Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012)

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The last of three posts about postage. You can skip the short context-setting intro section if you’ve already DVRed this series. If you’ve just wandered in, you might want to bounce back to the previous posts to view the top row and the middle row. The U. S. Postal Service, as part of National Stamp Month, issued a series of Forever stamps entitled Earthscapes. Three rows of five are displayed in the stamp pane seen above. Here’s the aesthetic big picture from the USPS publicity page:

The Earthscapes Forever stamps allow customers an opportunity to see the world in a new way. This stamp pane presents examples of three categories of earthscapes: natural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs were all cre­ated high above the planet’s surface, either snapped by “eyes in the sky” — satellites orbiting the Earth — or carefully composed by photographers in aircraft.

As always, for readers of this blog, the axiomatic fractal aspects of these aerial views are the central concern. I believe these stunning shots not only decidedly make the cut for high and snooty art, but also, for fractal art enthusiasts, must be considered just the coolest stamps ever.

I thought it best to look at the stamps in the order they appear on the pane.

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Row Three: Urban Earthscapes

The bottom row discloses the intricacies of urban landscapes. This world — here reduced to the scale of a miniaturized movie model — is so familiar that we have become nearly benumbed to its beauty. These earthscapes are man-made and thus seem more consciously engineered. They also, to my eyes, look more overtly mathematical.

Residential Subdivision

And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look the same
–Malvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes"

Let the heathens rage over suburban generia. Lovers of fractal art, in contrast, should dig the much maligned replication of suburbia’s self-similar forms. At first glimpse, this is a still life tinted in beige and tar. Fairly straight lines predominate: the flat and dark arterial roadways vs. the sloped depth of the lighter and rectangular roofs. Rounded forms, being more scarce, jump out. Cul-de-sacs, resembling abstract planaria, dead end in a head shape. The softer and irregular forms of swimming pools, not uncommon for a desert development in Nevada, provide a bright and counterpunching splash of aquamarine.

This photograph reminds me of the iconic shot I showcased earlier on OT of yellow taxi cabs left soggy and stranded in a parking lot by Hurricane Sandy.

One often hears the expression of being "cocooned" in suburbia. This aerial snap suggests a hive is likely the more apt metaphor. Workers, whether bees or ants, build their naturally fractal receptacles. Why would we assume human workers would not follow a similar, standardized instinct?

Barge Fleeting

The USPS handily provides the parameter files for this iteration:

A pair of towboats “wrangle” commercial barges in the Old River barge fleeting area near the Houston Ship Channel in Texas. The channel allows access from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of Houston, a major industrial center.

This is the most colorful stamp. It is also the most intensely angular one. Recursion is evident as rectangles iterate from top deck to bottom (or bottom to top if you prefer 3D). The height of the shot turns the barges into massive circuit boards that remind me of the work of e-waste artist Chris Jordan.

The extruding tubes and rectangle box forms on the green barge in the upper right remind me of some of Jock Cooper‘s "mechanicals" series. The brown barge in the upper left looks like the mother of all harmonicas or two pieces of a Kit Kat bar — that fractally self-similar chocolate-covered biscuit bar food substance.

By the way, the top vertical boat is named Apollo and the bottom horizontal boat is named Taurus. Despite the mixed mythologies, the god of light and the disguised god of the sky, working together, become emblazoned barge parking lot attendants.

Railroad Roundhouse

The USPD tells us what we are viewing:

Early 20th-century steam locomotives undergo maintenance inside the restored railroad roundhouse and museum. A turntable turns locomotives around and provides access to the roundhouse service stalls.

This imprecise Escher fractal is a DJ’s dream. I get a massive scale sense of something being repaired — everything from a immense, circular piano to the saucer section of the starship Enterprise. If a piano, the once mighty locomotives now serve as keys strung to especially intricate wiring. If the Enterprise, then Scotty looks to have patched her in the lower right with duct tape. I bet shields are down. Better set phasers to fractal.

It just struck me. The locomotives look like tinier versions of the barges seen in the last stamp — a rare sighting of cross-postage recursion.

Skyscraper Apartments

Iterations of windows and balconies constellate the Manhattan cityscape. The photographer’s post-processed compression of two towers into one adds significantly to depth of field and compacts perspective into even greater Escheresque recursiveness.

This stamp seems the most aesthetically industrial and engineered from a source code drawn directly from algorithms. Could it be the great-great grandparent of many a Mandelbulb 3D fractalscape?

Mandelbulb’s Green City by Marcos Napier

Tim has earlier blogged about this artist and has convincingly illustrated numerous times, most recently here and here, the ostensible visual connections between 3D fractal imagery and urban land/sky/earthscapes.

William Carlos Williams once said that "the pure products of America [modernization? urbanization?] go crazy." I think they go fractal and use self-similarity to hide in plain sight becoming pastiches of the fractalized clutter of contemporary life. Brick walls. Privacy fences. Venetian blinds.

