The purpose of this posting is to show you that 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.  Should you happen to agree with that conclusion, the question then arises: “Why is there so much more interest in a program like Chaotica and JWildfire among fractal artists than there is in one like Kandid?”

Hands up everyone who’s ever used Kandid

Nobody’s even heard of Kandid except for me.  Kandid is a java-based genetic art program from 2002 that features several kinds of algorithms including an Iterated Function System Affine Transformation; Voronoi Diagram; Cellular Automata and a bunch of other things.  By far my favorite is the IFS Affine Transformation in Grayscale mode.  It can operate in color modes but the results are always awful.  Kandid’s Sourceforge site.

Most fractal artists work with “advanced” programs that require them to make most of the creative decisions and which leads to a creative process that revolves around their guidance and direction and therefore produces work that is largely an expression of them.  This is micro-managing the algorithms and really interferes with mechanical creativity.  The more you’re involved in the decision making process the more you’re to blame for the results of it.

Why do they do it?

Only deliberate, “intelligent” control can make fractal algorithms produce consistently themed imagery.  I think the tastes of fractal artists have become so stylized over the years that only conventional themes interest them anymore because only those things attract the attention of their peers.  I would characterize the fractal art world as a craft community where technique and refinement rather than the iconoclastic attitude of an art community is the driving force behind new works.  Fractal art is now oriented around fractal artists rather than fractals.  It’s a social scene.  But I think most art groups eventually evolve into that, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

The Art Gallery of Doctor Moreau

Kandid is a genetic art program and makes new things in an entirely different way.  There is no artist needed or even any way for one to get involved.  It’s a purely mechanical process with the exception of selecting pairs of images to “breed”.  Can you call yourself an artist when all you do is check off two pictures and then watch them “breed”?  I don’t really see these things as my artwork or identify with them personally because they’re entirely the result of Kandid’s automatic gene shuffling and random mutation.  In a farming context, my role would be described as that of a breeder.  Any personal resemblance between me and my horses would be absurd.

~ Click on images to view the larger size version ~

More fractal than the coastline of Britain or a Sierpinski corn-flake!

Look closely at each image and you will see that every sub-unit is actually a copy of each large scale image.  Sometimes the smaller particles are flipped or rotated, but they are all self-similar on every scale.  I never noticed it at first until I stumbled across some really obvious examples.  The image just above is a good depiction of self-similarity.  Note the shape of the cloud in the background of the main image and then note how each of the small floating “puffs” are identical but scaled down to the point that they’ve become mini-thumbnails.  Some are flipped left to right, but each small one contains all the elements of the large one that forms the entire picture.  Recursive as well as self-similar, these images are about as fractal as fractal art can get.  And 100% mechanically made!  No “artist” required.  The program will entertain you.

Screenshot of all there is to Kandid: a bunch of breeding cells. Note the top right and bottom left cells marked with green triangles are the parents hand chosen by the user for breeding and the rest are the children.  You click the top-left button on the toolbar and the children cells change.  Change your parental pair selection or click again.  That’s all there is to it.

The only parameter settings that there are. I don’t know what they mean, but adjusting them does change the results somewhat.  I think the limit for mutation is 1.00.  I tried 9.99 but it stopped me.

Kandid conveniently makes available every image you’ve saved for re-breeding later. It displays the corresponding image file for each  accompanying chromosome file containing the genetic parameters that define the image’s graphical characteristics.  You don’t actually breed the images, you breed the parameters.  This is generally how most genetic programming works, I would guess.

Main opening screen for Kandid. The options are IFS (top row) Cellular Automata (next row down), then Voronoi Diagrams and then a bunch that I’ve never found very useful like L-systems and something that allows for POV ray export and things like that.  Ironically, there’s a Flame Fractal function but it’s very primitive although maybe it wasn’t back in 2002 (second row from bottom).

The Question…

“Why is there so much more interest in a program like Chaotica and JWildfire among fractal artists than there is in one like Kandid?”

