If you’ve been following my recent revolutionary thoughts about fractal art you may have noticed a few comments posted by readers here and in other venues relating to emotional experiences and feelings triggered by fractal images.  Such things are important from my revolutionary perspective because they appear to refute my theory that fractal art is mentally empty.

One the the main tenets of my artistic uprising is that fractals alone, “raw fractals” computed from parameter settings, are such a rigid graphical medium that they don’t allow the artist enough involvement and direction in the creative process to produce works that express feelings and ideas in the way that painters and even photographers can.  The fractal medium frustrates human expression so to speak, rather than facilitate it.  Fractals are a completely different kind of imagery, completely artificial and best appreciated for its weirdness and supreme alien character.

In fact what I’m saying is that the fractal medium is for all intents and purposes dead to such things as human expression and commentary.  Things which have been the main themes in (finer) art up to this point in time.  Attempts to use fractals to convey human feelings, thoughts, ideas and just about anything else that originates in the experience of being alive is a waste of time and the source of innumerable pieces of bad art.  And so I say… it isn’t going to work, give it up!

But in the interests of fomenting creative insurrection in the fractal art world, or at least more enlightened thinking about fractal art, I think I ought to respond to these suggestions that fractals have already been doing the sort of emotional expression that I (boldly) said they will never be able to do.

I will start by disqualifying most of what my critics are claiming to be works of “emotional expression” by saying that sentimentality is not the sort of higher art material that I was talking about in the first place.  Sentimental feelings, although nice and pleasant and definitely a type of emotional expression, are not substantial or important enough to be the subject of “fine” art (the good stuff).

Dictionary time…

Sentimentality

bleeding heart A person of excessive and emotive compassion; one of undue sentimentality, whose heart strings quiver at the slightest provocation. This figurative phrase is of relatively recent origin:

You want to think straight, Victor. You want to control this bleeding-heart trouble of yours. (J. Bingham, Murder Plan Six, 1958)

hearts and flowers An expression or display of cloying sentimentality intended to elicit sympathy; sob stuff, excessive sentimentalism or mushiness; maudlinism. This American slang phrase was originally the title of a mawkishly sad, popular song of 1910.

sob story A very gloomy story; a sad tale designed to elicit the compassion and sympathy of the listener; a tear-jerker. This common, self-explanatory expression often applies to an alibi or excuse. It also frequently describes the narrative recounting of the trials, frustrations, and disappointments of one’s life.

How anyone could heed such a sob story is beyond me. (Los Angeles Times, June, 1949)

~from thefreedictionary.com

Fractals that give you that “Christmas Tree” kind of feeling, or ones that remind you of a cat sleeping in front of a fireplace are just sentimental.  A well stocked cupboard or a reupholstered couch can do the same thing.  Joy amidst defeat; dark victory; the futility of everything; irony; heart of darkness… –these are the kinds of emotions I’m thinking of when I speak of fine art vs. decorative art.

Sentimentality I would say, following my decorative vs. fine art dichotomy, is “decorative” emotion as opposed to the “fine art” emotions that I just listed.  How does one express dark victory, a sense of great loss amidst the reality of success with fractals?  In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see… nothing that you’d expect to find in Ultra Fractal!

~Click on images to view full size on original site~

A plate from the Disasters of War series by Francisco Goya (c1810) Tr. "What more can one do?"

Not even the most carefully crafted bifurcation fractal can come close to expressing what Goya has done here.  These are the powerful, complex emotions of fine art works.  (It’s also part of a larger series of works.) Here’s an example by an equally talented skilful painter that evokes and expresses plenty of emotion, except it’s all sentimentality (maybe even cheap sentimentality?).

“Cinderella Wishes Upon a Dream" by Thomas Kinkade

If Thomas Kinkade is the “Painter of Light”, then Goya is the Painter of Darkness.  (To be honest, I’d rather have the kitschy Cinderella picture hanging in my dining room, but there’s a very enlightening lesson in Goya’s grim ink sketch reminding us that war gives opportunity to evil things.)  Goya’s work is fine art while Kinkade’s is sentimentality at it’s “best”: emotion as decoration.  Fine art is sometimes ugly to look at while decorative art, as its name suggests, is always pleasing and beaut-i-fying.

Les Coquelicots a Agenteuil by Claude Monet (1895)

How about Claude Monet?  The water lillies guy.  I actually bought a print of this painting here and hung it up in my residence room in university (years ago).  Have you every seen a fractal image that expressed such a peaceful, soothing and joyful feeling as this?  Maybe you think you have.  But can I call this “fine” art, or finer art, or is it just simply my own personal preference in sentimentality and decoration?  Was Monet simply the Thomas Kinkade of the last century?

