I read somewhere, or heard from someone, that study carrols were invented in monasteries. A study carrol (did I spell it wrong?) is a one-person table that is walled on all sides except the one you sit at. The prototypical cubicle. No, it wasn’t the first. The first cubicle was the small cave preferred by … Continue reading
Hordes of Photoshop Jockeys
Hordes of Photoshop Jockeys (2000) This one is kind of an in-joke. Back when I used to post my images on Usenet on alt.binaries.pictures.fractals (which were either — pick one — the good old days or the dark ages), there occasionally would be some lively (read: flame-filled) discussions. One night, a thread got hot and … Continue reading
The marriage of Sputnik
The first Radio Satelite. 1957, or around then. Whatever happened to Sputnik? No longer a celebrity, and not too shiny anymore, he slides through space, without destination or purpose. His simple senseless beeping, once the scherzo of a great Superpower symphony, is now just a sign he’s still alive. Years pass, decades pass. Then one … Continue reading
Deep in the Mines
Deep in the Mines 1 (2000) Fractals sometimes transcend their parameters. If they are art — and I’m guessing that most of us think they are — then our images reflect some deeper part of ourselves. Our dreams. Our buried treasures. Tina got me thinking about this standing on the shoulders of giants business. It’s … Continue reading
Space Heads
Sasquatch, UFO’s, Bermuda Triangle, and now –Space Heads. What am I talking about? Imagine that outer space is something like the ocean: mostly empty but “infected” with life. We don’t expect to find something. We don’t expect to get a cold. But we’re not surprised when it happens. Probability says, it’s going to happen, instinct … Continue reading
Putting the Art in Fractal Art
Chump Change (2006) The way I saw my art changed when I started working with a master printer to make poster-sized Giclees of my own work. I began to see my images on the wall rather than on the screen. My work habits shifted noticeably. I started creating in the largest sizes my poor computer … Continue reading
Flames over Tokyo
It’s never been my intention to talk about war and depressing stuff like that, but I like this image and all I can think of when I look at it is the B-29 fire-bombing campaign that took place over Japan in the spring of 1945. I read the diary of an allied soldier who was … Continue reading
The Varieties of Deadly Experience
Forest of Knives I remember back during the last few years of the Vietnam war, in the early 70s, reading an article in the magazine that came with the weekend edition of the newspaper, about the various booby-traps the enemy was using against US soldiers. I was 7 or 8 at the time and living … Continue reading
Homage to Andy Warhol
Homage to Andy Warhol (2000) From artrepublic: In 1960 Warhol began to replicate a range of mass-produced images, beginning with newspaper advertisements and comic strips before turning to packaging, dollar bills and more. He is probably the most famous member of the Pop Art movement. Virtually any image that was in the public domain was … Continue reading
Visual Encryption
Smashing with style Digital Dynamite Filter of Frenzy Ripped-off beyond recognition and left for dead “No, your Honour; I didn’t do anything. I just took the dog for a walk until it was dead.” Together, me and the filter formed a third personality, which neither of us could talk any sense to. Art grows out … Continue reading
Homage to Alexander Calder
Homage to Alexander Calder (1999) To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.—Alexander Calder From the National Gallery of Art: Alexander Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components. Yet his invention of the “mobile” — a word coined in 1931 … Continue reading
Homage to Niels Bohr
Homage to Niels Bohr (2004) From Nobelprize.org: In the autumn of 1911 [Bohr] made a stay at Cambridge, where he profited by following the experimental work going on in the Cavendish Laboratory under Sir J.J. Thomson’s guidance, at the same time as he pursued own theoretical studies. In the spring of 1912 he was at … Continue reading
I stepped off on Saturn
You know, post-processing can really mangle a decent, law-abiding fractal image and make it an almost unrecognizable, but strangely delightful, wreck. Some will never walk straight again. But when you start with an image that is almost entirely a product of the program’s filtering effect, and not quite a “fractal” image to start with, the … Continue reading
Postcards from Shangri-La
Would you expect this from someone named “Ilyich the Toad”? Once again, I’ve dug up a new and amazing Photoshop filter and I want to share the wonder… But it’s got a dirty name. I tried renaming it, but you can’t do that with Photoshop filters. Or at least I don’t know how. But everytime … Continue reading
One more time…
What is art? There’s an old black and white movie that spends two hours depicting a jury sitting around a table in a room, deliberating the verdict of a murder trial. Now I could also be wrong about this too, but I think it all starts when Jimmy Stewart, who’s the only one of the … Continue reading
Life is not
Life is not for the rich and famousfor the successful applicant and the olympic fewLife is in the eye and the mind and the handIt needs no permission,or conditionsto be. We can all be like Sindbadand set off on voyages with nothing but todayWe do not need to own the oceanit is enough that we … Continue reading
Fractal Trick or Treat?
The Familiar (1999) I’ve always been more interested in using fractals to push ideas rather than to serve as decorations Still Life with Dracula (2002) and this approach has sometimes proven very handy at Halloween to illustrate horror themes Back to the Blair Witch (2000) because although fractals can treat by assuming forms that are … Continue reading
"Better" than Pollock?
