We've Moved! to OrbitTrap.ca

OrbitTrap.ca is our new address. Update your bookmarks and check out the new site!

The Orbit Trap feed is still the same and subscribers don't need to change a thing.

The old site here at Blogger will remain for those who want to browse the archives, but new postings will only be made at the new site, OrbitTrap.ca.

Why did we move Orbit Trap? Well, like any online publishing venture, we've changed and grown over the years and our web hosting needs have become more sophisticated. We need things that Blogger, as wonderful and generous as they've been to us over the years, isn't able to provide.

"Oh?" you say. "What kind of things is big old Blogger not able to provide for tiny little Orbit Trap?"

Well, since you asked, rhetorically, Blogger isn't able to provide us with things like protection from false claims of copyright infringement. For a blog like ours that specializes in comment and criticism of current artwork, the principle of Fair Use as provided for in the Copyright Act is what allows us, or any publication like it, to speak its mind. Fair Use of copyrighted material reflects the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment right to freedom of expression. Fair Use, is a Constitutional right founded on Constitutional principles, not a legal loophole for unsavoury lowlifes to squeeze through.

Some of you reading this may think that Orbit Trap deserves to get muzzled and who cares about such academic things as the Constitution? That wouldn't surprise me because I've seen such attitudes very much alive and well in the way contests and other events are run in the fractal art world. They'd like to see Orbit Trap shut down, but so far all they've been able to do is harass us in minor ways. Fortunately, the Constitution of the United States of America and the U.S. Copyright Act wasn't written by people with such ethical apathy or such a narrow perspective on culture and public commentary. I don't expect any of Orbit Trap's critics to object to the censorship of our blog postings through bogus DMCA complaints.

What is the DMCA? Ask Cornelia Yoder. Ask her how a screenshot of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Winners page, published on the internet, intentionally or not, indexed by Google and used on Orbit Trap for the purpose of reporting on how the contest is run behind closed doors; ask her how it could be considered copyright infringement because it just happens to include a trivial 30x100 pixel thumbnail of one of her images entered in the contest?

It isn't, of course. In fact it's a ridiculous claim because the image represents nothing more than a navigational button in a gallery index. But that's all you need to push the DMCA takedown notice button these days and get the entire blog posting taken offline for a month. Guilty or innocent, it makes no difference, and web hosts like Blogger are caught in the middle, forced to become instant copyright lawyers and chose between becoming part of a lawsuit themselves or to censor their own clients by removing entire blog postings without consulting the author.

I guess it's a clear indication of how desperate our critics are to have Orbit Trap silenced that they've taken up such sleazy tactics as this.

So where does Orbit Trap go from here? Stay tuned. That is, change your bookmarks to OrbitTrap.ca, and stay tuned!

Keith Mackay's Revisionist History

"It was already dead, so I didn't see any point in keeping it around."

One of the few extant group blogs on fractal art got its plug pulled recently. This was no surprise since the wedream(ed)incolor blog, run by Keith Mackay, had been on life support for some time. In fact, Tim wrote an OT post about its terminal condition not long before Mackay decided to play Dr. Kevorkian with it. In an October 10th post on his personal blog, Mackay explains why he finally swung the axe. And, naturally, he goes out of his way to sketch out why his actions were far more preferable than the "unethical" steps taken by an unnamed blog that can only be Orbit Trap:

I deleted everything on wedreamincolor because I felt that it was the right thing to do. A few years ago I was part of a fractal based community blog that fell apart when the blog owners started to personally attack some of the other members. The owners cut off write and edit access to the 20 or so members but hung on to all of the images and entries that the members had made. I thought that it was terribly unfair and unethical for the blog owners to do that. With all of their contributions, the cut off members provided significant readership and momentum to that blog. It would be akin to a place like DeviantArt removing write and edit access to their members, but hanging on to all of their images and journal entries. That would piss off a lot of people. It certainly pissed me off when that blog did that to me, so I decided to not do that to the contributors of wedreamincolor.

Mackay, as usual, is not telling you the whole story. It has always been Orbit Trap's policy to remove any post should a contributor request we do so. Mackay knows this to be true from first-hand experience. He wrote us to insist his OT posts be removed, and Tim and I promptly deleted them. To date, Mackay is the only former contributor to make such a request. I'll say again, just so there is no misunderstanding: If you are a former Orbit Trap contributor, and you want any of your posts removed from this blog, email OT's editors, and we will quickly see that your wish comes true. However, you should be aware of the following implications: 1) Deletion of posts cannot be undone. You want it gone? It's gone for good. 2) Deletion of a post also deletes all comments for that post. I'm not sure how those good folks who took the time to comment on your writing will feel about wiping them out of existence. Still, OT feels it's your post, and thus your call. 3) If your post is a response to other posts, then the context or reference point(s) your post provides will be kaput. You may be giving rhetorical ground and creating a vacuum in argumentation where your point of view once provided a counter balance to the views of others. And 4) Visitors peruse OT's archives every day. If you don't want ongoing attention to your images and writing, just let us know.