Sentimentality is superficial emotion.  It’s shallow, trivial experience.  So I guess fractal art that expresses emotion can’t be considered fine art if those emotions are shallow and trivial.  “Cute” is shallow and so is anything that elicits a mild response.  Fine art deals with emotions of substance and complexity.  The Mona Lisa, for example, almost qualifies as sentimentality except for the fact that the famous smile is complicated and nuanced.  If she had a typical smile (or no shirt on) it would be a great work of sentimentality not art.

If it’s any comfort to those of you who feel hurt that I’ve dismissed all of fractal art as decorative art/design then you may be delighted to hear that Monet’s Coquelicots (Poppys) has just been tossed into the same category as you.  I don’t put all of Monet’s work there, and I should add that I really like his Poppys painting (I bought a print, remember?) but it’s nothing more than just a really beautiful image of nature.

If someone was holding both Monet’s and Goya’s images over a fire and asked me to chose which image was was more worthy of being spared destruction I’d say Goya’s because it’s a rare and powerful artwork of great moral merit rebuking our illusions of what war is.  What Monet has captured in his painting can be recaptured on any nice summer day by going for a walk in the country.  (As for the Kinkade one, I’d say “Hey, don’t forget this one!”)

Fractal artists work with formulas and their parameters and so you can’t expect such imagery to depict the same sorts of themes as painters do because painters form all of the image themselves and make the image do and be whatever they imagine (and have the talent to render).  We can’t expect fractals to portray the products of the human imagination, or even the the complex human emotions we ourselves experience everyday.

Some fractal images do, however, portray emotion it’s the shallow kind of emotion which I call sentimentality.  I suppose I really ought to show a few examples of this fractal sentimentality to complete things, but I’ve insulted enough people for one posting already.  On the other hand, if you really want to see “good” examples of this type of lower-class emotional expression, in the spirit of Thomas Kinkade, I can’t think of anyone better than this Prestigious Fractal Artist.

It’s been a rather heavy week in science.

An international scientific team in Italy claims to have recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light. And just when you were finally getting comfortable with the fabric of the universe. Rip up that old model — because, according to Reuters:

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.

Uh-oh. Somebody better call the Mending Apparatus from E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops.

But hyper-accelerated quantum shape-shifting particles exceeding the cosmic speed limit was (unbelievably) not the weirdest and most jaw-dropping geek achievement this week.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), scientists at Berkeley have successfully decoded the brain signals of three individuals and transformed those signals into watchable movies. Wearing those 3-D glasses is now more than just retro. You obviously need the latest flat screen feature: Telepathy.

The left clip is a segment of a Hollywood movie trailed that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this segment from brain activity measured using fMRI.

To my eyes, some of these internally reconstructed images look muddy but still somehow recursive. Those elephants and birds appear neurally re-mapped into blotchy fractal landscapes. I think fractal tracking shots might be physiologically hardwired into our brains:

Naturally, I could be wrong. This post, like everything I write on OT, is only my opinion. You might see something else in these images of what could be considered the ultimate in cinema verite. You might instead think these skull screenings more closely resemble the tone of the surrealist, murderous, crawl-through-the-flat-screen film in The Ring.

All I know is that I signed up for the Berkely Brain Movies Low Residency Program*. And now, every time I surf over to deviantART, over to its Fractalbook Swamp of Mass Ornamentation, my brain consistently records the same reoccurring movie. This:

Yeah. I admit it. I pretty much identify with Ricky. I must like to picture myself in his place — pitting my hard skills against the soft skills of the Bad Hair Hulk wannabe better-off-as-sausage Fractalbookers. But hey. A man’s gotta dream. And, of course, record it.

*Fictional. For the sarcastically challenged.

~/~

In an unrelated matter, here’s a glimpse of Beyond Infinity, a massive installation by Serge Salat placed inside a mall in Shanghai. I was struck by the inherent correspondences to mandelbox forms in Salat’s piece. Imagine being able to reflectively stroll through such fractalscapes instead of the often less satisfying quick fly-bys and loopy deep zooms. How wondrous would that be:

~Click on images to view full-size on original site~

Synthetic made gold crystals by the chemical transport reaction in chlorine gas. Purity >99.99% Photo by Alchemist-hp (Wikipedia)

Why do people make fractal art?  Well, actually they don’t make it so much as they find it, steal it, dig it out of the dirt.  Some of the best pieces of fractal art are things just picked up off the floor of the gold mine.  The fractal miners don’t call them art.  They don’t call them anything.  They’re named by where they were found or with a date.

Fractal art is warehouse full of rocks and boxes of rocks.  Seen as “test renders” many of the really interesting fractal works are known by just a few because they never make it out of the goldmine and into the bigger world.

