May 1999 — Added random fractal methods to Fractal Zplot 1.18.<\/p>\n
June 1999 — completed Fractal ViZion — first version with automatic selection of variables\/options for all fractal types.<\/p>\n
-from the Fractal ViZion help file, Chronology<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wait.\u00a0 He was even ahead of graphical AI because “automatic selection” of fractal parameters is the AI equivalent of a random prompt generator.\u00a0 Gintz’s random function makes you the captain of the starship Enterprise, sitting in your big chair on the bridge and all you have to do is push buttons on his “FV Remote” a floating window controller.\u00a0 Let’s take a look at this wonderful thing I have come to love and enjoy so much:<\/p>\n Fractal ViZion’s remote control, floating window.<\/p><\/div>\n Yes, that’s a video recorder at the bottom.\u00a0 1999 ought to be old, really old for fractal programs, but for me there’s still something cutting edge to Gintz’s programs like this (he made a lot of them).\u00a0 What is cutting edge about this?\u00a0 Random fractal image generation that works and is infinitely fun to work with at various scales.<\/p>\n All those numbers, 1-12 mean something different.\u00a0 It does common fractal types as well as L-systems, Quaternions, Strange Attractors and a few things I’m not sure of.\u00a0 \u00a0Sometimes, as with the L-systems, the drawing can be even more interesting that what is finally rendered –ray traced, too.<\/p>\n I just push the buttons and watch it sort through formulas and then draw something:<\/p>\n Status bar showing the program sorting through formulas, one by one. Sometimes it takes a while. Random thinking can be unpredictable.<\/p><\/div>\n Let’s start the Annual Fractal ViZion Random Renders Santa Claus parade:<\/p>\n All of these images are totally random renders.\u00a0 I haven’t done anything to them except pushed a button on the remote and then save.\u00a0 Obviously I didn’t include everything that was randomly generated.\u00a0 Which brings us to an interesting point: is mere selection of an image from a whole lot of other ones, a creative artistic decision?<\/em><\/p>\n Which then quickly brings us to an interesting point about creativity and art: what on earth do you like about this?<\/em><\/p>\n Well, this (also quickly) brings us to an interesting concept in the study of art:<\/p>\n Random fractals are the ultimate, real-time, Rorschach test.\u00a0 A Rorschach test being those inblot tests that often look like butterflies and were devised as a way to diagnose people’s mental state and condition by what they said they “saw” in the image.\u00a0 People’s minds would pick up on the little subtleties of the abstract inkblot and this would prompt “normal” people to describe normal imaginings while abnormal people would express other things in keeping, it was hoped, of their abnormal psychological state.<\/p>\n One famous artist, Marlene Dumas has stated<\/a> that \u2018All art is essentially a Rorschach test\u2019.\u00a0 Meaning, the viewer’s mind projects meaning into the artwork rather than the artist expressing the meaning through the artwork.\u00a0 By meaning I think they mean, or I would describe it as, “response”.\u00a0 I use a word like that rather than meaning because almost all artwork works very quickly in our minds, it’s more of a response, a reaction, than an interpretation or something rational and thought out.\u00a0 Especially with abstract works which is what fractal formulas generally create.\u00a0 Think: reaction; sensation; response; sense; trigger; prompt; provoke.<\/p>\n What I find interesting about that black and white thing up there… Wait. How do we know what it is we really are thinking?\u00a0 And even if we did, aren’t the thoughts prompted by many kinds of images and imagery, artistic or just ordinary and common, aren’t they often rather hard to describe?\u00a0 Putting our thoughts into words is a real skill most of the time and especially in regard to things like art or whatever you want to call this sort of random image thing.<\/p>\n I think it’s enough to say that art is whatever makes us pause and consider a new and unexpected, but interesting thing.\u00a0 Art perhaps, is simply, anything of interest, in it’s minimal form and things of great, absorbing interest in its maximal form.<\/p>\n Back to the Fractal Rorschach parade:<\/p>\n You will find this type of image quite often in 3d fractals: The Turning Passageway<\/em>.\u00a0 By the way, as you may have noticed, these images aren’t even anti-aliased.\u00a0 I found it blurred things too much and the crisp jagged style had almost an anti-fractal art, retro look to it.\u00a0 Of course, the program is a little retro in some ways.