So, given our policy, why does Mackay feel he is morally justified to criticize us about keeping posts online? Did he go out of his way to ask his blog's contributors if they wanted their posts (and the effort that went into making them) taken down? Remember, too, such excision means all the post's comments are expunged as well. Didn't his contributors (and commenters) have the presumption when posting that their work would remain online? Why should Mackay's contributors suffer because he goes into a melancholy funk and decides to scorch earth his blog? Really, though, this is typical, impulsive, slash and burn behavior from Mackay. How many times has he capriciously trashed then rebuilt his various Fractalbook galleries? I've lost count.

And he claims the happy family, kumbaya, group blog days is when OT had momentum? Somebody hasn't been reviewing OT's stats to properly keep score. Feed subscriptions and readership has increased at least tenfold since OT scrapped its initial group blog format. Mackay has everything backwards. OT did not succeed because we initially had so many "great" fractal artists on board; we succeeded in spite of that fact. The growth in OT's readership took place after we junked what Tim likes to call the "community limbo" phase of OT. I suppose Mackay can be forgiven for assuming that gathering together a collection of so-called "prestigious" fractal artists would be the best way to get the community interested in our blog. Tim and I thought so, too -- at first. It wasn't until we changed the blog's format that we discovered that OT's readers wanted something else -- something they weren't getting from their Fractalbook forums and UF List threads. That is: honest, opinionated criticism. They didn't want another venue where artists went on talking about themselves. They'd had enough of the mutual admiration society where every post elicits the compulsory "Another Masterpiece," suck-up, bargaining chip, you-scratch-my-back remark that must be repaid in kind somewhere down the comment chain. Instead, readers want a direct, critical perspective -- something the fractal community never engages in. Even if OT's readers did not always agree with us, they at least appreciated our plainspoken bluntness. For example, if we feel a fractal contest is crooked, we say so -- and we do our best to outline and illustrate the facts and behaviors that lead us to formulate such an opinion.

But Mackay would have you believe we have been unethical for not following his model example -- an example that collapsed into epic fail mode. What Mackay doesn't want to face is that his warm fuzzy group blog couldn't generate much interest outside its own narcissistic, insular crowd. Like the small pond insiders on the UF List. Like the back-slapping shut-ins inhabiting Fractalbook arenas. Like the cowards who falsely flatter others to ingratiate themselves and worm their way into the good graces of any fractal artist presumably having status and power. Ironically, Mackay's blog had some of the very same contributors who once cranked out a few-and-far-between post on OT during its salad days. So I have to ask. Why is he now chiding us for not following the very same framework that resulted in his blog's slow death?

Then again, I'm not all that surprised that Mackay shredded every post from wedream(ed)in color. After all, that's what's done when you don't want anyone to see the record of what you've actually done

***

UPDATE: Keith Mackay has responded to this post here by reanimating a few limbs of his dead (now undead?) group blog apparently for the sole purpose of answering OT and notes that

No one should ever answer to [Orbit Trap] for anything.

which, paradoxically, does seem more than a little like answering to us for something.

~/~

Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, keith mackay, keith mackay's revisionist history, wedreamincolor, wedream(ed)incolor, orwell sez failure is success, cruelanimal, orbit trap

Sailing into the Horror

The Garbage Path by Guido Cavalcante

[Click on the image above to see a large-scale version.]

Editor's Note: This is a guest posting by Guido Cavalcante. His image was made using Ultra Fractal. Excerpts in this post were taken from "Our Oceans Are Turning into Plastic...Are We?" by Susan Casey. For more information about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, please see this post at RTSea blog. The current print edition of Rolling Stone also has an excellent article on the floating plastic mass: "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" by Kitt Couchette. To illustrate the severity of plastic debris polluting the world's oceans and waterways, Couchette notes: "On British coastlines in the North Sea, a study of fulmars found that 95 per cent of the seabirds had plastic in their stomachs, with an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds."

Orbit Trap welcomes guest posts on fractal art topics. Query the editors using the email link in the sidebar.

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The facts happened twelve years ago.

It was August 3, 1997. A sunny day with little wind, Captain Charles Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert -- a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

Map of the gyre. The blue square represents one study of the garbage patch.

[Click on the image above to see a large-scale version.]

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? As the Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

The memory excerpts above of the first encounter with the Garbage Patch remain one of the most terrible discoveries of the century. My image tries to represent the surprise of the horror. I think it is the first time the Patch has been graphically represented, except for photos. For those that want to read the six page description which leads me into the adventure of making an image tied with the reality, it is here:

--Guido Cavalcante

~/~

Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, guido cavalcante, the garbage path, great pacific garbage patch, captain charles moore, sailing into the horror, orbit trap

Force 10 from Navarone!