The “miners” have just seen too much gold to realize how valuable their finds really are and how much they shine when compared to the artificial stuff that clutters the big cities of fractaland.   Although none of it is worth anything they keep going back to look for more.  If that’s not a good description of gold fever I don’t know what is.

Knini by Bib (Jeremie Brunet)

Made way, way back in April of 2011 in Mandelbulb 3D this was a single render, meaning (I guess) it comes from a single image and not a series of layers.  When you find a nugget like this you don’t try to fit it into the usual 4:3 or 16:9 frame, you let it have its own aspect ratio.  You’ll need to take a look at bib’s treasure map if you want to find another one like this.

Rotated "Mandelbox surface" by Kali (fractalforums.com)

The full size is worth the view.  I like the humble name.  This is probably one of the best examples of panoramic lighting and haze I’ve seen in the 3D fractals.  There’s no mention of any processing but can Mandelbulb 3D make something that looks this polished and complete all on it’s own?  I don’t think it could have been painted or drawn better than this.  And the monochrome palette makes it look even more impressive instead of plain.  But to Kali it’s just part of a conversation about mandelbox “folding”:

Rotated “Mandelbox surface”

Then added 90º rotation on y axis

There are many possibilities using this method with different params and rotations

These folks are so low-key.  This is an awesome 3D fractal rendering that would make a spectacular poster: “Fractal Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Eiffel Tower of Babylon”.

Burning Ship Close-up by HPDZ

HPDZ is High Precision Deep Zoom which (as you may have guessed) is the name of a program of whom the author (I believe) is Michael Condron of hpdz.net.  Not exactly cutting edge fractal art these days, but some themes like the Burning Ship (and the Phoenix formulas) just never lose their shine and this is a good reminder of that.  The site is dedicated to deep zooming and contains animation downloads ranging from 7 to 739 MB (for the true enthusiast).

Special Sphere by Haltenny

There always seems to be something just a little new in the 3D world, but this is quite a bit new.  It reminds me of the internal parts of an electric motor as well as the lobby of a very ritzy banquet hall.  Haltenny is a master of the metal mandelbox and if you follow these things you undoubtedly have seen either his very steam punkish copper vats and piping or versions by other people using his (generously shared) techniques and parameters.  (What is a parameter file but a fractal treasure map?) You’ll find the best ones on his Deviant Art site.  This is a bit of a departure for him but he’s one of those folks who’s always looking for something new.

Alisss by Fractalisman

Too glassy and brittle to be real gold but it’s still a golden one.  A nice 3D scene with a figure photoshopped in.  I don’t think it’s all that easy to make these scenes look big and massive.  I think one has to have some skill with the lighting and fog effects otherwise the result is something microscopic rather than this Glorious Temple of Golden Glass.  Is that woman standing in awe of the massive monument in front of her, or is she genuinely lost?

Hernando's Hideaway by covertop99agenda5 (Deviant Art)

Well, who else would find such a motherlode as this besides “covertop99agenda5” aka co99a5 aka Kevin from Jacksonville Florida.  I don’t know which name to use, but I will say that he often makes very detailed renders like this one.  I think these take much more time and certainly one has to also find something with worthwhile details to render.  Despite numerous appearance on Fractalforums, Kevin seems to have most of his work on his Deviant Art page.  Which in fact is a goldmine all it’s own.  I’ve just included the most golden one here.

ABoxScale3Start16 by Trawersant

I have no idea who this person is but their Fractalforums bio says they’re from Poland.  There’s a bit of a funny story connected with this one.  Trawersant apparently uploaded quite a few images via the convenient bulk upload function which is something frowned upon in many online art venues (to put it mildly).  In fact I would have avoided them all if it wasn’t for the fact that this one in particular has such an interesting and unusual mandelbox folding pattern to it.  You can really see how complex and amazing the details of 3D fractals can be.  No mention of which program made this one, but I’ve heard that sometimes you can’t tell those things from the final images.

Baroque by Pauldelbrot

Paul is an oldtimer by fractalforums standards having been there since January of 2009.  I believe, but I’m not sure, that his full name is Paul Derbyshire and he’s been active in the fractal world for quite some time.  Paul has a different perspective on fractals which means, using my goldmine metaphor, that he tends to pick up different rocks than most of the others.

The patterning and design aspects of Pauls images are quite captivating despite their humble appearance when displayed alongside the latest sculptural wonders of the mandelbox.  This one is a fine example but many of his other ones displayed on Fractalforums are equally good.  The style is quite different but it’s still golden.

