{"id":1467,"date":"2010-07-28T23:15:50","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T03:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2010-07-28T23:15:50","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T03:15:50","slug":"frames-drains-and-hurricanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=1467","title":{"rendered":"Frames, drains and hurricanes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many people have a favorite sport.\u00a0 Some follow soccer, others american football or hockey, basketball, baseball, cricket…\u00a0 I follow hurricanes, the tropical storms or cyclones that form in the Carribean during summer and fall of every year.\u00a0 There’s never a players strike and you can follow all the action over the internet.\u00a0 In fact, you really don’t want to buy tickets to see any of these “games” live.\u00a0 The American National Hurricane Center<\/a> gives you the best seat in town, or out<\/em> of town, rather.\u00a0 There’s only one team but everybody loses.\u00a0 And it’s impossible to cheat.\u00a0 It’s a funny sport.<\/p>\n

This year was supposed to be much more energetic<\/em>, which was a great relief after the incredibly disappointing 2009 season.\u00a0 I’m still waiting for a really big, Category 4 or 5, game this year.\u00a0 Bonnie was so pathetic the NHC stopped talking about her before she even made landfall which, in this game, is ordinarily the main event.\u00a0 She just went back to being a depression —tropical<\/em> depression.<\/p>\n

They don’t name them only after women anymore, they’ll use any name.\u00a0 They ought to let the folks living in the path of the hurricane suggest the names.\u00a0 But they’ve got more important things on their minds –hiding, dodging, staying alive<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Life is the sport of sports and art is its World Cup.\u00a0 But that’s coming from a guy who thinks hurricane season is more fun to watch than the SuperBowl.<\/p>\n

Back to fractal art:\u00a0 here’s a piece of fractal artwork by Deviant Art member Sophiiiii that caught my eye just this week and also strongly suggested –hurricane–<\/em> to me.\u00a0 (That’s Sophi with five “eyes”.) <\/em><\/p>\n

– Click on any of the images below to view them full size and on their original site –
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Ghosty Frosty by Sophiiiii on Deviant Art<\/p><\/div>\n

This image (by “Five-Eyed Sophi”) has a number of interesting aspects.\u00a0 Although, from the title, she probably didn’t intend it to have a marine theme much less that of a hurricane, it fits well into this and I think she saw a similar terrifying weather theme from her choice of the word, frost.\u00a0 But maybe the spider web is the terrifying theme here?<\/p>\n

I guess that’s the thing with “imaginary” art: the image is open to a number of interpretations, each one arising from the personal context the image unavoidably becomes mixed up in when it engages the viewer’s mind.<\/p>\n

It was made in Incendia and I suspect has a few other layers incorporated into it, such as the spider web and the cloudy, watery background.<\/p>\n

As I was saying about hurricanes, they are “wrathful” creatures that arise almost out of nothing and quickly grow (within days sometimes) into massively destructive beasts.\u00a0 They are also composed, not of a neat circulation pattern which we see in the simplified diagrams used to explain them, but of broken and winding bands of thunderstorms and sometimes tornadoes spawned by those thunderstorms.\u00a0 Sophiiiii’s image here, although completely artificial, is an excellent example of such an “extreme weather phenomenon”.<\/p>\n

And it looks good too.\u00a0 Incendia seems to have this nice ability to make grainy images that are more characteristic of real world imagery than the slick smooth world of computers, but I think Sophiiiii has added a lot of her own artistic talent to make this one looks a well as it does.<\/p>\n

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Tulum, 1988, Acrylic and Pastel on Paper, 18 x 20, by Peter Alexander<\/p><\/div>\n

Sure.\u00a0 This one’s not a fractal.\u00a0 But when you’re floating in the ocean off the coast of Quintana Roo where Mexico meets Belize and the rest of Central America, such things are incidental.\u00a0 There is the hint of shore in the dark bottom we see through the water, but where is it?\u00a0 This is the morning after the hurricane.\u00a0 It’s beautiful.\u00a0 Out there somewhere is your house, but take heart, there’s plenty of building materials all around you.\u00a0 One of them must have hit you and knocked you out.<\/p>\n

I read an anectdote about hurricane Hattie that erased Belize City back in the 60s.\u00a0 The author, a young boy at the time, told about how his family had completely lost their house (built on the beach, incidentally) but then a week later his father and uncle were out fishing and found a better one that the storm had dropped off from somewhere else.\u00a0 I’ll bet there’s a lot of that shuffling of property<\/em> going on in the wake of hurricanes every year.<\/p>\n

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Westmoreland, 2009, monoprint, 12 7\/8 x 14 5\/8, by Peter Alexander<\/p><\/div>\n

Obviously this isn’t a fractal either, but Peter Alexander has made palm trees into such a separate and well developed genre much like the fractal spiral is in fractal art that they deserve a mention.\u00a0 Click on the image to see the whole collection.\u00a0 Very colorful.\u00a0 I had a hard time picking the best one because they’re all very interesting.\u00a0 Monoprints are prints that are made with unique characteristics and thus not reproducible merely by making another impression with the plate.\u00a0 (I’ll bet they sell for more too.)\u00a0 I think the coloring here is very sophisticated and carefully done.\u00a0 I don’t like a lot of contemporary art (of the paintbrush sort) but these palm trees are something completely different.\u00a0 Better than Warhol?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Revived by Sophiiiii<\/p><\/div>\n