In keeping with the Phase 2 idea that the essence of fractal art is found in the imagery and not in the tools that made it, I present a mixed bag of things I found while taking the paths less traveled, or never traveled, to find fractal art.  I followed a number of categories during my search on Flickr, mainly the New Abstract Vision Group.  Ironically, I found this a better path to take than the more orthodox and straight forward strategy of simply searching on the word, "Fractal".  I think they're all interesting; whether they're all fractal is a matter of argument and I present them here as food for thought.  None of them would look out of place in any fractal art gallery, that is, with the exception of the tree stump, which at first might be considered a joke, but only once one recognizes that the outer edges of this apparently inverted formula are covered --in bark.

(Click on the images or text links to see larger views and links to similar work by the artists on Flickr.)

Untitled by Segozyme, 2009

Just a spiral, but how many fractal images can we list that serve no other purpose than to be such simple laboratory specimens upon which experiments in rich, ornate rendering textures and colors are conducted?  It's all in the surface texture which in places resembles the pitted surface of the moon and in others resembles expensive suede leather.  I've always thought that spirals were the still lifes of fractal art and this one's a fine example.

Aztec by Manas Dichow, 2008

Manas Dichow is a fractal artist I've reviewed before.  He uses Ultra Fractal, and I think it was from a comment to this image in his Flickr gallery that I got started on the New Abstract Vision Group's Flickr gallery.  I found this image to be a good example of the complex juxtaposition found in fragmented images of micro/macro and detail/panorama and if it caught the eye of a member of that Flickr group then I thought I ought to see what else they've collected.  Of course, from a fractal perspective this image is just a sierpinski triangle variation with simple coloring and not the sort of thing you'd expect much from.  But Manas, like most good fractal artists, seems to excel at the use of simple formulas to make surprisingly interesting and artistically engaging work.  Very creative.

101100111 by jj1236

Although it's really not all that apparent, this image is a painting.  At first I wasn't sure as I've seen a lot of sophisticated rendering that creates paintbrush textures like this.  As far as it's fractal qualities go, doesn't it have the proliferating, vegetative look that many fractal programs easily produce?  If I had to guess the rendering, I'd probably say it was a Stalk method.  But it's a painting and if you're interested you ought to check out similar ones in jj1236's gallery.

P by -P-, 2007

Nice title eh?  I'd go even further in the alliterative exercise on the letter P and point out the Purple.  Another spiral, but what a strangely proportioned one and with such neonic (neon like) coloring.  I think there's a Party going on down there.  I don't know why I like this one so much.  I think it's the Paul Klee-like shape and style to the spiral and also the fact that it's quite tastefully presented and not over-layered and stuffed full of distracting elements --simple and strong.  Who would dare to make such a simple and bold spiral?  -P- would.  He even made it his avatar.  That's Perfect!

treestump C905 by Ian's Art, 2009

Well, I tipped you off to this one in the intro so you knew it was a tree stump.  The title's not too subtle, either.  I just find that the shape, the patterns in it, and the je ne sais quoi of fractal art is evident.  Apparently Ian thought it was a work of art too, so there's another vote.  Does this mean the lumberjack who cut down the tree was a fractal artist?  I can just see the lumberjacks discussing technical matters during a smoke break, "Sven, I'm tired of cutting on the usual plane.  I'd like to experiment with 1/mu today."

Untitled by Segozyme, 2009

Hmmn... I suspect that Segozyme might have used this same spiral formula up top there in the first image.  This one was either layered in order to incorporate the background, or some filtering took place to produce that orange powdered texture on the iron spiral.  A lot of attention in the fractal world is paid to such details as surface texture and it's also quite common to compose the background from completely unrelated imagery.  Why not do both?  We often work hard to get a realistic, photographic appearance in digital work.  Why not just import everything?  If you want to end with photo-realism, why not start with photo-realism?  That's a guaranteed method.  Nice work, Segozyme.

Untitled by Phantom Blot, 2009

Funny, you'd expect a two-headed mandelbrot to look both ways before crossing the road, but this one didn't.  If you had to guess how this image was made, what would you say?  I've seen fractal art like this.  Actually, this is an even better example.  One of the unofficial jobs of artists is to challenge our comfortable ideas about art by putting a frame around ordinary objects or objects that we would normally disqualify from the category called art.  Only then can we be tricked into seeing the beauty of that foreign object which the artist, being more observant than the average viewer, has already detected.  We often see what we expect to see.  The human mind just works that way.  I think this is a photograph of an old plaster wall.  But that could be a trick.