Sketch by trafassel

In case you thought “Professor” trafassel had disappeared on his Journey to the Center of the Mandelbox I present this image to update you with his whereabouts.  This is part of a series of images he’s made with his own program Gestaltlupe that seems to incorporate some sort of ancient dust parameter.  It’s weird, but the images all seem to have accumulations of dust on them like the objects in a pharaoh’s tomb would.  The result, along with the black and white, or greyscale, palette is to give a much stronger impression that one is looking at a photograph or electron micrograph.  In a sense the journey is real and like other fractalists trafassel is exploring  something quite tangible and in his own custom made gold mine.

A flower for you, by stoni (fractalforums)

Stoni adds the note that this is his first fractal posted to fractalforums, made in the Mandelbulb 3D program.  I’d say he’s (she’s?) off to a good start in this prospecting business.  A great example of the varied geometric surfaces and structures that can be made.  Shape is everywhere and the variations are impressive.  I think it would make a very unique Christmas card.  In fact, I’ve always though fractals were a natural theme for such ornamental themes as cards.  Hopefully Stoni will be back (unless he’s actually another Deviant artist with a huge gallery slowly growing over there).

Well, as always there’s more.  And there always will be because fractals are a goldmine, or rather they are *the* goldmine.  You won’t find paper money in the goldmine but you’ll find gold.  It has a value all its own unlike the paper stuff that everyone chases after in the big, bright cities of fractaland.

Made in InkBlot Kaos

I think I’ve found a better way to explain what makes fractal art so different than other art forms.  The differences are there simply because fractals themselves are a different medium to work with.  Fractals are different than paint and canvas or chisel and stone.

In fact, fractals are probably the strangest kind of artistic medium of all.  Consider, for example, the two very dissimilar and but equally well established mediums of painting and sculpture.  The differences between them are actually much smaller than those which exist between them and fractals.  For starters, both painters and sculptors can touch and alter their work with their own hands.  Fractal artists can only interact with their work via the parameter settings of the fractal program.

I would imagine that many people would consider fractals to be very similar to any other kind of visual art medium because the final products look that way.  Fractal artists produce prints just as photographers do.  Fractals are two dimensional images just as any painting is a flat, two dimensional image.  Fractals can even be three dimensional making them appear to be just another way to make sculpture.

But that’s looking at fractal art backwards!  It’s more appropriate to look at how fractal art is made rather than how it appears in its final state.  It’s more enlightening to consider the context the artist works in than the form the finished product takes.  The differences are huge when one regards how the artist makes their so-called “paintings” and “sculptures”.

When one only looks at the end result, they don’t see the deeper differences between fractals and other forms of visual art that are not observable in the gallery.  The differences come from the process by which fractals are made; this is where fractals diverge enormously from other art forms.  The strengths and weaknesses of fractals as an art form are different than other visual mediums because when an artist, even a great artist, works with fractals, they are working in a substantially different artistic medium.  A medium that works differently.

Being a painter matters little in fractal art because a fractal program doesn’t allow for any painting.  One can digitally paint with a fractal image in Photoshop but that’s processing a fractal image, not generating one from a formula and rendering method.  Digital painting has more in common with traditional painting than it does with fractal art, despite their common digital context.

The irrelevance of painting skills is actually a liberating aspect of fractals for those who find painting or drawing to be a frustrating thing.  Those people are not limited by their lack of traditional art skills because the fractal program does the drawing and painting for them.

When a fractal artist goes to work what is most significant about their medium is not what they can do in it but what they can’t.  Like I mentioned earlier, the fractal artist can’t alter the image with their hands like a painter can.  Painters of course generally use brushes to do this but the brush is just an extension of their hand and is controlled by the artist’s gestures.  Fractal parameters don’t understand or compute “gestures”.  Another difference in the medium.

So the fractal artist works remotely, through the parameter options of the fractal program rather than directly on the image like a painter or sculptor.  This makes working with fractals quite a bit different, doesn’t it?  You can’t move a spiral around or make the mandlebrot man look slimmer and less like a snowman.  Sometimes parameter options will allow things like this, or possibly variations that approximate things like that, but those are options the formula and rendering methods make available not something the artist can always control like you can a paintbrush on a canvas.

This lack of control which limits what fractal artists can do is also what gives fractals their greatest strength.  Fractal formulas will run off and generate a huge panorama of imagery that few people (artistic or not) would never have imagined, much less realized, on their own.

The artist doesn’t have to tell the mandelbrot set what to do or where to do it.  Because of this the famous deep zoom animations are possible because the artist doesn’t have to draw all the (vertigo inducing) imagery required.  Not even the most talented cartoon animator could produce one of those hypnotic ten-minute zoom videos.  Or rather, the cartoonist’s zoom wouldn’t look the same and have the same awe inspiring effect.  Just as one can’t paint with a fractal program, a painter can’t “fractal” with a paintbrush!

You see now what I’m getting at, you horde of idiots?