I think what makes the average fractal artist tick is an interest in fractal software development.  They like artwork that epitomizes and demonstrates cutting edge rendering.  This is not really an art thing, it’s more of a medium thing.  Imagine a photography category that focuses and revolves around the latest equipment and specialized techniques.  Their photo galleries would be full of very similar subject matter that highlighted differences in the equipment and techniques used.  It would be labeled a photography tweaking group.  Would they have eccentric subject matter and themes? or much “retro” black and white photography?  No, they would use standardized themes because that would make for easier comparison with current artwork and techniques.

In the fractal art world over the last two decades we’ve improved the rendering but we haven’t improved the subject matter and there’s no point in improving the rendering unless it’s got a subject worth rendering.  The 3D fractal innovation of the last few years was the sole exception.  The 3D fractal revolution brought both an improvement in rendering as well as an improvement in subject matter.  It was “3D imagery” (voxels) but it was also interesting 3D imagery.  All of a sudden you had a quantum leap in creativity in the themes of fractal places and fractal landscapes.  It was much more than a tweak.  Artists I’d never been very interested in before suddenly started adding exciting stuff to their online galleries.  Something happened to them? or something happened to their software?

Chaotica has added some nifty new rendering techniques to the world of flame fractals, but with the exception of a few interesting works, there is little to take note of.  JWildfire is another new flame renderer; perhaps the Great Leap Forward in flame fractals that I’ve been expecting is going to occur with that program’s user group?  Just like Chaotica, however, it’s produced a handful of cool looking artworks but real creative innovation in the area of flame fractals hasn’t been affected much by its advances in rendering.  The genre of flame fractals remains a place of ever increasing rendering refinement but stagnant artistic expression.

Man, that sounds grim.  Here, let’s take a look at some of the better, new and improved flame fractals from JWildfire and forget about all that other stuff.  These works are truly exceptional.

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

Flame ett808 by blenqui (DeviantArt)

Blenqui is no stranger to making artwork that is the exception to the rule.  This here is an example of the “clockworks” style of flame fractals that consists of circular excitement.  Note the highly irregular and unmechanical arrangement of elements.  Once, again, as I pointed out in my last posting, one of the core strengths of flame fractals is their unpatterned patterns.  Fractals can be frustratingly regular but flame fractals usually are not.  A lot of people make clockwork images like this but the depth of the imagery and “painterly-ness” to it sets it apart from the typical ones.  (Incidently, compare with Jared Tarbell’s Bubble Chamber applet.)

Fracrobats by kofferwortgraphics (DeviantArt)

You ought to read the statement on this guy’s DeviantArt page that explains why he abandoned the place.  It’s interesting that his work also stands out as some of the better stuff.  The fractal art world is infected with the usual social dysfunctionalisms that plague every interactive venue in the online world.  Once again, the rich rendering ability of the program is used well to enhance the subject of the image rather than prop up the subject of the image.  The classic mandelbrot patterns become a theme within a larger them of “circles in straight lines.”  I think I like this one because of it’s strong design qualities; geometric but not repetitive.

Endless Nightmare by thargor6 (DeviantArt)

Thargor, if I’ve got this right, is the author of JWildfire as well as one of it’s most prolific and creative users.  This image features one of its new “hard” flame rendering methods that introduces a solid look to what was hitherto wispy and translucent.  Furthermore, it expresses a dark, disturbing sensation, as the title, Endless Nightmare, suggests, of something unpleasant that you can’t escape from.  It’s interesting that the author of the program, undoubtedly a highly skilled, technical person, also has such a feel for artistic expression.  But maybe that’s what inspires and motivates him to keep developing the program; he’s trying to produce a more creative program.  I always felt that when using programs like Sterling and Tierazon, an awful lot of the artistic style in the appearance of their images was a direct product of the author, Stephen Ferguson’s own artistic imagination which went into designing the rendering methods.

They don’t have DeviantArt group?