Solder by Howard J Duncan, 2009

When you suspect everything of being frameless art then you have learned something, I think.  We praise avante garde artists because they have shown us new kinds of art; they have shown us something which was always there, but we just couldn't see it before because either we've never looked in that sort of place before or we didn't expect it and our eyes just glided over that sort of thing.  When they put a frame around it, it helps us to focus our attention and see in a gallery what they were able to see --in the wild.  I like this one because it's impossible to tell whether it's a deliberate creation or something resulting from the accidental and random effect of natural decay.  One's mind becomes a hung jury wanting to both release the defendant and restore them to a place of dignity and honor, and yet, at the same time to see them capitally punished to such a degree that time itself will be reversed and their evil deed erased from very soil of the Earth.  I'll let you cast the deciding vote.

Tidal by Howard J Duncan, 2009

Perhaps you are thinking that I have become a big fan of (my goodness, this artist has a real name!) ...of Howard Duncan?  Actually, I just looked at the artwork and bookmarked what l thought was interesting as I surfed the Flickr galleries.  I was quite surprised when I wrote all this up and discovered that three of the ten were by the same artist.  It ought to happen more often, but it doesn't seem to; I find many fractal artists have one or two interesting works and about a hundred that are, to put it nicely, "in progress".  Rich surface texturing and a strange flow of --solid-- shapes  makes for a dynamic sort of abstract image that changes its shape the more you look at it.  I wonder if that was intentional?

Bias by Howard J Duncan, 2009

This has got to be a fractal.  That is, the kind made in a fractal program.  I've never seen these thread-like intersections in any other kind of imagery.  But, honestly, I'm guessing because as you can see for yourself by clicking the link, there's no information in Howard's Flickr gallery to indicate how, or with what, it was made.  Even the image tags only list Digital, abstract, bias and hypothetical.  Hypothetical is an interesting term for fractal art.  This image as anyone can see, is quite simple.  In fact it's really made up of a tiny and probably minor rendering detail of a much larger fractal image, but shows how one can sometimes be creative with even those sorts of things.  Interestingly, this obviously fractal image is probably the least fractal of all the ones I've presented here, in my mind.  One could easily draw such things in a paint program and the grainy background is most likely a simple graphical (noise) effect.  Fractal art is much easier to define and describe when you focus on the finished artwork and not the tools.

Well, I hope you've been as challenged by these fractals ("genuine artificial" or otherwise) as I've been.  Removing the software bias from the definition of fractal art I think will make the genre both more meaningful as well as more creative.  At the very least, it will force people to look at fractal art more closely.  And that's always a good thing when it comes to art.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, Flickr galleries, phase two, spirals, sierpinski,

Dan Wills: Fractal Columbus

halleyDetailTwoPointNine... by Dan Wills, 2008
-Click for larger view-

Like a needle in a haystack, or a glowing needle in a fractal formula, is the rumor of a continent over the horizon or the possibility of some new and intriguing fractal artwork out there, somewhere, on the internet.  My impression after browsing over Dan Wills' Picasa web gallery is that he's someone who excels in searching out new kinds of fractal imagery.

All done in Ultra Fractal, Dan's artwork stands out from the usual UF type of artwork in it's pure fractal simplicity.  This is fractal art in it's most authentic and engaging presentation --snapshots from a New World.

butterflyPhoenixDoubleNova... by Dan Wills, 2008
-Click for larger view-

This second image I chose for it's naturalistic look and for the subtle, but impressive coloring.  You can really see here the wide variety of fractal forms and seemingly endless unique details to be explored.  I don't know why more UF artists don't produce work like Dan has done here.  Maybe they need a Columbus to tell them it's there first?  Well, let's continue our voyage...

The next image I found to be really something worth writing home about.  It's from his superpositions collection (the first one was from the ultraEpsilon, and the second from the butterflyLaces).  The hazy appearance to all the images like this one add a realistic touch, and in a 3D sort of way.  The Julia things look like they've been frozen into the larger fractal shapes.  It's an interesting mix of what you'd expect to be very standard, even dull, fractal themes but yet the result is a new hybrid thing --a super positioning, as the gallery title suggests.

butterflyPhoenixDoubleNova... by Dan Wills, 2007
-Click for larger view-

Is work like this too simple to be worth drawing people's attention to?  Or, rather, is it too fractal for most people in the fractal world today?  We can add photo-imagery and luscious, de-luxious, rendering layers and create ever grander and more lavish recipes, but none of that beats plain old, hard-core, fundamentalist fractal imagery.  Why work like this has sat in obscurity like it has is yet another testimony to how new and still growing the fractal art form is.

butterflyPhoenixDoubleNova... by Dan Wills, 2008
-Click for larger view-

This one ought to be enough to start a whole new legend of El Dorado.  They're out there.  Maybe you can track down Dan and beg him to give you a copy of his treasure map, that coveted parameter file, that made this image.  Nice coloring.  Subtle, but attractive and still natural looking.  Another good example of the complexity of "ordinary" fractal art.