Not all of the fractal clutter shuts us out though. The best iterations always let us in. Books arranged in bookshelves. Frames of film. Poetic meter. Computer coding. Pixels filling everything everywhere.

Even stamp panes that enable us to see a fever dream of the organized chaos of apartment buildings.

Highway Interchange

But when the suppers are planned
And the freeways are crammed…
Will I finally be heard by you?
—Neil Young, "L.A."

An urban crossroads shot of Interstate highways 95 and 395 converging in Miami. Such complex interchanges, like the less convoluted cloverleaf variant, were once all but an archetype for what W. H. Auden called the "Age of Anxiety."

The sun provides convenient natural shadowing here and renders additional depth to the multiple structural levels. Is it ironic that this particular stamp chances upon the most skillful use of earth tones?

Here is another iterated variation of a circulatory system. More boxy barge shapes are found, too, but this time on tires rather than on water. Hot Wheels-sized cars creep like blood clots through corkscrewing concrete veins and arteries. Blame modernity for this paradigm of self-inflicted road rage.

Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012)

[Click on images to view at higher resolution.]

The second of three posts about postage. You can skip the short context-setting intro section if you’ve already DVRed this series. If you’ve just wandered in, you might want to bounce back to the first post to view the top row.

The U. S. Postal Service, as part of National Stamp Month, issued a series of Forever stamps entitled Earthscapes. Three rows of five are displayed in the stamp pane seen above. Here’s the aesthetic big picture from the USPS publicity page:

The Earthscapes Forever stamps allow customers an opportunity to see the world in a new way. This stamp pane presents examples of three categories of earthscapes: natural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs were all cre­ated high above the planet’s surface, either snapped by “eyes in the sky” — satellites orbiting the Earth — or carefully composed by photographers in aircraft.

As always, for readers of this blog, the axiomatic fractal aspects of these aerial views are the central concern. I believe these stunning shots not only decidedly make the cut for high and snooty art, but also, for fractal art enthusiasts, must be considered just the coolest stamps ever.

I thought it best to look at the stamps in the order they appear on the pane.

~/~

Row Two: Agricultural Earthscapes

The center row takes an unheralded turn toward abstract expressionism. That’s ironic, since five highly realistic products — salt, timber, grain, cherries, and cranberries — are exhibited being grown or gathered or harvested.

Salt Evaporation Ponds

Why does Mother Nature paint the ponds with such resplendent colors? Evaporation causes salinity levels to spike and change concentrations of algae and other microorganisms.

I’ve seen similar Lyapunov forms when tinkering with fractal software made by Stephen C. Ferguson and Terry W. Gintz. One bullet train, atop a tall trestle, blazes in and out of the frame in the upper right. Another set of tracks intersect beneath the bridge. But why, gentle readers, are the rice paddies filled with blood? There’s something anatomical or arterial about this shot. Tissue can be seen clotted and torn. Veins are empty from corrosion but somehow surface areas are substantially inflamed.

This is America’s wounded infrastructure. Or an icon for some past and now abstract massacre.

Log Rafts on Way to Sawmill

This mode of transporting lumber in now nearly antedeluvian. Few highway encounters are as memorably nerve-rattling as being compacted behind a large lumber truck.

Fractal art lovers should moon over those reality-level 3Dish high def fern forms seen at the far right. The coastline replicates a natural dividing line of terrain vs. absent space similar to the dichotomy seen in the earlier foggy butte shot. The wood forms, frozen by photography, become islands. The self-similar replication of wood reminds me of some of Ai WeiWei‘s more fractal-influenced work.

The middle log bundle is just a long patio for the raft that rests at its top. I wonder what Huck Finn would say if he could see us now?

Center-Pivot Irrigation

How does this earthscape get its unnerving modern art vibe? From the USPS:

Circular patterns on Kansas cropland show center-pivot sprinkler systems have been at work. Red circles indicate healthy, irrigated crops; lighter circles represent harvested crops.

My favorite stamp in the series prompts thoughts of Kandinsky‘s work but is much more geometrically and fractally organized. The iterative replications of moon phases remind me of aesthetic aspects I admire in the art of Tina Oloyede. Circle and squares compete aggressively for canvas space. It’s the coin collection of a giant. Or are the gods of Olympus playing dominoes?

This shot from NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite is a crop circle to aliens from us. It reads: Let us take you to our artists.

Cherry Orchard

Fractal recursion at its best as cherry trees transform back into dandelions. This stamp is arguably the most minimalistic. Inky shadow lines from the trees intersect opposing lines of the green and embossed mown surfaces. The subsequent collisions produce a muted but natural plaid background. Taking a deeper zoom stroll through this fractal orchard reveals its location: the L-system.