I found it a little harder to locate the better grade, higher-shelf JWildfire fractals than I did with Chaotica.  Chaotica seems to have a more organized (as well as more mobilized) user base on Deviant Art.  Below are two screenshots of Deviant Art searches on the string:  “JWildfire flame fractal”.  We all know that there’s a lot of uploads on Deviant Art and you can’t judge a software category by what is found in the general recent upload feeds, but it does show you what the average user typically makes and the influence the program itself has on them.  Or is it just the influence the average user has on the program results?  directing the highly talented software in cliche directions instead of experimenting with the full range of capability that the programmer has given it?  I should point out also that JWildfire does a lot of other things than render flame fractals so, unlike Chaotica, a unified user group for JWildfire would contain a wider range of fractal imagery types than just flames.  JWildfire users don’t all specialize in flame fractals.  But for those who do, this is what you typically see:

DeviantArt search results for “JWildfire flame fractal”

DeviantArt search results for “JWildfire flame fractal”

But then I found these…

Blue invasion by luisbc (DeviantArt)

I thought Chaotica users were into Cloudscapes but it seems to be a common theme among all “Flamers”.  Although I think the cloudscape theme is a little limited artistically this one is much more energetic than most and quite captivating in detail as well as flow and movement.  It’s not the usual swirling toilet bowl class so often seen, but is more like the sky from one of the great landscape painters.  There’s a lot of landscape paintings that feature a huge, panoramic sky so I guess it’s natural for flamers to pursue such a theme as this.  This could easily be an underwater scene as much as a sky but works well I suppose either way.  The rendering almost produces a hybrid, thick-air, thin-water medium.

Space lava by ElenaLight (DeviantArt)

One difference I noticed between JWildfire works and ones by Chaotica, was a greater talent for astronomy themes.  Or perhaps ElenaLight is just more talented at getting the program to create this sort of space imagery?  If you click on this one and view the full-size, it’s even more impressive as the star patterns made by the little points of light look extremely realistic and give this “synthetic” work a profoundly natural quality.  This is the sort of “higher development” in flame fractals I’ve been hoping for.  This image stands alone as something worth looking at and not merely “a good example” of JWildfire.

Borealis by luisbc

Flames in space?  I was really shocked when I found this one because it was so subtle and yet intense.  The colors are beautiful but they’re also just part of the team of elements that all work together to make this simple flame a real hit.  Luis’ gallery has a lot of these kinds of images and just like ChaosFissure with Chaotica, he gets a little obsessed with the theme but maybe that’s what you have to do if you want to make a few really good ones.  I’d like to say a whole bunch of great things about this image but apart from checking out the starry details in the fullsize version, words seem rather inappropriate when talking about artwork like this which speaks so well for itself.  Why is it so much better than all the other wispy “flames in space” out there?  Good art is a lot harder to explain than good rendering.

Texture by luisbc

This thing’s been up for a year and a half and yet only one comment on DeviantArt:

The title of the work is longer than the comment… but that’s DeviantArt for you.

You will recognize immediately a Frank Frazetta style to this one, just as many Chaotica fractals have a Rembrandt style to them.  Frank Frazetta painted fantasy themes and gave them a blotchy style instead of a brushy style.  It was a departure from what most fantasy painters tried to do, which was make their works look more like traditional paintings.  Frazetta tried to make them look better.

So what is this image? Sky? Space? Underwater?  I think Luis just called it a texture because it has that elusive quality that is best described by not attempting to describe it.  Or did Luis not appreciate his own work as much as I do?  I think it’s a nighttime vision or dreamscape.  That’s the bubble-ish quality and the dark pinnacle in the lower middle is a small but steep rocky place where contemplation occurs and visionary light springs forth.  Or how about “Genie from the bottle”?

Compare it with this famous painting by Turner:

Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis by JWM Turner, 1843

Turner really goes overboard with his title, doesn’t he?  There’s enough words there for three paintings and a haiku poem to follow.  A commenter here once criticized “suggestive titles” as tools to prop up meaningless art.  Maybe he’d never heard of Turner? (or anything else).  Flame fractals, like much of algorithmic art carries on the long established category of abstract expressionism of which not all of it is so abstract, as is the case here with Turner’s visionary smudge.  It’s interesting how old art themes can reappear decades or even centuries later.

So, is JWildfire any better than Chaotica, or what?