I expect to see more work like this, simple and powerful --spawn of the math-machine-- fractal wonders.  And it won't be because it's promoted or given Olympic gold medals.  More will be created because there's plenty more New Worlds out there beyond the horizon and artists like Dan Wills and others will gladly go there, even in obscurity, and bring back snapshots to the Old World because it's just a natural thing for them to do --explore.  Fractal art is like that.

Technorati Tags: fractals, fractal art, Dan Wills, exploration, digital art, Ultra Fractal,

Meanwhile, back at the Academy...

lesson_2_atmosphere_isolation_for_janet
Click to Enlarge

I found this in the Student Galleries section of the Visual Arts Academy.  There's no name or date but it's filed in the Ultra Fractal Artistry section of the gallery, a course given by Janet Parke.

I like this.  In fact, I fished it out of all the student works there as the one that appealed to me the most.  However, I should mention that most or all of the works there are probably produced for specific course assignments and to demonstrate competency of the course material, so it's not the standard sort of online gallery.

This is a fine example of a number of things.  For one it shows how the complex graphical features of UF can be used to compose interesting artwork that would be eye-catching in any venue, fractal or non-fractal, or even online or off.  The image is really indistinguishable from any abstracted landscape painting found in a traditional gallery.  Although details often change when viewing digital artwork at differing levels of resolution and size and also when produced as prints, what I can see in this image is a darkened, moonlit, landscape barren of features and yet very expressive in a surrealist way.

If the purpose of this course was to teach artistry, then I'd say the student has learned something or at least polished whatever they already had.  But perhaps teaching artistry in the context of a program like UF which has so many user-controlled graphical functions is much easier and also much more necessary as its features allow the user to work with fractals the way one would work with photos in Photoshop.  UF is a program designed to give artists creative control of imagery; to paint with fractals in the sense, as I mentioned, artists work on photographic imagery in Photoshop.

UF is a program that enables a wide range of conventional digital artistry.  It's natural then to teach a course on how to use those conventional layering and masking features in the context of fractal generated imagery just like the example I've selected here.  I'm quite curious to see what sort of influence these online courses at VAA have on the development of fractal art.  I really think that regardless of the instructor's personal artistic preferences and whether they fit with the student's own, one can only hope to gain something of value from instruction even if it's only a better technical use of their tools.

Back in High School art class, our art teacher's taste in art seemed to focus on gardens and other forms of colorful foliage.  Not the sort of thing that appeals to iconoclastic teenagers, but we learned a lot about composition, design, color, and the importance of developing a personal style.  The teacher never expected anyone to imitate what she did, and I don't think any of us angry young artists did, although some of us did gain a greater respect for the fabric, wax and dye medium called Batik.  Man, she made one almost three stories tall!

Are there some similarities in this student work to Janet Parke's own style?  I suppose, in a general way, perhaps the color scheme and flowing, folded shape of the structures in the image, although these are becoming fairly common choices in UF work these days.  But there's a harsher grittiness to the student's image and a significantly more saturated, less muted tone to the colors that makes for a very different mood.  I'd say the style is quite different, although, like I said, such details can be distorted by changes in image size and as we all know, in UF, image size can be pretty big.  It's quite possible that the image we're looking at is a mere thumbnail of what the instructor and the student were viewing for the purposes of their coursework.

By Helmut Tarnick, XenoDream Introduction Course
Click to Enlarge

People often go nuts with XenoDream and try to concoct all sorts of creative, but confusing images.  And they're almost always made of brightly shining gold or silver that looks just too clean and shiny to be real, not to mention it's use, in flowing liquid form, spashing about in impossible ways.  So what I like about this one by Helmut Tarnick for Joseph Presley's XenoDream course is the relatively simple yet appealing shape he's used and the tasteful and realistic steel surface he's given it that allows me to study the image without having to put on sunglasses.

Interestingly, the larger image you'll see on the Student Gallery page by clicking on the image or caption, looks less photographic than this smaller version I've used here.  Realistic surface texture is easier to do in lower resolutions obviously.  But I'd check out such technical things with Professor Presley before you go saying that on the final exam.  Why should the iteration of such a simple piece of metal look so appealing?  It's a fractal thing, I guess.  The self-similarity and ever expanding number of pieces at lower scales just naturally captures our attention when done tastefully like this.  Also, there are simple, but intriguing patterns to be seen if you study the image carefully to find the juxtaposition of the same element repeated at differing scales --a basic fractal characteristic.  Overall; a very skillful and artistic use of XenoDream's capabilities.  Maybe Helmut will be teaching his own course one of these days?

That's it for my perusal of the Student Galleries at the Visual Arts Academy.  You might want to consider taking a course there someday.  Or perhaps you might want to consider teaching one yourself; their home page says they're looking for qualified instructors.  Think of all the talented students you might end up teaching.