<\/p>\n Note the common coloring to the eyeball thing and the opening portal; they go together, they fit together.\u00a0 On either side you see a passage going away to another place and with another shape and appearance.\u00a0 The more you think, the more you see, in random imagery.<\/p>\n I don’t know where the black frame came from.\u00a0 Maybe Gintz thought of everything: even the frame!\u00a0 It does fit nicely.\u00a0 Framing art is another skill.<\/p>\n I think the most primitive and therefore perennial structure in visual imagery is the concept of a horizon.\u00a0 It suggests land below and sky above and gives an almost unavoidable and instant spatial orientation to the whole image.\u00a0 We then see three symbolic objects buried beneath the ground and a distant horizon and either evening or morning sky — beginning or ending.\u00a0 It suggests to me native myths and animistic traditions of the West.\u00a0 As I mentioned years ago, geometric and symmetrical structures are often used to illustrate religious concepts, which gives fractals a common “spiritual” interpretaton and use.<\/p>\n Another horizon-dominant image.\u00a0 The simplicity (flat, bleak) easily fits a panoramic, Western, interpretation.\u00a0 This time the fractal structure in the sky forming a huge cloud shape in the sky.\u00a0 Note the four little bumps on the horizon; houses? clumps of trees? a little town?\u00a0 or a big tractor? –or all four, in sequence? There is something suggestive of lostness in the little fractal thing in the foreground.\u00a0 It has turned away and given up its attempt to reach the horizon.\u00a0 Or is this just the way things are out here?\u00a0 Everything is just another little weed, blooming where it’s planted, it’s presence known only to those who are present<\/em> with it.\u00a0 A big world of little worlds.<\/p>\n Mandelbrot said that when people look at fractals they often start to see things that are familiar because fractal structures are very common in nature.\u00a0 This reminds me of a Google Map satellite view of places in the Middle East, although the blue river is perhaps a little exaggerated for that locale.\u00a0 The banks of the river, if you look closely, are either orchards (olives?) or vineyards.\u00a0 But what is the big, dark mass in the middle and cutting across the whole image.\u00a0 I don’t know, but it looks like its been there for a long time.\u00a0 My guess is it’s just rough, rocky land that doesn’t have much use.<\/p>\n The Sun made itself cool so he could get himself close to the man.<\/p>\n I didn’t know the Sun could do things like that, the man said.<\/p>\n If you can believe it, no one has ever asked me anything before.<\/p>\n There is really no end to staring at fractal images, and the random ones have a kind of untamed wildness about them that, surprisingly, the human hand can only take away from rather than improve.\u00a0 Raw power, a raw visual power.\u00a0 They are computerized obviously and although best described as abstract, they have a familiar naturalness to them, as Mandelbrot remarked.\u00a0 They are places we’ve never been, but we can still look over the photos and plan our trip.<\/p>\n They are arbitrary and yet very creative and thoughtful –thought out.\u00a0 Sometimes I wonder if the best fractal art is actually the simplest and all the improving and efforts we make to “create art” just show how little we think of the viewer’s ability to appreciate fractal imagery as well as, come to think of it, how little we think of fractal imagery on its own –by it’s own– powers of expression.<\/p>\n Terry Gintz is the Einstein of fractal programming and fractal art, for that matter.\u00a0 Random rendering is a quantum leap over and beyond fractal art.\u00a0 It’s the closest thing there is to a really unique art form in fractal art.\u00a0 I predict people in the future will be more impressed with Fractal ViZion’s random generation feature than anything else the fractal world has done.\u00a0 Nothing else shows the real creative power in fractals like clicking on those buttons in the FV Remote.<\/p>\n I’d post a download link but they all seem to be dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 ViZion — first version with automatic selection of variables\/options for all fractal types. -from the Fractal ViZion help file, Chronology. … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/orbittrap.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fractal-Vizion-Remote.png\")
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n
“Art as Rorschach Test: what you like tells us what’s wrong with you.”<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>“The man who spoke to the Sun”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n