Surfing Squirrel by Maria K. Lemming I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part Three: I may not always know why I like a given work of art, but I can usually tell when a given piece makes me simultaneously smile and think. So, I’m on more sure footing on this outing. … Continue reading
FaeryRing by Jennifer Stewart [Click on images to view full-size.] I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part Two: I began recent entries in this series outlining with some certainty why I like certain fractal artists and then admitting my trepidations for being less sure as to why I’m drawn to the … Continue reading
Fly Me to the Moon by Tina Oloyede I Know What I Like — Or Do I? Part One: Last time, I was on surer footing as I attempted to explain why I know what I like when viewing fractal art. I admitted my bias for the painterly over the photographic, as well as … Continue reading
The Listening Heaven by Elizabeth Mansco I Know What I Like My aesthetic sensibilities apparently run counter to the prevailing grain when it comes to my personal taste in fractal art. Photography, especially the digital variety, naturally appears to be a closer cousin with fractal art than does painting. Both digital photography and (software-based) … Continue reading
2766 by Jock Cooper Create your own visual style…let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others. —Orson Welles The premise of this post is quite straightforward. I assert that Jock Cooper’s "Mechanicals" series is the most skillful, satisfying, and stylistic fractal art series to date. And here’s why: 11010401aa by Jock … Continue reading
Send Out the Probes by Linda Allison No one to date has had a more profound effect on fractal art style than Linda Allison. Her fractals became the template de rigor for the Fractal Universe Calendar (FUC) — the long-running staple of fractal art mass marketing. Her work made with early iterations of Ultra Fractal … Continue reading
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. —Walt Whitman Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns. —Willem de Kooning Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether … Continue reading
This third part is all about everything to do with fractal art that isn’t automatic and machine generated. This is where the medium of fractal based automatism gets mixed with user inspired and guided modifications. These modifications for the most part take the form of photographic backgrounds and overlays Continue reading
Whether you’re a fractal artist or simply just a fan of fractal art, you’re bound to eventually notice similarities in style and develop preferences for this kind of art or that kind of art. Fractal art is still what I would consider to be something of a niche art form, but thanks to the internet, … Continue reading
I’d given up blogging about fractal art and the sight of this image reinspired me. It was the art, not the fractals. It’s all geometry and nothing but geometry and yet there’s nothing square about it. Continue reading
How dare you? Really, really, really… [Image seen here.] It seems a flash mob of Fractalbookers has lowered the drawbridge and surged out of their virtual fortress. Upon hearing Kerry Mitchell’s clarion call on the UF List to defend his sacred manifesto (and legacy?), they’ve amassed in OT’s basement to pour their burning oil on … Continue reading
Susitna Glacier Alaska’s Susitna Glacier revealed some of its long, grinding journey when the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite passed overhead on Aug. 27, 2009. I’ll be back to posting more regularly on OT as summer nears and RL slows down. For now, enjoy this natural fractal photoblog … Continue reading
While doing some serious research on calendars recently, I stumbled on a gallery where:Big Black Framesand Short Inspirational TitlesIn Glowing White TextSeparated by a White LineWith Snappy Quotation Subtitles BelowWere The House Specialty They looked nice. In fact, this inspirational poster framing style looked very polished and professional, which is what I think, “Corporate” is … Continue reading
If one person can produce fractal work that other users can’t then there must be some personal component to fractal art. On DeviantArt HalTenny’s 3D fractal work stands out and I think I’ve figured out why. Continue reading
An old, point and click program operating in grayscale can be more creative and artistically profitable to use than a cutting-edge fractal flame renderer like Chaotica or JWildfire. Continue reading
Just like Chaotica, JWildfire has produced a handful of cool looking artworks but has its advances in flame fractal rendering helped artists overcome the obstacle to creative innovation in the genre of flame fractals? Continue reading
Not too long ago, before the advent of the Mandelbox and Mandelbulb 3D fractals, there were basically two types of fractals and two types of fractal artists: plain fractals and flame fractals. Flame fractals were a very interesting new development because they had a whole new look. They were light, gaseous and wispy while the … Continue reading
Executive summary The user does what the machine can’t do and the machine does what the user can’t do and together they make something. Automatism explains how fractal imagery works and mutation explains how a fractal user works but only symbiosis explains how fractal “art” works. Automatism works at the local scale while mutationism works … Continue reading
In the first posting I made the argument that fractal art is a variety of automatism. Automatism being imagery that is created by an automatic, self-operating device. One doesn’t draw fractals, the fractal program draws them. The fractal program is the self-operating device or automaton (ie. automatic thing). Being an automatic thing, a fractal program … Continue reading