Dust bunnies. Asterisks. A freak snow settling on a field of yucca.

Cranberry Harvest

USPS shares the parameter files:

A Massachusetts cranberry bog holds a bounty of ripe red fruit. During the fall harvest, growers flood bogs, then mechanically churn the water to dislodge cranberries from their low-lying vines. They round up the floating fruit with booms.

I hope, probably because I live within a fifteen minute drive from the Mayflower pipeline spill, the booms, like a chain of white bamboo, perform better than similar boom forms used for (alleged) oil spill containment.

This stamp marks the only appearance of visible human beings (and their Negative Man shadows) in the stamp series. In this shot, the people, Jonah-like, and who seem oddly unnatural and thus obtrusive in these earthscapes, become parasites ensnared inside a Peptol-Bismol-coated-stomach ad.

Xtreme blood farming? Or an open bar for hardcore drinkers of Kool-Aid?

~/~

Up next in the series: Urban Earthscapes.

Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012)

[Click on images to view at higher resolution.]

This is the first of three posts about postage.

The U. S. Postal Service, as part of National Stamp Month, issued a series of Forever stamps entitled Earthscapes. Three rows of five are displayed in the stamp pane seen above. Here’s the aesthetic big picture from the USPS publicity page:

The Earthscapes Forever stamps allow customers an opportunity to see the world in a new way. This stamp pane presents examples of three categories of earthscapes: natural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs were all cre­ated high above the planet’s surface, either snapped by “eyes in the sky” — satellites orbiting the Earth — or carefully composed by photographers in aircraft.

As always, for readers of this blog, the axiomatic fractal aspects of these aerial views are the central concern. I believe these stunning shots not only decidedly make the cut for high and snooty art, but also, for fractal art enthusiasts, must be considered just the coolest stamps ever.

I thought it best to look at the stamps in the order they appear on the pane. Originally, I’d planned to write about all three rows in one post but came to quietly realize each row deserved a separate blog entry.

Row One: Natural Earthscapes

Glacier and Icebergs

In the top row, we have a window seat for selected renders from America’s dazzling wilderness. The Alaskan glacier above, described as a "conveyer belt of ice" on the USPS page, looks more to me like partly a highway but mostly a bird wing. The fractal feathering can be seen covering the lower right of the "wing" and even seems blasted by uttermost force into the surrounding land forms. The scattered icebergs resemble glass shards. The ensemble reminds me of a planetary ring that was either destroyed or that collapsed into numerous satellite particles trapped within a gravitational field.

Notice the dividing line in the lower left where the mountain range splits into tributary and peak/crater forms. Although we know the large blue area to be water, the blue field also suggests the sky and even the expanse of outer space where larger icebergs are asteroids and smaller ones are stars.

Volcanic Crater

We are looking at some seriously hard raw material here. Intemperate rock and desiccated lava. Yet the image is surprisingly floral with the texture of an impressionistic oil painting of a moonflower. The green landscape takes on a resemblance to background vegetation. Or is this image a representation of the world’s worst beer foam spill? No hazmat suits will be needed to clean up this disaster. Just enough volunteers who have that common Western bar malady of "a powerful thirst."

And, for fresh insights, save this image and turn it upside down (180 degrees). Behold fresh revelations. Is it a religious commission capturing something like The Pentecost of Gill Man or a rare glimpse of the not-yet-seen Lord of Light from HBO’s Game of Thrones?

Geothermal Spring

I’ve seen similar formal structures to these render up in fractal software I used in the early 1990s. This has a watercolor feel everywhere except for the fluidity of the spring pool. It’s ironic that the spring looks more circumscribed by flowing lava than does the volcano. A face shape finger-painted with fire. And do I see the white blind bottom-feeding eyes of a murderous catfish deep in the upper blue waters?

Or maybe the old gods should not be mocked. This is the face of Poseidon.

Or, if not the face, then maybe…

Butte in Early Morning Fog

Seldom has space been so decisively divided. On the left are fractal clouds desiring to touch the earth. On the right is sea blue void. The left space is obscured and wispy and damp. The right space is all crystal nothing. The grandest natural "Great Wall" tears the "canvas" in half. A scar on a mountain. Castle remnants. The broken crown of Odin.

The left wall is erased — chipped at by time and now marred with holes. The right is enhanced by shadowy snow — used here as texture.

Inland Marsh

A preponderance of moss and mold saturate this entire field. Marsh patterns do indeed seem as snake-like as river formations. This image is a feast for admirers of fractal coastlines where matter molecules combined to form uneven structures. What, apparently, looks so inviting and comfy to a duck might strike human beings as a staph infection waiting to happen. Or could this be a panorama of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as seen by a drone’s eyes?

The dinosaur forms are the genuine Jurassic Park. Follow Jim Morrison’s advice. Ride the snake.

~/~

Up next in the series: Agricultural Earthscapes.