) to serve as judges thus setting up the potential for them to reap financial and/or personal benefits?  Last year, one such judge of good conscience sensibly resigned.  The remaining two who refused to leave in the face of such conflicts of interest are presumably more self-interested than sensible and cannot be shamed.

Will mathematicians again be used as judges?

Oh, no doubt.  Mathematicians, not artists, are fractal art’s celebrities.  Why bother with procuring the usual elitist snobs like museum curators or art historians?  It clearly makes more sense to have art contests peer-reviewed by people who know little or nothing about art.

Will the exhibition be better publicized than it was last time?

Maybe — but only if the judges’ work is again allowed into the exhibition, thus making such promotional efforts more beneficial to those who run the contest rather than those who actually win it.

Why does the contest insist that winning entries will have to be submitted at such massive sizes?

They’ll tell you the huge sizes are necessary to ensure "lots of good, interesting fractal detail" or other such nonsense.  It’s all bullshit.  Exhibitions of digital photographs are seldom exhibited at picture-window size, and photographs are filled with "interesting detail."  Last year’s "information hallway" BMFAC exhibit in India featured fairly small prints that could have been made at one-fourth the size BMFAC demands.  The size requirements are there for one reason only: to privilege Ultra Fractal because it scales images easily.  UF and its users have made up the majority of BMFAC’s winners — just as UF is the established program of choice for the directors and most of the artist-judges.  Please understand that the contest is just an excuse to better perpetuate the careers of the administrators and to further implement and maintain their prevailing aesthetics of fractal art.  It’s all a self-fulfilling cycle.  Most BMFAC prize-winning entries are conveniently made with UF and selected by self-proclaimed "prestigious" artists-judges who also just happen to predominately use UF.  Rinse.  Repeat.  A con is born.

What can I do to better insure my chances of winning a slot in the exhibition?  

Don’t be an ethical worrywart.  Have no moral scruples whatsoever.  Think only of yourself.  Use UF obviously and make the conventional layered monstrosities popularly associated with the program.  Ask yourself: what would Janet Parke do (WWJPD) and consciously imitate her work.  Better yet, have taken a UF course with her and submit images you created under her tutelage.  Hopefully, she’ll again be a judge, recognize your work, and show you favor.  Remember, BMFAC isn’t bound by those pesky rules most art contests have to follow — like having explicit clauses forcing judges to recuse themselves in compromising circumstances like the one I outlined above.

I’ll take one more question.  Yes.  You in the back.

Will Dave Makin win a fourth consecutive BMFAC exhibition slot thus pushing overt favoritism to even higher stratospheric levels?  

Makin is the competition’s chief apologist and has previously been well rewarded for his services as a willing propagandist.  There’s no reason to assume this year’s contest will be any different — on any level.