Sheets in the Wind and Rings of Gold: The Ultra Fractal Style

Whether you're a fractal artist or simply just a fan of fractal art, you're bound to eventually notice similarities in style and develop preferences for this kind of art or that kind of art. Fractal art is still what I would consider to be something of a niche art form, but thanks to the internet, enough of it has been created and displayed that one can start to see styles emerging.

The most obvious style to anyone observing fractal art today is what I would call the Ultra Fractal Style. It's more than simply art that is made with the popular program Ultra Fractal now in it's fifth version; the UF Style focuses on the enhancement of basic fractal imagery by constructing, through the use of graphical layering, images with very elaborate structure and detailed surface texture. The UF style has pioneered a movement away from simple fractal forms in favor of images that rival the most complex creations of popular graphics programs like Photoshop.

While most fractal enthusiasts have eagerly adopted this style and some have even categorized their artwork as Before Ultra Fractal and After Ultra Fractal, I see this style as more of an abandonment of fractals as an art form than an enhancement of it. While not all artists utilizing the powerful programming and layering features of UF produce work that would fall into the category, UF Style, most artists using the program lean heavily on the program's graphical rendering powers and make little effort to explore the fractal side of the art form.

Two recent fractal artworks, both of them winners in the BMFAC of recent years, exemplify what I would describe as the UF Style. The first is by Dave Makin, entitled Theme Park 2 and was a winner in last year's contest. The second by Nada Kringels, And how is your husband Mrs. Escher, a winner in the 2006 contest.


Sheets in the Wind


Rings of Gold

I've labeled them Sheets in the Wind and Rings of Gold because those are the best descriptions I can think of to summarize the kind of imagery that characterizes the UF Style and these two images are some of the finest examples of it in addition to being familiar to many people in the fractal art world because of their presence in past BMFAC exhibits. These two images have met with critical success and therefore represent not only the artist's own preferences in fractal art, but the confirmation of those preferences in the larger fractal art world itself by their selection in the contest.

I think if one reflects, even just a little, on what they see displayed on the internet as fractal art, they will see that most of it falls into this UF Style category and the epitome of it is work, like this, that features not fractal forms but rather the slick rendering powers of this cutting edge graphical program. It's not the fault of the program, and similar results can be achieved with other fractal programs or with other software combinations, it's just that most fractal artists today have fractal art all backwards.

Their approach is backwards; rather than first seeking out an interesting fractal form and enhancing it graphically, they start with some mediocre fractal form, or several, and then try to make it interesting by, literally, layering it with gold or tweaking the colors to produce some attractive piece of fluttering fabric. I see this in both these images. Rings of Gold at least exhibits some recursive pattern, although the pattern, without the gold, is not significantly interesting. Sheets in the Wind is, at best, a borderline fractal image and would only suggest a fractal origin if viewed in another context, such as, a collection of Photoshop artworks, because the image is abstract and reasonably complex enough that it would have required some sort of computational help, a fractal program perhaps? Why either of these images were chosen to be part of an exhibition to introduce people to fractal art says something about today's fractal art world and it's own view of itself.

It's cliche. I don't just mean that it's popular. Although popularity can create cliches, cliches arise because of a lack of new, innovative ideas. Those new, innovative ideas can also in turn become cliche, but only if the art form loses it's creative force and stops developing. (And what would that look like?)

Dave and Nada are making artwork that I believe they truly enjoy and as I've suggested, their winning spots in the BMFAC shows that they are not alone in pursuing this UF Style of work. The judges, as shown by their selection of Dave and Nada's work consider it to be exceptional and worthy of distinction in their contest. So my real criticism of the UF Style is not with any of the artist's that make it --that's their personal preference in art. My real criticism of the UF Style is how it's come to be critically accepted. First off, it's only weakly fractal; and secondly, it's visual attraction is almost entirely based on slick looking computer imagery effects which, honestly, might have excited an audience back in the early 90s, but which now are found in almost every television show or advertisement. If they think this sort of thing will wow the average person on the street who they're trying to introduce to fractal art, they're mistaken.

Fractals have a lot of artistic potential and a kind of imagery that easily captivates most people regardless of whether they understand the mathematics behind them or not. But the UF Style of artwork resembling Sheets in the Wind and Rings of Gold isn't like that at all. It's cliche and it's hung on this long because nowadays most fractal artists prefer to tweak mediocre work to perfection rather than experiment with fractals. If they want to make that sort of thing, that's fine, it's their artistic choice, but giving it awards and presenting it as the best in fractal art just makes us all look stupid.

Technorati Tags: fractals, fractal art, UF Style, Ultra Fractal, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, Art Criticism, Digital Art, Obama's Birth Certificate,

The Damien M. Jones Fractal Art Contest

"I'm the decider!"