Overall, I’d say the two programs are tools of equal creative power for flame fractal users (flamers).  But just as I concluded in my Chaotica posting, the genre of flame fractals is still a lean place for visual creativity even if it is becoming a richer place for rendering options.  Noteworthy artwork can still be made with programs like this, as is the case with the examples I’ve reviewed here.  And more examples will be made in the future, I’m sure, but for the average user, flame fractal algorithms are still just something to play with and not the algorithmic world to explore and make discoveries in like other fractal algorithms, such as the 3D variety, are.

In my next posting I will show you what a really creative program can do for you without all the fancy, “cutting-edge” rendering toys.  If you want me to show you something better and not just complain about what everyone else is doing (or can’t do), my next posting I believe will do that.

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 traditional fractals were solid, lumpy and rigidly geometric. Although light and refreshing to look at, flame fractals suffered from something.  They had an achille’s heel of sorts: they lacked variety. Flame fractal imagery tended to be little more than variations on a narrow theme. That theme being “flamy-looking things”.

Apophysis, the main flame fractal program, received some improvements that spiced things up a bit and soon bubbles, clock gears and a rather promising “oil painting” look emerged.  But for me the arrival of Chaotica seemed to be the quantum leap for flame fractals that I was expecting.  And the things that were being made with it initially confirmed that a new era in flame fractal creativity was beginning.

Flame fractals seemed to be less rigidly ordered than the traditional fractals and that lead to imagery that was less rigidly geometric and mechanical.  If only they could somehow be empowered to draw something more substantial and visually fertile than just flames and glowing gas.  I had hoped Chaotica would do just that and add the visual brain that flame fractals seemed to be missing and which regular fractals always seemed to possess.

But after all these years the waiting is up and it’s time to ask the question: Is that all there is to Chaotica?

First off, not everything made with Chaotica is bad or even mediocre.  In my last post I reviewed a Chaotica artwork that I liked, by Platinus, and it was an exception to the rule.  There is some good work made with Chaotica but there just isn’t very much and it hasn’t really changed the flame fractal category very much in the way I hoped it would.  If anything, Chaotica has just moved flame fractals into a new set of wheel ruts; something new users probably don’t realize because the initial “wow-factor” which flame fractals have always possessed detaches them somewhat from reality for a while.  The potential of flame fractals looks endless, at first.

I’m going to review what I think are the best examples of Chaotica I can find.  I could easily review bad or mediocre examples but what interests me, and has always interested me, is the potential of Chaotica, how far it can reach, not what the average user does with it.  I think that’s probably the perspective of most readers, too.  Chaotica’s arm has turned out to be a lot shorter than I expected.

On that note…

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

The first stop is the Chaoticafractals group on Deviant Art:

Chaoticafractals group description on Deviant Art

The description says, “This group was created to showcase high quality still renders and animation created or rendered in Chaotica”.  Sounds like the best place to get an idea of what Chaotica can do and what its best users are making.  “Join us in pushing the limits of fractal art!”

I went through the whole “Featured” section of their gallery and chose what I thought were good examples of “the reach” of Chaotica’s “arm”.  As a side note, it’s interesting that the Chaotica image I reviewed in my last posting is not found in this featured section.

Lightspeed by katdesignstudio

As with most Chaotica images, one really needs to click on the image to view it full-size on the original site because of the rich detail they almost all contain.  The forte of Chaotica, like most flame fractals, is in the details of the exquisite graphical rendering.  Details in Chaotica are what brushstrokes are in oil painting.  A splotch, smudge, smear or even a thin line when viewed in a thumbnail, like in the the one here above, often is discovered to be a work of art in its own right when viewed close up.

Even still, how about this image?  Nice color.  Intriguing astrophotography like subject and yet rendered in oil paints in the style of Rembrandt.  You see what I mean about the proverbial “wow-factor” with flame fractals?  Chaotica must have added some of Rembrandt’s own genetic code to their program.  It’s a powerful thing.

Lightspeed by katdesignstudio (detail)

It reminds me of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  It captures the various lights of nighttime and records their movements at the same time.  You see, I’m not saying Chaotica fractals are bad.  I’m just saying that they excel at a very narrow range of things and this one is probably the best example of that excellence.  I like this image.  I’m not being sarcastic.