The fractal medium is characterized by geometric beauty and not intellectual expression.  Fractal art is wonderful to look at but unavoidably stupid and empty-headed.  It’s because of the way fractals are made and not because of the people who make them.  It’s the medium!

Now granted, there are a lot of stupid people in the fractal world but (fortunately) that never enters into the equation because, like I said, there are no variables for human gesture or other human-ly things in a fractal formula.

So what can people do to make good fractal art?  What are the artist-controlled variables (if any) in fractal art?  Are we just frustrated painters in digital straight-jackets?

Well, like I said, there really aren’t any directly artist-controlled aspects in fractal art apart from changing the parameter settings.  So this is what fractal artists should focus on and concentrate their creative energies on.  It’s actually the only thing they can work with and if other artists get different results it’s because they’ve manipulated the parameters differently.

Now, strictly speaking layering and masking is processing although programs like Ultra Fractal incorporate these Photoshop functions right into the fractal program.  I’m all for it because I’m all for more (and more) processing of fractal imagery.

But you have to understand that these are not fractal and when you work with these kind of tools you’ve (silently) passed over into a different medium that doesn’t behave like fractal algorithms do because you’re not working with fractal algorithms anymore.  But that’s why people do layering and masking; they’re trying to get their hands on the canvas, so to speak, and paint on the fractal imagery.  It allows them direct control over the final image  and to do things they can’t do with fractal formulas.

Zooming and cropping is one aspect of making fractals that lies to some degree under the artist’s control.  (It’s a bit like photography but only if you’ll overlook the fact that fractals are the only thing you can “photograph”.)  Some creative selections of fractal images are unrecognizable to other artists who haven’t found that special place in the formula’s output.

Color is something generally overlooked in the creation of fractals.  Sometimes it’s hard to work with because, like all aspects of fractal imagery, it’s determined by things you can only slightly alter.  But if you find it’s possible to generate random palettes (like in Xaos) or to cycle or edit the coloring then it’s worth the effort because good color can make anything look appealing.

And don’t forget plain old experimentation.  Experimentation is doing what hasn’t been done and it’s also the most enjoyable thing about fractals, just playing with parameters to see what will happen.  I believe the main reason people get interested in fractals is they’re fun to play with or “highly interactive” as a psychologist would say.  There’s no money in fractals; most artists are here for the graphical pleasure.

But no matter what you do with your fractal parameters you’re not going to produce anything that lies outside the visual domain best described with words like: “design” “ornamental” “decorative art” and, the perennial, “beauty”.  The intellectually expressive, reflective and works that make social commentary are things that require a degree of interaction and artistic control that the fractal medium just doesn’t support and can’t provide.

But if you’re willing to accept such a limitation in a visual art form, then you’ll find fractals to be the greatest of all visual mediums for the easy creation and exploration of graphic design works, rivaling the ornamental and decorative genius of any human artist.

Those are the strengths and weaknesses of the fractal medium.

~Click on images to view full size on original site~

Closer by Jesse (Fractalforums.com)

Mayan Trickster by reallybigname was a great piece of design but this one here by Jesse Dierks is what I would call a great landscape –a fractalscape.

It’s a classic sci-fi vista complete with a rich, city of the gods in the distance.  Buildings that look like statues surrounded by a lush expanse of rich agricultural land around it.  And what’s with that weird temple like thing at the cross roads?

On the other hand it has a passing resemblance to the fire bombed cities of WW2 Japan.  A strange place indeed.  This is not the usual geometric scene made from Jesse’s own program, Mandelbulb 3D.  I guess all fractal programmers are artists at heart.

Julia Island 2 by Alexis Monnerot-Dumaine (2007)

This one I found on the Wikipedia.  An interesting example of post-processing.  The author give its story like this:

Julia set rendered as a landscape with Terragen. Fractal previously created with Ultrafactal (coordinates around 0.28 + 0i) and saved as a terrain with Terraformer. Boat added and level adjustments made with Photopshop.

The realistic context (all computer generated) is quite intriguing.  Someday UF may have a rendering option that does this with one click?

The Flood by Taurus66 (fractalforums.com)

Oops.   The Mandelbulber v 1.08 by Krzysztof (buddhi) Marczak already has it, or at least a lake effect feature.  It’s an old effect, but it still looks neat when used carefully.  This fractal thing, although somewhat fantasy-like, steps into reality with the water effect.  At the very least it dips its toes…  But now it’s become an island fit to illustrate a new voyage of Sindbad.

Secure Beneath My Watchful Eye by Madman (Fractalforums.com)

The eye thing looked so natural I first thought it was just a reflection.  Madman is living up to his name here by turning this happy fractal scene into a laboratory nightmare.  But again, the eyeball addition fits nicely reminding me of the fine mixed media images I previously reviewed by Brutal Toad et al.

