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
Two Prints: Geisha Remix (2012, Left) and Cleopatra Worries Remix (2012, Right). I’ve written before about making prints. I don’t want to rehash what I said previously. However, my thinking has "evolved" a bit since I last opined on the subject in 2009. The photo above shows two prints I recently made to be … Continue reading
Our brains need a vacation. And what could be a better Brain Resort than the electronic paradises of the fractal realm. Here’s a sampler of some of the most interesting fractal scenery and composite images I’ve stumbled upon over the last few months. Although we’ve already arrived at our electronic destination, let’s do the old-fashioned … Continue reading
Yes, fellow patients, and particularly those in the line-up waiting for shock-treatment, we are sometimes gripped by that psychotic condition which I would label, “fractalsport”. What is fractalsport? You know what fractalsport is and are exhibiting its symptoms right now with your attempts to deny it. For those of you whose brains are still effervescing … Continue reading
Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012) [Click on images to view at higher resolution.] The last of three posts about postage. You can skip the short context-setting intro section if you’ve already DVRed this series. If you’ve just wandered in, you might want to bounce back to the previous posts to view the top … Continue reading
Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012) [Click on images to view at higher resolution.] The second of three posts about postage. You can skip the short context-setting intro section if you’ve already DVRed this series. If you’ve just wandered in, you might want to bounce back to the first post to view the top … Continue reading
Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012) [Click on images to view at higher resolution.] This is the first of three posts about postage. The U. S. Postal Service, as part of National Stamp Month, issued a series of Forever stamps entitled Earthscapes. Three rows of five are displayed in the stamp pane seen above. … Continue reading
First, let me explain. I make such a bold statement not because I hate fractals (or fractal artists) but because I love fractals and include myself among the hopelessly deluded. A quaint anecdote I came to this realization in a rather unexpected way: through rediscovering the joy of fractal artistry. For the last year or … Continue reading
I created. I uploaded. I published. [Image seen here.] The so-called "little magazine," or more generic mainstream literary/art journal, has long been a tried-and-true avenue for artists and writers to distribute their work while insuring professional respectability. Why are such publications seen as more artistically credible? Since such journals/magazines are juried (screened or solicited … Continue reading
With 3D printing technology, fractal art can cheaply and easily enter the domain of sculpture. It’s an exciting development and offers the ever dazzling world of fractals another venue in which to capture that proverbial and elusive, “mainstream” audience. Will this be fractal art’s big break or just another demonstration of how hard it is … Continue reading
A Shocking Fractal I have previously written about both fractal fields of lighting and about shocking flowers, but here is an experiment that merges the two topics. A Pratt Institute student, Melanie Hoff, attached cables carrying 15,000 volts to what looks like plywood planks. One would expect the wood to immediately catch fire or … Continue reading
From the developer’s, Tim Day’s site: Fracplanet is an interactive tool for creating random fractal planets and terrain areas with oceans, rivers, lakes and icecaps. The results can be exported as models to POV-Ray and to Blender, or as texture maps for more general usage. The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt … Continue reading
Stop what you’re doing, forget everything you know –and just jump into fractals!