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
--Lord Acton

The recent revelatory leak that a pre-sorted "winners page" was being built by the director of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest leads to an inescapable conclusion. The competition is indeed a one man show. The director, Damien M. Jones, appears to be playing the role of sole gatekeeper. It looks like Jones not only screens all entries, he also classifies them, thus sending tacit signals to the BMFAC judging panel as to exactly where various entries should be placed. The BMFAC judges are strawmen; they don't select so much as shuffle, like an iPod, material that's been pre-ordained for them by Jones. If your entry doesn't get past his initial sorting, you're out. Once that happens, Benoit Mandelbrot, the honorary chair of the contest, won't get the chance to pass judgment on your work, nor, for that matter, will the rest of the selection panel. In fact, Mandelbrot, the esteemed mathematical theorist and fractal pioneer for whom the contest is named, is merely a figurehead, a kind of trophy wife who looks good fronting the contest but has little to do in the actual selection process. The contest should therefore be renamed for the individual who plays the god-like role of deciding which entries live or die. BMFAC should more appropriately be called The Damien M. Jones Fractal Art Contest. After all, that's what it truly is.

It wasn't enough to load the judging panel with Ultra Fractal enthusiasts, including coders, teachers, apologists, and even the UF author himself. It wasn't enough to rig the rules by calling for massive file sizes that only a program like Ultra Fractal can easily handle. It wasn't even enough to hand many of the judges a back door pass key enabling them to display their own work in a (supposedly) juried competition they themselves oversaw. No. These incredible conflicts of interest, examples of UF privileging, and self-serving publicity stunts, were all contrived to radically skew BMFAC to heavily showcase exactly the kind of work that Jones and his UF paisanos produce and to hold up their style as rigorously judged, if not the epitome of our art form.

Astoundingly, none of that elaborate wrangling was enough. Apparently, BMFAC's director and judges and sponsors still needed an ace in the hole. So, Jones, devoted to the interests of Ultra Fractal deeply enough to write this article, took it upon himself to insure that only work he approved of would be pre-approved for the already UF-inclined panel. With this final step, the deck would be fully stacked.

How else is one to interpret what Tim stumbled into last week when the "winners page" opened as he linked to it while drafting an OT essay. We've already shown in our last few posts why the "test page" theory put forth on the UF List won't fly. The winners page was based on a template from the 2007 contest. It worked fine then, and a test, if even necessary, could have been made by importing a single image. Why test with so many images from current 2009 entries meticulously titled, identified by artist, and, most significantly, classified into three categories? Furthermore, if the "winners page" was only a test, then why were two additional entries added after I posted the screen caps last Thursday? That's not testing. That's sorting.

Tim referred, probably with some sarcasm, in his last post to the "official response" to the leak. Of course, Jones won't talk to Orbit Trap directly, but he did issue an explanation of sorts on the Ultra Fractal Mailing List, housed on Jones' own server. It seems he's only comfortable talking within the walls of his own fortress among friendlies who'll provide a chorus of nods to his every proclamation. Since the UF List is a public forum, though, here is what he offered by way of an explanation for the "winners page" leak:

Indeed, no winners have been selected and any page purporting to have them is an error.

I did indeed duplicate the 2007 site in prepping the 2009 site, and neglected to include a check on the winners.php page to see if the winners had actually been selected. Since that winners.php page isn't actually linked from the main page of the site and the contest site configuration is still set to accept submissions, for the page to even appear is a bug (now fixed), and for anyone to find it they had to go looking for it--essentially, low-grade hacking. Digging for dirt, as it were. It's embarrassing for me to have missed this check, but it should be equally embarrassing for any would-be critic to try to manufacture issues where there are none.

The contest is still open until the 10th and the winning entries have not been determined.

Note that Jones admits building the page. The "bug" was merely that the page was "live" and visible. Think for a moment. What kind of a check would have been in place "to see if the winners had actually been selected"? Isn't Jones aware of the material he's consciously placing on his own page? The page isn't self-aware; Jones is the one positioning those entries into the various slots that serve as signposts for where he feels the second rounders should be situated. And he has done all of this with no input whatsoever from BMFAC's other judges. Kerry Mitchell, a judge, made clear on the UF List last Thursday that the panel had not yet convened. Even if the winners have yet to be finalized, Jones' hunting and gathering of entries is laying out his own picks for the judges' commendations. The only thing being "manufactured" here is Jones' evasion.

And this, you understand, is the best case scenario for what's going on. For all we know, Jones could be making all of the final selections in advance, and the BMFAC judging panel merely rubber stamps the director's choices. Maybe you fall in line or Jones doesn't ask you back for the honor of "judging" the next contest. Given BMFAC's history of secrecy, how can anyone be certain what's what?