The Scapegoats Udder by Kraftwerk (aka Mandelwerk)

This is quite recent as well as being fresh and innovative.  Am I the only one that senses a Dali-like style to this?  What are they and what do they mean?  There’s something quite compelling about this image.

From the Fractalforums.com gallery page:

Description: Inspired by the painting by William Holman Hunt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_Scapegoat.jpg
Having a fever… is good for creativity…

Higher quality: http://MANDELWERK.deviantart.com/art/The-Scapegoat-257662850

Mandelbulb 3D
Photos of clouds in background and reflections + birds my own stock, added in photoshop.

Photoshop.  Why does that seem to be popping up so much?  Johan Andersson has really done a great job on this.  It’s stylish and most important: not overdone.  He’s added touches that only accentuate the image.  Such restraint and tastefulness is uncommon in the fractal art world.  But then, Johan’s not your average fractal artist.

Well, time to roll the movie credits.  Like all bank robbers, I wish I could grab bigger handfuls.  I might just return, For a Few Fractals More…

The only place  I ever go on a regular basis to see fractal art is Fractalforums.com.  I don’t pay much attention to the names only the artwork.  So when a name like reallybigname becomes familiar to me it can only be because he’s been consistently uploading interesting work.

~Click on images to view full size on original site~

Mayan Trickster #4 by reallybigname

It was the colors that caught my eye, but on viewing the larger image I was genuinely shocked to see the incredible detail and stunning 3D depth to the image.  This was apparently made with Jesse Dierks’ Mandelbulb 3D but I’ve never seen anything like it from that program or any other.

As the title suggests, this is one of a series of images uploaded to Fractalforums.com and here’s an even more recent one:

Mayan Trickster #6 - Shambhalaya by reallybigname

Everything is just great; the color, the lighting.  And like the first one the incredible detail is …incredible!  Really crisp, high-quality rendering too.  This is a new benchmark for Jesse’s program and the 3D fractal category probably too.

Reallybigname must just have a flair for fractal “piloting” because he’s been making these sorts of highly detailed, geometric images for a few months now.  This one from May, 2011:

Illuminaughty by reallybigname

Reminds me of the crisp, detailed and very stylish images by “blob” I reviewed in a post a year ago.  This is the geometric engines of fractal art working in high gear; who could ever make artwork like this by hand?  And could they do it better?  The best any hand made artist could do to approach this sort of thing would be to copy something like this.

Wooden Ruins by reallybigname

The first genuine all wood 3D fractal image.  Wooden fractals?  Doesn’t it look like wood to you?

This reallybigname guy has too much talent.  Who is he?

I did some link clicking and quickly discovered his real name is Forest Walz, hailing from San Jose, California (or Costa Rica?).  He has a website, REALLYBIGNAME.COM where it tells me that he’s… well, a screenshot is easier:

Now you know who reallybigname is

I knew this guy was talented.  I’ll bet he has a YouTube channel.  Could it be called “reallybigname”?  Let’s try that and see:

He wrote the music, too.  Notice the nice, clean rendering and the… oh no…the temptation to embed YouTube videos has me in it’s power… can’t… stop… it…

Slideshows seem a little tame compared to 3D flythoughs, but this serves as a nice portfolio of reallybigname’s work and suggests, I believe, that discovery is a big part of making interesting fractal work.   There’s a wide range of imagery here but his recent Mayan Trickster series are the best.

In fact, I think the Mayan Trickster images are a good example of the graphical designs strengths of fractals that I talked about in my Rebooting Fractal Art series of blog posts.  Reallybigname’s Mayan images may not be Picassos or Rembrants, but they are very good at what they do.  And what they do is excel at complex graphical design; something Picasso or Rembrant in fact could not do as well as reallybigname here has done.

We need to start thinking of fractal art as the domain of geometric design and rich graphical wonders like these.  Baseball players don’t make good swimmers, but when they stick to playing baseball they really shine.

Reallybigname has just hit a homer with his Mayan series.  There’s nothing speculative or subjective about that; anyone can see how fractal algorithms excel at this kind of artwork.  Fractal art is in a class of its own and this is some of the best of it.

Some time has now passed since Tim posted his thoughts on "The Fractal Art Manifesto" — basically arguing that Kerry Mitchell’s document glorifies the artist’s role and downplays the computer’s contribution. Mitchell, in a cut-and-paste epic-length response, half of which was merely quoting Tim’s original post, rebutted — and then called in reinforcements from the Ultra Fractal Mailing List. A flash mob, virtual torches and pitchforks in hand, quickly gathered and — surprise!! — supported Mitchell en masse. Mitchell then claimed that I "lowered the discourse" in my follow-up post and wondered if OT would ever get around to addressing his "relevant points."