Back twenty years ago in high school English class I read or studied, or something, Julius Caesar by George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, as he is called by those who are familiar with him, was something new for us high school students. We were quite familiar with Shakespeare as the school curriculum included one of his … Continue reading
Jar Jar Agonistes
Jar Jar Agonistes (2006) Gollum is way better.I evoke birthday blight and snakesto haul home. I stoke vitrioland hollow men to guess the price of my money pit. Sad to bepitied more than Lieberman orother juggling carpetbaggers. I seema nasty senator, a recycling smattering of acting and idiotclowning. Executable. Embeddedface down in a chemical treatment … Continue reading
The Robot’s Renaissance
Although most labels in the art world have a number of interpretations, I define algorithmic art as artwork made with algorithms. An algorithm is a series of instructions. Usually these instructions are computer commands and algorithmic art is made with computers. But it’s the “mechanical” component that makes algorithmic art special and the machine doesn’t … Continue reading
India Ink-194.8bf
Download parameter file “bug05.ink” I’ve found a new toy. It makes everything look like it was ripped out of an old book, so to speak. Costs money. $15 US. Fully functional demo download. Just like uscomic.8bf, it often takes uninteresting images and transforms them, lifting them to higher quanta. People like me need all the … Continue reading
Cult of the Microbe King
Who would have thought this humble pest would someday take a seat beside the likes of David Copperfield or Martin Chuzzlewit, as The King of the Microbes. One of the most startling events for fans of Charles Dickens this past year has been the recent discovery of an unpublished manuscript, The King of the Microbes. … Continue reading
Tiffany Lamp Gone Bad
Tiffany Lamp Gone Bad (2001) May West liked good salmon.Her bedroom had dark panelling and lava lamps. Over her tables hungracks of critics behind the bar where bad service is largely blamedon Texas. Her rental limo was toothless and made me think ofcamp. Such dim jerky tastes survivalist or maybe all the songsabout trendy green … Continue reading
He played the Balalaika
He played the Balalaika… then ate it! I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I clapped. He wasn’t finished yet. Everyone in the alien dinner theater scowled at me while he started again, from the beginning. I couldn’t see why this guy was such a big celebrity on this planet. Until he started to … Continue reading
Who’s That Tramping Over Our Blog?
Periodically, blog housekeeping issues arise that need to be clarified. Orbit Trap is not an online community. We’re a blog. In a very real sense, we are like a publishing house. We reserve the right to choose what we will and will not publish. We do not exclude public opinion. Comments are welcome, and we … Continue reading
Unattainable
Unattainable (1999) An impossible self help questionwill waitcheck outbe homeunless you are a fan of stupid networks. One of the tightestgoing nuclear photographs cuts waste and overlooks ad agencyethics. To understand more toast the Broadway stage withhandgun exits, silent designs before clicking to playshut the bookscool detachmentself protectionwhen the Coca Cola intelligentsia stumble in household … Continue reading
Electro Sine Trap Tentacles of Terror
It’s been ages now since ants took over the Earth, but they still enjoy reliving the old battles. “One small step for an ant, one giant leap for all insects.” Conquering the humans was the defining moment in the civilization of the ants. When they read what we wrote about them in textbooks, they weren’t … Continue reading
I walked with Warhol
Hey, how about it? Is this the Campbell Soup Cans of fractals or what? Anyhow, Andy told me, and no one else knows this, that he’s taken all his talent and everything he’s ever learned about art and put it into a single photoshop filter. And he gave it to me, on a diskette. I’d … Continue reading
Mandelbrot Among the Gypsies
Mandelbrot Among the Gypsies (2001) Gaston Julia, recovering from injuries caused by a hospital, was named king of the gypsies in 1917. He had darned some socks for corpses and driven a hawthorn stake through his soon-to-be famous set. Much of his initial groundwork was spent decapitating computers on a finite area of the X-Y … Continue reading
uscomic.8bf
I’ve been spending alot of time in my garbage can lately. Never before has it been such a delight to retieve stuff I thought was worthless, even the things stuck to the bottom of the can. I feed them into the uscomic.8bf machine and out comes instant Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery 1960’s vintage … Continue reading
Probe This!!
Neptune Probe (1998) Ganymede Probe (1998) These heavenly bodies are still in good standing after astronomers recently convened to decide who would be voted off the cosmic island. Everyone held its slot in space, and even Xena kicked some Van Allen Butt Belt — everyone except poor elliptical Pluto. Alas, we hardly knew ye. From … Continue reading
The other machine
It sits there, quietly. Unused but waiting. Sometimes while working on the fractal machine, I look over at it. Our eyes meet. I say nothing and return to the fractal machine. Before I discovered fractals my hobby was making seamless background tiles and web graphics in my graphics progam. I made thousands, maybe ten thousand … Continue reading
Fractal Politics
Portrait of George W. Bush (2004) Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.—Theodor Adorno A poem that calls us from the other side of a situation of extremity cannot be judged by simplistic notions of “accuracy” or “truth to life.” It will have to be judged, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said of confession, by its consequences, not … Continue reading
Tugando: the dancing fractal bear
parameter file “bear01.loo” Where is the music? What is the music? It must be jumpy and fast; look at the way he’s dancing. Check out the shoes: He’s a stylish fellow. And that strange flowing white stripe, like a flame, a scarf unfurling from his brain. Hey, he’s got two heads. Cool. In another place,in … Continue reading
Eye of the Beholder?
It may now be said that an object becomes, or fails to become, a work of art in direct response to the inclination of the perceiver to assume an appreciative role.—Victor Burgin, “Situational Aesthetics” Who among us hasn’t wondered why fractal art cannot seem to crack the glass ceiling of broader cultural recognition and gain … Continue reading
Art with Fractals
I’ve been thinking about fractals and art and that’s what I came up with. Like the world’s shortest email message, I have put everything into the subject line and now there’s no need to add any message. Fractal art is commonly labelled “Fractal Art,” which at first glance makes sense, but in a way, I … Continue reading