I scroll down a few more page lengths in Chaoticafractals’ Featured gallery, past more than just a few “smudg-isms” and this catches my eye:

In The End by LukasFractalizator (DeviantArt)

Nothing gets more panoramic than that!  I can feel the wind and the majestic awesomeness of that churning sky of energy.  I like the coloring because its so subdued and yet the effect of windswept panorama and thunderous sky-kingdom is heightened rather than weakened.  Just goes to show what can be done with well chosen palette.  By the way, I think the ground is actually a frozen lake blown bare by the wind.  Probably that storm we see moving off in the distance with a chilling cold front.  This reminds me of a few scenes in the movie, Gone with the Wind.

Lukas seems to focus on landscapes which I personally think is smart because fractal imagery lends itself that way.  And like Kat above, his work here is extremely Chaotica-ish and distinctive of the style of work the program produces.

Back to scrollin’ down the road…

Ring of Red by ChaosFissure

You know, after looking at this one you might seriously question my question, Is that all there is to Chaotica?  Pretty freaky eh?  To be honest, this is the sort of quantum leap in flame fractal graphics I’ve been hoping for.  Does this look anything like a “flame fractal”?  Check out the full-size, too, the details of the details are paintings in paintings.  The coloring is really pretty good, too.  In fact, a different palette might make this image much less interesting.  It’s got that avant-garde science fiction feel to it.  Nice strong composition as well.  Most Chaotica images are like that because I think the program offers a lot more variation in image shapes and arrangements than standard fractal imagery does, which, as I mentioned above, is much more rigid and less free flowing than flame fractal imagery usually is.

Portrait of the Artist with Sunflowers by tatasz (DeviantArt)

Truly this is a “flameless” flame fractal.  Beautiful color.  And not the usual eye-candy kind of beautiful color, either.  Very subtle and sophisticated.  Note in particular that no two dots are the same.  That’s what I like about the flame algorithms, they don’t have to have that “spirograph” rigidity although they are capable of doing that as well if the artist wants that sort of symmetrical, patterned effect.  Images like this make it hard to say anything bad about Chaotica.

This next one doesn’t make it any easier…

Runic Neutralization by ChaosFissure (DeviantArt)

The imagery here is composed of some hybrid substance.  It’s flame-like but something more than that.  The blue, watery “sword” on the right has the appearance of gushing liquid and yet the form of something more rigid and coherent like electricity or a magnetic force.  I don’t think such an image could be made in any other program.  I like the choice of title, too, because the imagery suggests something Norse or Germanic and Wagnerian.  I tried to get a wide range of artists for this but I had to let my eyes be the judge and so there’s another one by Chaosfissure.

And another…

Running the River by ChaosFissure

I chose this one because of the incredible “painterly” style it has.  Honestly, can you really believe this wasn’t painted by hand instead of being rendered on a computer?  It has a rough, abraided look to the canvas that can be achieved with something like a rough rag but you’ve got to be careful not to merely smudge the paint.  There’s none of the mechanical look of fractal art here and if you bought a print of this and hung it in your living room, visitors would never suspect it was computer art.  You might even forget after a while.

Here’s a link to ChaosFissure’s DeviantArt gallery if you haven’t gone there already.

Cherry Cola Falls by FarDareisMai

Once again a flameless flame fractal.  Another great title, too.  I find most titles for fractal art are rather uninspiring and ill fitting, but this one effervesces with the imagery.  As always, click on it to see the rich details.  Here’s an example of rich detail; my favorite from the lower left corner:

Cherry Cola Falls by FarDareisMai -detail

This reminds me of the pattern-piling type of imagery that Samuel Monnier did in Ultra Fractal.  One difference here though, and a good example of the difference between regular and flame fractals, and that’s the natural disorderliness and lack of rigidity to the imagery.  This image, like ChaosFissure’s above, have the appearance of human rather than mechanical origin.  I’m sure that’s one of the main features that draws artists to flame fractals and Chaotica.  They probably feel they are making a whole new category of fractal art, and even digital art for that matter.

And they are.  Flame fractals are still a separate and unique category because the imagery they make is sufficiently distinct to make such a separation relevant and practical.