OT, of course, has no obligation to respond to comments. Comments, in fact, are responses to our "relevant points." Tim already said what he had to say about Mitchell’s manifesto, and Mitchell (and accomplices) had their chance to respond. OT’s readers, presumably, can now read both sets of views for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking for over a week as to how I’d like to respond, and my views haven’t really changed from my last post when I said that

Very few of the protesters actually engage with Tim’s expressed observations. The gist of most of the comments fall into 1) I disagree without showing any supporting evidence, 2) You’re a fool (or variation of that insult), 3) I am an artist because see here’s my art I made stuck somewhere on Fractalbook, or 4) some variation of the “art is in the eye of the beholder” platitude (which apparently means that no one, especially Orbit Trap, can ever say anything about art at all).

Tim laid out, in a series of six posts, an exhaustive treatise on why fractal art needs a rigorous do-over. He was quite specific in his claims, questions, and examples. Among them:

–Why has fractal art failed to produce recognized masterworks, like the Mona Lisa, found in other artistic disciplines?
–Interacting with fractals is a more creative experience than is presenting them in a static format.
–What fractal "artists" produce are "really the results of publicly owned, mathematical formulas."
–You can’t make art with fractals because "fractals don’t tell stories because they don’t speak any of the visual languages, that being: the human form and gesture, or landscape."
–Fractals and photography cannot be seen a comparable art forms because "photography has the richly expressive world of real life to draw on and that makes all the difference."
–You cannot draw with fractals. You can only enhance them, and "the creative scope gained from such features doesn’t make up for the limitations that fractal imagery already imposes."
–Fractals are "parameter art" that is "rigidly deterministic and we interact with them only in those aspects of which the parameters are adjustable." Therefore, "working solely with parameters is also an aspect of fractal art that limits its creativity and homogenizes its style."
–Fractal artists have no identifiable styles. Why? "Because they don’t post-process their work [thus creating "pixel art"] and avail themselves of the thousands of weird and not so weird graphical effects and filters that transform images much differently than the standard ways fractal programs do."
–Consequently: "Pixel art is a natural extension of fractal art for the graphically creative, while parameter art is satisfying only to those who are technically creative."
–Unless you post-process, you are merely a technician. "Artists crave novelty and are inherently drawn to create; and ‘to create’ means to make new things, not polish the old stuff up or tweak to perfection imagery that lacked style in the first place and only possesses technical merit.  Fractal programs are the comfy home of the technical ‘artist’."
–Then Tim answers his opening question: "I believe the reason why fractal art has failed to attract any serious artists or art talent is because any reasonably skilled artist can see how rigidly deterministic the process of creating fractal art is."

There’s much more, of course, but I’ve encapsulated enough to make my point. Which is: Did any of the commenters ever get around to addressing any of these claims — addressing them and refuting them with the same breadth and depth that Tim argued them?

It is my belief that they did not.

~/~

So, what did they say? Here’s a sampling.

LadyGrey asks:

Isn’t everything we perceive a “geometric construction” from the macro right down to micro level?

To a physicist, maybe. To the rest of us, no. I’ve yet to see, say, a newborn infant that looks exactly like a Menger sponge.

Elaine makes a mistake common to many of the commenters who, incomprehensibly, believe that expressed feelings or stated opinions hold the same status as facts. She says:

Design and ornamentation are still art. Saying that someone is wrong for calling something art in their own perspective is the same as telling someone their opinion is wrong.

I put up an OT post two years ago explaining why lovely ornamentation is not automatically art. And is Elaine suggesting that no expressed opinion, however farfetched, can ever be considered wrong? So if I express an opinion that Sarah Palin rode dinosaurs sidesaddle 6,000 years ago when the earth was flat, no one can question my perspective because "opinions are in the eye of the beholder"?

Madelon Wilson says:

I love making my fractal flowers, and in that sense, I have mastered that form within the realm of fractals.

Tim already explained why such an accomplishment is more technical than artistic.

Paula Nyman says that

Yes, the computer does the rendering but the artist has to input so much to really make it an outstanding piece.

but without explaining away or accounting for Tim’s points about the deterministic nature of "parameter art" and its inherently homogenized style.

