Orbit Trap

The iterative nature of fractal formulas creates not just fascinating images but entire worlds. Exploration of these "worlds" has been a major theme of fractal art from it's very first days back in the 1970s.

Fractal Imaginator has a very rare talent: it renders images that look like old-time engraved illustrations, tinted line drawings and horror comics from the 1970s.

Art is contemplation. Contemplation is when you are preoccupied and focused on something to the point of single-mindedness. Anything you see that causes that is art. Anything you read that causes that is literature. Anything…

Perhaps it’s too early to tell. We can still comfortably ignore it. The sublime mathematical magic behind fractal art will forever establish it as “more than just art —a whole new universe” and “without rivals”.…

Where was graphical AI back in 1999? Nowhere! that’s where. Terry Gintz on the other hand, was already there: May 1999 — Added random fractal methods to Fractal Zplot 1.18. June 1999 — completed Fractal…

  He even copied the little tree-like thing in the middle of mine. Oh, did you see the “moon” in my fractal in the upper right hand corner? Not as ostentatious as Van Gogh’s but…

Graphical AI has some similarities with fractals: imagery no human mind could have conceived.  That’s what I like about graphical AI; the bizarre, the visual meat grinder, the nuances of industrial accident.  That kind of…

Why does it still live? What makes fractal art so exciting it doesn’t need anything except itself to keep it going? I guess then, the question is: what is exciting about fractal art? I haven’t…

It sums up all my thoughts perfectly and really needs no explanation other than a field trip to a gallery to give examples.

I read an interesting article by Rhiannon Cosslett in the The Guardian entitled, Art is all about nuance. Let’s not lose it in the alarmist censorship debate (Feb 8, 2018).  In attempting to explain the…

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…

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.

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?

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…

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…

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…

There's something different about fractal art. Something that sets it apart from the art of artists working with their hands to form paintings out of paint and sculptures out of clay. Artists working with their…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Fractals are many things to many people but as an art form they’re really very simple:  Fractals are a visual medium. Do not be fooled by such simple language and such a simple statement,  “medium”…

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…

As I concluded in my previous posting, there are only two art genres which fractals are capable of contributing to: Abstract Expressionism and Landscape/Place. Everything else created with the fractal medium is what I would…

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…

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…

I should begin by mentioning I never actually met Paul –offline, that is. But I suspect that describes most of the people he knew, since he was so active in the online world. In fact,…

Fractal art got the boot a long time ago… Let me start with an interesting quote from the (archived) Wikipedia talk page: This article should probably be merged with fractal.—Eloquence 17:12, Dec 23, 2003 (UTC)…

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…

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…

It’s useless, and although there have been efforts to build something substantial there, ultimately the page keeps reverting back to a few shallow paragraphs that fail to even offer a basic definition.  I’ve been going there for several…

I logged out of one of my YouTube accounts and before I could log into the other, I found myself on the main YouTube page with links to the dumbest junk I’ve ever seen.  I…

It was called the “International Fractal Art Symposium” and was held in San Sebastian, Spain (that’s in Europe) from June 25th to 27th, 2014.  I first heard about it back in December 2013 in a…

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…

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…