This one is just fantastic.\u00a0 Color, shadows, lighting, contrast; it’s like a carefully painted old master’s work, laboriously rendered and painstakingly perfected.\u00a0 That’s what Incendia can do when the right person is clicking it’s buttons.\u00a0 I guess it’s a bit like paintbrushes: what comes from them depends on who’s holding them.\u00a0 This is sort of weird, but I think the real beauty of this work is in what the image is reflecting.\u00a0 It’s the light source that we don’t see.\u00a0 There’s something golden, shining and radiant in this image –off screen– and it’s all suggested by what we see in the image.\u00a0 The question is not, “What is this?” but rather, “Where are we?”\u00a0 This is a great place.<\/p>\n

To me this image is sea shells and other sea debris caught in a tangle of branches on the shore after that world cup of storms –a hurricane.\u00a0 Neatly collected, I see.\u00a0 Apparently the best time to collect sea shells is right after a storm (the key word is “after”<\/em>).\u00a0 That might also be the best time to check and see if your neighbors are still alive, so you’ll have to chose between the two.\u00a0 Of course if your neighbors are down on the beach… with the seashells…<\/p>\n

Sophiiiii added a link on her Deviant Art page to the image she used as the background for this image.\u00a0 It’s worth looking at too.<\/p>\n

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Colour Acrylic 20 by Tackon (Deviant Art)<\/p><\/div>\n

I find it interesting how the background complements the incendia image.\u00a0 It may seem trivial, but the background layer, even just a colored texture like this, just like the frame on a painting, is part of the artwork and contributes to the viewer’s general impression in ways which I suspect can be quite strong even if they may appear subtle at first glance.\u00a0 Speaking of frames…<\/p>\n

What came first?\u00a0 The Picture or the Frame?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Flickr’s thesmartestfish<\/em> (Sophia Brueckner) said “experimenting with some vintage round picture frames I bought on etsy. I was thinking it would be interesting to have a series of paintings in round frames. not sure if I want to keep going in this direction though.”<\/em><\/p>\n

(Etsy.com<\/a> apparently is a website that describes itself as “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies.”)<\/p>\n

Thesmartestfish really is pretty bright.\u00a0 Not only is she a Master of Fine Arts student, she also works with javascript to create generative imagery using the Processing platform; a nice combination of skills we could all use.\u00a0 From this I suspect she either printed and embellished by paintbrush the images in her round collection (similar to monoprinting) or just painted them freehand using their simple but characteristic, generative look as a guide.\u00a0 Either way she’s produced something quite appealing.<\/p>\n

Here they are; nicely photographed, too.<\/p>\n

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Round Painting Collection by smartestfish (Flickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Untitled Round Painting by smartestfish<\/p><\/div>\n

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Javascript-photoshop1 by smartestfish<\/p><\/div>\n

The round paintings look hand-painted but the bottom image the author describes as “shapes generated by javascript + photoshop with a scanned watercolor background.”<\/p>\n

It’s a strange dynamic between frame and picture but there’s more dynamism going on.\u00a0\u00a0 Consider the interplay between the digital imagery of the javascript-photoshop process and thesmartestfish’s own hand painting skills.\u00a0 Thesmartestfish created the javascript which in turn produced the snakey tendril imagery.\u00a0 But that computer generated imagery in turn went on to inspire the hand made images in the round picture frames.\u00a0 From such well defined and synergistic rotation often comes a powerful hurricane.\u00a0 But it has to stay well out at sea, away from land, and feed on\u00a0 warm waters and also avoid the vertical shearing forces of interfering ridges and troughs which dissipate the force of that rising energy coming off the sea.\u00a0 Hey, some people like to talk in football or baseball analogies.\u00a0 I prefer hurricanes.<\/p>\n

Finally, everything flows back to where it came.\u00a0 Solomon remarked on this very thing almost three thousand years ago: “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.\u00a0 To the place the streams come from, there they return again. \u00a0All things are wearisome, more than one can say.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Ouch.\u00a0 Here’s a fine illustration of that somewhat depressing\/encouraging quotation.\u00a0 It’s in the form of a video screen capture of a highly talented java applet rendering Fractal Drainage Patterns<\/a>.\u00a0 This is extremely fractal.\u00a0 But I doubt it would have cheered up Solomon: everything is just sinking into the earth and if you watch the applet long enough at the original site, everything eventually fades into nothing.<\/p>\n

[flashvideo file=http:\/\/ambaka.com\/blog\/26\/drain02.flv width=254 height=252 image=http:\/\/ambaka.com\/blog\/26\/drain02.png \/]<\/p>\n

I think they’re cool.\u00a0 They’ve got a weird, sci-fi, Andromeda Strain<\/a> replicating space-virus look to them.\u00a0 I suppose epidemics and even wars have similarities to sports, just like hurricanes season does.\u00a0 But hurricane season has a much more regular, reliable schedule than those other disasters even if all the hurricane game dates are impossible to predict ahead of time except by more than just a few days.\u00a0 I should go check right now.\u00a0 There’s a new update at the NHC about every four hours.\u00a0 The next big one could be boiling away as we speak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many people have a favorite sport.\u00a0 Some follow soccer, others american football or hockey, basketball, baseball, cricket…\u00a0 I follow hurricanes, the tropical storms or cyclones that form in the Carribean during summer and fall of every year.\u00a0 There’s never a players strike and you can follow all the action over the internet.\u00a0 In fact, you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/orbittrap.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/Ghosty_Frosty_by_Sophiiiii.jpg?fit=500%2C500","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1802,"url":"http:\/\/orbittrap.ca\/?p=1802","url_meta":{"origin":1467,"position":0},"title":"My Oort Cloud Vacation","author":"Tim","date":"29 October, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"~ Click on images to view full-size on original site ~ In defense of Valerie, tohu777's image fooled me too.\u00a0 I thought it was an art installation out in some desert somewhere. 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