Ironically, the great examples I’ve reviewed and commented on here show both the strength as well as the weakness of Chaotica.  The strength is easy to see: amazing “painterly” rendering with rich, stunning detail.  It’s a hallmark of Chaotica, such unmechanical computer art.

The weakness is simply the limitation of such rich rendering and it’s been the perennial problem in flame fractals from the the start.  Every awesome image in Chaotica is the last of its kind because it’s perfect and there’s nothing else to be done.  The rest all all just variations on that theme.  Once it’s been done well a single time, there’s not much room for innovation.  Take a look at these zoomed out screenshots of the Chaoticafractals Featured gallery.  It will give you a broader perspective on the category than you will get from just looking at the best examples.

Chaoticafractals Featured Gallery on Deviant Art

Chaoticafractals Featured Gallery on Deviant Art

I think you can see how similar most of the images are.  And this group is not a general “recent uploads” feed that is often crammed full of a lot of mediocre work.  This is the better stuff made with Chaotica.  The artistry primarily revolves around the rendering effects and rarely do any of the new works contain subject matter that is unique or expressive.

And the subject matter or theme of the imagery that you’ll mostly see is that of “melodrama”.  Big explosive scenes and rumbling storm clouds.  Or weird splashing paint effects.  I find myself experiencing the same few handful of emotions when viewing these images.

They’re awesome but…

The examples I’ve reviewed here are good and they compliment the genre of fractal art.  I wouldn’t have chosen them if they weren’t worth looking at and paying attention to.  But if you browse around the personal galleries of many of these artists you’ll mainly see a lot of variations on the same themes.  This isn’t because the artists are unimaginative or uncreative; it’s just that there’s still a limit to what anyone can do with flame fractals even when they’re hooked up to such a powerful rendering machine as Chaotica.  How many creative things can you do with this rich but still narrow medium?  It’s a big challenge artistically to work with flame fractals and come up with something fresh and novel.  The examples I’ve shown here are proof that it can be done, but that’s about all there is.  These artists are proof of how hard flame fractals are as a category of fractal art to work in.  I had hoped Chaotica would change that but it hasn’t.

Is there anything new in fractal art today?

I want to show you two fractal images I made years ago in Sterling v17.  I think they fit in well with the dominant themes in Chaotica artwork of: rich color; highly detailed, textured imagery; and wild, irregular, liquid flowing shapes and structures.

Sterling is a one-layer fractal program from 1999 but I think it’s still more creative overall than Chaotica is today.  But fractal art today revolves around rendering and not creativity because that’s what seems to make most fractal artists tick; that’s the itch they like to scratch, so to speak.  Great works of rendering will never be important or admired for very long because rendering technology keeps getting better and making the older stuff look weak.  Chaotica is a great rendering machine but it’s going to need some other creative engine than flame fractals if it’s ever going to produce artwork has any lasting merit.  But I’m sure anyone can still have a lot of fun with it.

Carved wood “flame fractal” by Roger Cook, 2006  at lumberjocks.com

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

boxFoldp2V3 eee2 by mclarekin (Fractalforums)

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.  I don’t think mclarekin was trying to make anything great or revive my jaded sensibilities, so here is a fine example of what I love about fractal art: we often don’t know what we’ve captured.  We’re just as capable of underestimating its value as overestimating it.  “Making” fractal art is the first step in discovering it.  That’s how it works.  There are no artists.  Artists are the first members of the audience.

Everything in this image is working and active.  The whole thing’s alive.  It’s a symphony of color, shape and pattern.  There is nothing real and yet there is nothing abstract either.  Fractals are the twilight zone of art.

This next one is a little harder to explain…

(MB3D) ABox M-set Image Thread 4 by Anon (Fractalforums)

You’ve heard of Magic Realism in literature?  This is magic archeology.  The top one is a rare gold crown from the Incas which magically reassembles itself in a way which science has been unable to explain.  Note the teeth in the little faces which represent the gods that were believed to consume the sacrificial victims.  The bottom image looks like a tomb containing gold objects but is really a natural metallic crystalline growth that is hundreds of millions of years old and discovered in a silver mine.   Like I said, in fractal art not even the artist realizes what they’ve found.  It has to be taken to an expert who can properly assess its value and identify its origin.