Six months ago… I decided to summarize… and bring to completion… all my thoughts… …about whatever it is my computer hobby is all about. I didn’t even have a good label for it. But nothing helps you think deeper and deeper than trying to write more and more precisely about something. It wasn’t about fractals … Continue reading
As I said in my last post, there’s something captivating about the Buddhist artworks in the Mogao caves in northwestern China and, strangely enough, I find it to be reminiscent of things I’ve seen in fractal programs. I’ve come up with a term for this electrifying visual genre: “Divine Diagrams.” “Divine” because they’re mostly, but … Continue reading
Alright, maybe it’s just me but the image above and just about everything else in the Mogao Caves bears a strong visual resemblance to what I see in fractal programs. What I see in fractal programs: That might be a new way of defining the term but I believe it’s the most relevant in the … Continue reading
In my previous series of postings (first, second) on how to separate the art from the fractals, I basically say that the only way to do more with fractals than simply create computer crafts is to focus on producing works of abstract expressionism or landscape/place. These are the only two existing art genres where fractals … Continue reading
Over the years I’ve come to see this as the perennial problem in fractal art. Naturally there are many other perspectives regarding the “art-worthiness” of fractals, among which the most common seems to be that they’re essentially no different than any other medium that artists work with. But this doesn’t explain why the enormous creative … Continue reading
There are many ways to judge fractal artworks; you could look for beauty, whatever that is, or you could look for expression, or artistic merit, or something else too profound for words. I look for “Awesome!”. Call it the Awesome School of Fractal Art Criticism, or Awesome-ism for short. The exclamation mark is optional. ~ … Continue reading
Untitled by Alice Olive And then you get an artist says he doesn’t want to paint at all He takes an empty canvas and sticks it on the wall –"In the Gallery," Dire Straits I wrote last time about my concerns that most fractal "artists" are more accurately merely technicians using software manipulation to … Continue reading
Oxford Tire Pile 9b by Edward Burtynsky [Click on images to see higher resolution renditions.] Shut up and play your guitar. —Frank Zappa Seriously. I mean it. Calling yourself a "fractal artist" could be damaging your fine artistic street cred. On the Wikipedia Fractal entry, as Tim revealed in his last post, there’s plenty … Continue reading
I apologize in advance if this post seems like nothing more than a roundup of fractals recently posted to Fractalforums.com, that mega mecca of all things fractal, but that forum site just seems to have the right formula for their fractal flypaper that makes the job of roving scientists like myself so much easier. Here’s … Continue reading
Here’s a bunch of images that caught my eye while out prospecting with my virtual mule. Let’s take a look while I try to psychoanalyze myself and add another chapter in the book, “Art as Rorschach Test”. ~Click on images to view full-size on original site~ Stratographic detail/ Prince of Persia Sands of Time like … Continue reading
Photographs of Snowflakes by Alexey Kljator Nothing better reveals the pervasiveness of underlying fractal patterns that lie beyond the scrim of our sensory perceptions than microphotography. The medium digs gold mines for fractal treasure hunters. We claim to understand that no two snowflakes are alike. We have even calculated the parameter files … Continue reading
The work of some surrealist artists back in the early 20th century involved the use of creative methods that are almost analogous to many of our modern computerized algorithms and effects. For people like myself that are currently exploring the creative potential of photoshop filters and other graphically creative computer things, the smoke drawings, photo … Continue reading
The Creative Device Synthetic art has only one principle to it: the creative device. As a result, the synthetic aesthetic is not bound to any particular medium but rather is a way of being creative within any medium. The computerized medium holds the most potential for synthetic art because it allows for much easier creation … Continue reading
This is the third part of a series on The Synthetic Aesthetic: artwork which is mechanically made as opposed to handmade ( Part 1 / Part 2 ). Fractal art borders on this synthetic realm because it is one of the most powerful tools for the computational generation of imagery. Most people commonly think of … Continue reading
In the first part of this series, I introduced a few new ideas which have a central part to play in my concept of the Synthetic Aesthetic. I believe it might be of great benefit to pause and clarify those ideas before moving on to examples of actual artwork that illustrate these trends. Here’s the … Continue reading
This is another one of those theoretical postings; you might want to skip it and go look at some fresh fractal art instead. But if you’re still interested, in this posting I intend to examine what fractal art has come to be and show that this evolution of the art form has made fractal art … Continue reading
What shower of insults and rotten tomatoes are provoked up by such a play on the expression, “Paint by Numbers”? And yet, to those who know what galactic boundaries are quickly traversed by just a few (million) iterations of the simplest of fractal formulas, the phrase “Paint by Fractals” is nothing short of rocket-powered creativity. … Continue reading