Synthetic. That’s a good word in computer art. You like synthetic things if you like computer art. There’s too much color in this? It looks unnatural? It’s synthetic, just like those chewy fruit candies that don’t really taste like real fruit. They taste better than real fruit. Space age flavours. This image has space age colors. Love it, or the image will delete you. Continue reading
Dave Makin, in a thread over at Fractalforums.com suggested that the mandelbulb deserves more attention: Anyhow, while still shaking my head and wondering (like taurus66 in the quote) why anyone would be interested in that puffy, spiny thing called the mandelbulb, along came someone else, in a completely different thread, posting their marathon session, 6-core … Continue reading
I travel the internet, I make “Viewmarks” of artwork worth reviewing, and sometimes I end up with little scraps of things that I just can’t seem to fit into a proper blog posting. But I keep them around anyhow because they’re food for thought, so to speak; singular ideas with potential. Here are a few … Continue reading
Mosquito eyes. Microscopy courtesy of Oliver Meckes. I first wrote about microscopy on OT back in September of 2009 when discussing Luke Jerram‘s glass sculptures. I said then that microscopy "frequently reveals fractal characteristics in the microcosmic world." Was I ever right. The image gallery at FEI, a company producing high end microscopes, is … Continue reading
DorianoArt has a real talent for mixing fractals with photography and doing it with style. It’s not the typical marriage between earthy fractals and leafy scenery. It’s more like an extraterrestrial romance between mother earth and alien invaders. Despite such a disturbing courtship, the results are quite natural, or rather, quite unnatural, a hybrid landscape, … Continue reading
Back, several postings ago, when I reviewed the latest Fractalforums.com calendar, I heaped abuse on Pauldelbrot’s image from his Mandelbrot Safari series calling it retro and not cutting-edge. The owner of Fractalforums.com and publisher of the calendar, Christian Kleinhuis, informed me that what Pauldelbrot was doing was in fact very cutting-edge as it was utilizing … Continue reading
There’s a theme that binds all these images together but I can’t seem to find the right words for it. Freaky; harmonic; other worldly; sacred symbols; journey into mystery: they all fit for some but not for all. I guess variety is best; with a play on the famous book by Henry James, The Variety … Continue reading
Welcome back, readers, once again to the home edition of the Fractalbook Network’s much idolized game show: Name! That! Comment! Tonight, due to the panic of sweeps week and the fear of ratings slippage, we’ve cobbled together a most prodigious presentation. Our crackhead team of scientologists has scoured cyberspace (and beyond!) to seek out only … Continue reading
Like the elegant orchids and other surface-dwelling plant species called epiphytes, image comments can have a richness and uniqueness that is surprising when one considers their tiny size and extremely casual origin. And also like the epiphytes of tropical forests, comments can become almost as great, collectively, as the underlying tree they’ve attached themselves to, … Continue reading
Death from Above [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] "New aesthetic" visionary James Bridle‘s latest project is Dronestagram –an Instagram feed that posts satellite images tied to U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East and Asia. The feed, according to Bridle, shares a similar purpose with Josh Begley’s Drones+, … Continue reading
Such perfect fractal clouds are too perfect to be real. Photograph by Rüdiger Nehmzow [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] I wrote recently about Google opening their data centers to writers and photographers and thus revealing how fractal the digital cloud looks. Let’s not forget, though, that physical … Continue reading
Arvinder Bawa recently had a showing of his fractal artworks in Laredo, Cantabria, Spain at the Sala Ruas gallery. The poster explains it best: ~Click on images to view full-size on original site~ Arvinder has written an interesting explanation to accompany the exhibit. I like his simple language and layman’s terms: …For the exhibition it … Continue reading
~Click on images to view full-size on original site~ Just a neon sign, cloudy sky and moon, but what a transformation. A number of 3d fractalists refer to having an “architectural style” and here you can really see what’s meant by that term and why it is such a natural one in the world of … Continue reading
Hurricane Sandy’s Fractalscape Renders But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: —T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" A pervasive side effect of working with fractal art is that one begins to develop a heightened sense of fractal pattern recognition. Self-similar forms and recursive … Continue reading
Fractalforums.com’s owner, Christian Kleinhuis (aka Trifox) is attempting to put out another fractal art calendar this year. I reviewed last year’s and called it, “The Best Fractal Calendar Ever!“. I hope that review scored me enough points over there with the Fractalforums.com folks to cover this year’s review. Here’s a brief summary of the discussions … Continue reading
Inside a Google Data Center [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. —Ted Stevens, Former United States Senator … Continue reading
Does it seem that no one has any interest in the old, 2D fractal images anymore? And furthermore, does it seem that since the advent of the 3D fractal craze that there are more fractal artists making interesting work than ever before? I’d answer yes to both those questions. Numerous times while browsing further and … Continue reading
I found his gallery on Flickr during a routine search of the word, “fractal”. I clicked on a couple of unusual looking thumbnails and quickly headed straight to his main gallery page. ~ Click on images to view full-size on original site ~ Ron uses one of the 3D mandelbulb programs but he must be … Continue reading
Hey! Wasn’t Orbit Trap supposed to be closed down? Wasn’t Orbit Trap supposed to be finished with and over and all that sort of thing? Well, let me explain. In short, I got tired of blogging every week and after six years decided it was time to give it a rest. Eight months later I … Continue reading
Orbit Trap is closing down. This is the last and final post you will be reading here. No, this is not a joke. After almost 6 years of continuous weekly and sometimes daily (hourly?) publishing, we, the co-editors of Orbit Trap, Tim Hodkinson and Terry Wright have decided that the blog has run its course … Continue reading
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