We now leave Kansas and arrive in Oz…

Dmap Rr558 by blenqui (DeviantArt)

If I told you that this was a computer generated visualization of the standing wave structure of a hybridized Uranium 238 atom, would you be more interested or less?  This is what blenqui has created, although, like the others above, the artist is not fully aware of that yet.  Blenqui is one of the very few original artists in the fractal world.  If you don’t like his work, or at least find his work interesting, then you don’t really like fractal art, you only like fractals.

There a regions, states, phases and cross-sections to this image.  One travels and studies it; climbs and accesses it.  To speak of “appreciation” and “viewing” is to have seen it only in a postcard.  It’s an experience and you should have the expression and heart rate of someone who’s just gotten off a roller coaster when you speak of it, if you were really there yourself.

Here’s another…

Dmap nu216 by blenqui (DeviantArt)

Hmmn… it actually resembles one of those stand-up spinning rides that press you  against the outside wall with centrifugal force in which you can lift up your legs and not fall down.  The creativity in fractal art is self-propagating.

Note the fancy monochome world on the “tread of the tire” and compare it with the cellular cross-section style  of imagery on the “sidewalls”.  The color is retro and I believe the original upload image was a png (this is a jpeg) and it’s quite appropriate for the display of such high contrast imagery.  Of course, the two sets of imagery are created by the same, single structure which is merely displayed in two different planes (horizontal, vertical) and yet one plane gives birth to a nighttime scene of a desolate lake surrounded by glowing white trees while the other resembles a biology diagram of a hollow stemmed plant with large xylem tubes surrounded by smaller, phloem tubes.  How could anyone fully realize what this was when it was first picked up off the virtual ground?

Of Yonder by Platinus (DeviantArt)

You really need to click on this one and view it full-size.  It’s surreal.  The empty horizons and the convoluted worm hole stairwells in the “hills”.  The Underworlds are everywhere.  Not a single curved line that I can see and yet it’s a natural landscape.  Could even be Kansas on a surreal day.  Simple geometry but complex effect.  Sounds very fractal.

MyRohypnol by Wajakaa (DeviantArt)

I’m guessing this was made with Fractal Explorer or some other program of similar vintage.  One of the biggest mistakes in computer art is equating technological progress and development with better art.  More advanced fractal software simply makes more advance fractal graphics not necessarily more advanced art.  The wild comic book imagery of Wajakaa’s image here is a good example of that.

The lower regions by the memory by Wajakaa (DeviantArt)

Another visual amusement park ride.  The interplay between the overlapping patterns in these one-layer programs is often more sophisticated and more tasteful than the deliberate layering in multi-layered programs.  Fractal artists shouldn’t have too much say over what the image looks like.  Imagine how dull and predictable most natural landscapes would look if designed by a nature photographer.  In programs like Sterling or Tierazon, one can get lost for hours in these gritty and intense regions or crash scenes.

Thurfis by OttoMagusDigitalArt

How do we know this is “fractal”?  Or how about this question: How do we know this is “art”?  It’s easier to answer the art question.  Why is that?  Is it because “fractal” is actually a meaningless term?  Art on the other hand is a quality or attribute of the image and independent of the technical origins or pedigree of the imagery that forms it.

The colors are exquisite and the shapes multiply the effect.  Note the shadowing and how it accentuates the colored forms.  Made with Ultrafractal and possibly a rebuttal to my comment that multi-layering is usually second-rate to the mechanical single-layer processes.

Hexenfruit Stew by OttoMagusDigitalArt (DeviantArt)

This one really  needs to be viewed full-size to get the subtle texture effect.  I want to retitle this one: Thoughts Found in Ice.  Very creative use of realistic as well as abstract rendering effects.  Layering can easily produce that sort of hybridized style.  In fact, layering is almost a whole new creative process in which fractal formula renderings are just the raw material.  Does this image fit with anyone’s idea of fractal art?  It’s great to see something new and different and this is also good as well.

Here’s something much older: