![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/orbittrap.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/Capture01.jpg?resize=297%2C249\" "\\"Capture01\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Or: Why the Offline Promotion of Fractal Art is a Waste of Time<\/p>\n
Here are 6 reasons:<\/p>\n
There is no such thing as “Great” Fractal Art<\/strong><\/p>\n This is the key problem, really.\u00a0 I didn’t understand this myself until just this past year.\u00a0 Fractal art is a limited medium and it just can’t make the kind of visual imagery that evokes great ideas or makes people stop and reconsider the nature of art itself.<\/p>\n The hopes of the contest organizers is that they will “wow” the offline crowds with something they will recognize as “real art” and start people and the media to take a serious look at fractal art.\u00a0 But they won’t because such works don’t exist and never will.\u00a0 There’s a ceiling to how impressive a piece of fractal art can be and that ceiling is well below the artistic stratosphere of Warhol, Goya, Picasso and even Pollock (yes, even those drip paintings).<\/p>\n Pollock’s drip paintings have historical value and are largely respected for playing a part in freeing the minds of the art world.\u00a0 Pollock was like Columbus discovering the last parts of the world.\u00a0 Covering the same territory today with digital tools doesn’t accomplish the same thing.<\/p>\n The greatest fractal art collection won’t move critics or even the average art fan to suggest that all galleries need a fractal room to be complete and up to date with today’s advances in art.\u00a0 It will catch people’s eye for a little while.\u00a0 That’s what decorative, design artwork does.\u00a0 No one’s going to write a Master’s thesis on a piece of fractal artwork the way many have about Picasso’s Guernica.<\/p>\n Fractal art is too eccentric to appeal to most people<\/strong><\/p>\n I didn’t use to agree with this until I heard Paul Lee say it once somewhere online.\u00a0 Unlike most people in the fractal art world, Paul is trained and experienced with both sides of the fractal art genre; the technical side and<\/em> the art side.\u00a0 I thought about it more seriously when I heard him say it.\u00a0 Actually he said “too abstract” but I think eccentric is a better term.<\/p>\n Sure, we’ve all heard stories of how appreciative people are when they see fractals for the first time and how they marvel at its (genuinely) freaky mathematical origins.\u00a0 If all those people were connecting with fractal art work in a really meaningful way instead of in a merely superficial way then the fractal art world would be enormous by now.\u00a0 To most people fractal art is just eye-candy and it melts in their minds as fast as chocolate does in their mouths.\u00a0 The real aficionados are a statistically small group; weirdos like us.<\/p>\n Fractal art is an attractive but shallow art form that is best appreciated by being exposed to hundreds of works<\/strong><\/p>\n Fractals are a world to be explored and to look at, not a few masterpieces to be studied and “understood”.\u00a0 To have this happen in an art gallery you’d need to have an exhibit of hundreds of images, not a mere 25.\u00a0 And without animation you’ve missed a feature of fractal art that leaves it incomplete, especially in the 3D area.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that printing and framing fractal animations is both financially as well as technically challenging.<\/p>\n Ideally the audience would get to fly the spaceship themselves and not just stand on the ground and look at the pictures.\u00a0 Again, this is not something that an offline gallery is best at, although digital works can be displayed –digitally– in galleries.\u00a0 Of course, seeing how easily fractal imagery can be made might cheapen the masterpieces hanging on the wall in the audience’s mind.\u00a0 But maybe making fractal art is more exciting than viewing it?<\/p>\n Fractal art is created on computers and that is the most natural venue to view it in<\/strong><\/p>\n What a thing to say!\u00a0 But really, sitting in front of a computer is the context in which we make our fractal discoveries and also the venue in which we polish and perfect them.\u00a0 Printing them out can be produce spectacular results but we’d never get to that place if they hadn’t appealed to us in a big way on the computer screen.<\/p>\n As for the rich detail of high resolution printing, so what?\u00a0 You want a closer look?\u00a0 There’s a number of solid technologies for displaying zoomable images on the internet.\u00a0 In fact, I think Damien Jones, one of the BMFAC organizers produced one of his own<\/a>.\u00a0 Ironic, I’d say.<\/p>\n Printing can produce rich images that the computer screen can’t match.\u00a0 It’s almost as if printed images are a genre all their own.\u00a0 But that’s going a little too far.\u00a0 There’s nothing second rate about “monitor art” it’s just a lower resolution and smaller, but that’s the “canvas” on which fractal artists work.<\/p>\n The notion that fractal art is a young and relatively unknown art form with the potential to “go viral” is an old and exhausted excuse that has been repeated over and over again since it really was a young and relatively unknown art form with the potential to “go viral”<\/strong><\/p>\n Fractals aren’t a new thing anymore.\u00a0 Look at all the old people who talk about seeing their first fractal back in the 1980s on the cover<\/a> of Scientific American<\/em>.\u00a0 Look at all the people who claim to have been making fractals for 20 years!\u00a0 Self-programmed on Comodores or Amigas with monochrome monitors and hammered out on dot matrix printers.<\/p>\n Me, I’ve only been around since 2002 but I’ve seen a few things come and go and I can tell you that even the recent 3D fractal surprise has only taken us to new places, no one has found anything categorically new there.\u00a0 The fractal world gets larger and larger with the addition of every new formula, type of formula and rendering method but it doesn’t really go anywhere or advance to a higher level.\u00a0 It’s the same old awesome but strictly ornamental type of imagery all the time.<\/p>\n People know about fractals, they just don’t care.\u00a0 There’s plenty of fringe art forms around; will they captivate you and change your life if one day they have an exhibit in your city?\u00a0 We couldn’t care less about them and they feel the same about us.\u00a0 It’s the law of the conservation of apathy.<\/p>\n Offline art resides in art galleries because it’s not digital, not because that’s the apex of art I can’t help but think that many fractal artists see art galleries in the same way that small town athletes view the Olympic Games.\u00a0 In the words of Frank Sinatra\u00a0 “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, It’s up to you, New York, New York”.<\/p>\n Anyhow, there will be plenty more Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests in the years to come once someone figures out a consistent sponsorship method.\u00a0 The real question is how long will it be before fractal artists realize that they’re already in “New York” and the only place the BMFAC will take them is offline and out of town.<\/p>\n The only thing fractal art lacks today is creativity.\u00a0 The artwork is too tame and domesticated.\u00a0 Contests have never been able to change that.\u00a0 In fact, they seem to encourage it.\u00a0 Institutionalized and anemic artists that seek approval rather than innovation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or: Why the Offline Promotion of Fractal Art is a Waste of Time Here are 6 reasons: There is no such thing as “Great” Fractal Art This is the key problem, really.\u00a0 I didn’t understand this myself until just this past year.\u00a0 Fractal art is a limited medium and it just can’t make the kind … Continue reading
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n