Buddha Kat wants to know if we’re artists and can she see some of our "works of art" (even though links for other sites of OT’s contributors have clearly been available on the blog since its beginning) and then proclaims that

but no one has the right to tell me I am wrong to describe/define what I consider to be art, art…

because

artists have feelings too…

although Buddha Kat doesn’t seem to mind hurting our feelings with the insults she sprinkles throughout her comments. Since she wants to see our art, let’s have a quick look at hers:

CrossRoad by buddhakat9

Alelujah by buddhakat9

Although, according to Buddha Kat, I have no right to "describe/define" anything at all, I’ll risk venturing an opinion (which Elaine claims is "in the eye of the beholder" anyways). The two images above, made with different programs (according to their creator), illustrate Tim’s claims about "parameter art" being prone to rigid determinism, if not exhaustion. Moreover, I do not think these particular works rise to the level of art. They are ornamentation — decorative (and common) fractal forms that, in my view, are not even especially well crafted.

As for Mitchell himself, let’s look at several "relevant points." Here he is on why all fractals look alike:

I don’t argue that there’s a lot of similarity in images created with the same program, but I do argue with the idea of that being inherent in the process. The application of paint to canvas is an inherently limited process, but yet, artists have found ways to communication thought and emotion through their paintings. Communication requires a receiver, so perhaps, over the hundreds of years that folks have been painting, viewers have learned how to become effective receivers of the messages that the painters were sending.

But Mitchell has turned around the process. Painters are free to put whatever visions their skills can transcribe to the canvas. The canvas itself does not restrict the painter to a limited number of visions. What Mitchell is describing is more analogous to Tim’s outline of "pixel art" — not to "parameter art." And did humans really need "hundreds of years" to receive the communications of cave paintings? Or did those stick figures with spears chasing an animal shape look like a hunt from the moment they dried? But, in contrast, what thought, exactly, is being received here

Untitled (Test 3) by Kerry Mitchell

other than, at best, an aesthetic response to viewing a decorative object? Mitchell has yet to make a convincing case that the "organized imagery" of fractals can be just as meaningful as either painting or photography.

Mitchell goes on to equate fractals with photography because "artists" in both examples "capture a scene." But a scene captured by Ansel Adams (one of Mitchell’s favorite examples) is generally of a recognizable facet of nature. What, though, is the scene captured in Mitchell’s image above? That’s what Tim meant when he noted that Mitchell appropriated other disciplines, like painting and photography, and compared them to fractals "only in very general terms so that they will be broad enough to qualify fractals for membership." Mitchell has shown only spacious similarities (like "capturing a scene") but never demonstrates that fractals (parameter art) deliberately use the elements of design in ways that painting and photography (and pixel art) can and do.

~/~

Mitchell also accused me of "lowering the discourse" with an analogy that the UF troopers rushing in to prop up Mitchell were like dogs following the instructions of their master. He said:

What’s next? “Yo mama’s so fat…” Or maybe, you’ll reach the pinnacle of internet discussion and just call us all (Fractal)Nazis.

In the end, I think it was his side that went down that road. Here’s Cornelia Yoder bottoming out the discourse on the UF List:

Re: [ultrafractal] The Fractal Art Manifesto Revisited
From: Cornelia Yoder <yodercm@earthlink.net>
To: Ultra Fractal Mailing List <ultrafractal@list.ultrafractal.com>

Kerry, there is a certain class of people in this world who cannot create anything themselves, so they try to make themselves feel important by tearing down what others create. They can then feel more powerful than those who do the creating. Their value system behaves as if blowing up a building was of more value to the world than building it. Since they have no self-worth themselves, they have to try to destroy something to prove their power over those who can and do create.

People like that are not convincible of anything. Because they cannot create anything worthwhile, they have to destroy. Comments on that post only give them more to tear at. Ignoring them is (in my humble opinion) the most powerful thing you can do to shut people like that down – sort of like not giving terrorists free time on TV. Arguing with them only encourages them.

The Fractal Art Manifesto was a brilliant piece of writing that has stood the test of time, at least so far. It doesn’t need defense against idiots who (1) obviously don’t even understand it, and (2) distort carefully selected portions of it.

When someone who can create really good fractal art and sell it or get it hung in a serious art gallery critiques the FAM, I’ll read that person’s comments. But when someone who has never created anything worth looking at tries to drag others down to their level …. well ….

Everyone here should read the FAM, but imagine if no one ever read the OT blog, how long would they keep writing it?

Cheers,
Cornelia

That’s right. We’re worse than Nazis. We’re terrorists. Throw us in the same police line-up with Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden. No difference.

We don’t create anything? Like establishing this blog, running it for five years, without advertising, without self-promoting our own work, and in the face of "lowered discourse" like this

The Orbit Trap bloggers are
(a) insane
(b) retards
(c) fucking morons
(d) terrorists

is not creating something worthwhile? Personally, I’m not…well…"convincible."

~/~

Oh. Incidentally. I’ve had a few shows in "serious art galleries" — for whatever that’s worth. And we both manage to find the time to create our own artwork, too — that is, in between escapades like dragging others down to our own level and blowing up buildings.