This entire process, mirrored, as Tim pointed out last post, by the recently deceased Fractal Universe Calendar, is completely backward. In a conventional literary contest, screening is done by a panel who sends a pool of finalists to one judge. However, let's be clear: These finalists are never categorized with pre-assigned preferences. BMFAC puts the sorting in the hands of one enormously powerful person and allows him to recommend final placement. A better comparison could be made to the art contests run by the Museum of Computer Art. MOCA makes all entries instantly available for public view. Anyone, including the judges, can visit the online museum anytime during a competition to review the entries. Once the deadline passes, then the judges convene, discuss, cast votes, and select a modest field of artists who placed or received honorable mentions. This seems fair and well handled to me. BMFAC, on the other hand, operates in buttoned-down stealth mode with the director having a heavy hand over who makes the grade.

I mean, seriously, what else could Jones have possibly been doing but weeding out and pre-slotting entries? He has yet to explain exactly what kind of "prepping" he was undertaking. He'd rather transfer blame to OT for accidentally uncovering his chicanery. We were "hacking," you see, so that obviously excuses whatever sieving of entries Jones was tackling. However, I'm a little unclear as to how one can hack a page that is viewable to anyone who surfs to it. Tim stumbled onto the page while writing a draft for a post about tired fractal art. He thought it might be funny to link to the 2009 winners page that would have a similar URL to the previous contests. He expected to see nothing, or maybe one of Jones' chiding bandwidth theft messages once popular on Fractalus. To Tim's amazement, the "winners page" materialized. This is hacking? We put up a link to the page on OT, a link that was active for almost 24 hours. I imagine many of our readers visited that link, now down and appearing as a "security error." Did any of you who used it have to hack in to see it? The link was so public, in fact, Google actually indexed it. The hacking charge is absurd, or, worse, a lie. Even if it were true, Jones has yet to convincingly explain why current entries were being sorted into categories before the judging panel had yet to convene.

The question for fractal artists everywhere is whether you are comfortable having the public perception of our art form so powerfully entrenched in the hands of one person -- a person who, by his decisions and actions, has shown a repeated pattern of bias and preferential treatment that continually benefits himself, his friends, his loyalists, and his software of choice. Fractal art, and all that it is and can be, is not his personal property. It belongs to all of us -- absolutely...

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Update: My bad. I corrected a cut and paste typo leading to a garbled sentence at the end of the second paragraph.

Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, the damien m jones fractal art contest, damien m jones, the decider, it's good to be the king, cruelanimal, orbit trap

Is the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest Run Like the Fractal Universe Calendar?

How is the judging actually done?

I've always assumed that in order to give every submission an equal chance of winning, the judges independently viewed the submissions and then chose the ones that they thought ought to be included in the exhibition. The choices of all the judges would then be tabulated and the images ranked according to the number of votes received. The top 15 or 25 would become the Winners and then coming next in rank, the Alternates, and subsequently the Honorable Mentions, images that had some artistic merit that distinguishes them from bulk of the other submissions but aren't strong enough to be winners. (It's important to point out that only the Winners form the real exhibition. Alternates and Honorable Mentions are merely categories made up for display on the Contest website.)

Although I've always been a little skeptical about how such a cozy little group of judges like that of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest would really function behind closed doors, and how it's unlikely that the judging would be fair and treat all submissions equally, I'm now asking more pointed questions and suggesting much clearer conclusions because the recent Winners Page leak suggests to me a judging process that definitely does not give all submissions an equal chance of winning. I think the Winners Page that I accidentally stumbled upon was nothing short of a sorting page used to whittle down the submissions and produce a much abbreviated selection of entries which would then become the real contest entries that the judge's would see. This is just what the editors of the Fractal Universe Calendar used to do for Avalanche Publishing. The editors screened the submissions and would pass on to the publishers at Avalanche what they thought were the better images to chose from. This would spare the publishers the job of weeding out all the mediocre stuff so they could then concentrate entirely on what the "editors" regarded as the more serious contenders. Orbit Trap called this screening process judging as the screeners determined what the publishers would see and would not see. A rather influential position to have because no submission made it any further than an editor's desk unless they judged it was worthy enough to do so.

The official response to this Winners Page leak has been typical of the sort of thing that Orbit Trap has encountered for quite some time from both these secretive entities, the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest and the (now defunct) Fractal Universe Calendar: Questions shrugged off, claims of technical difficulties, and then ironically told that we know nothing about how their contest really operates, as if that is supposed to be some sort of "clarification". And of course, stir in a few insults, sprinkled with Official Annoyance, and you've got the same old recipe they've used every time we raise questions about the way they work.

Here's how I think it works, based on the evidence we've seen. It's very simple. The Director screens the incoming submissions looking for three grades of artwork: Winners; Alternates; and Honorable Mentions. Everything not selected by the Director at this stage doesn't advance any further. It will get added to the entries page but as far as the contest goes, it's all over for those for whom the Director frowns upon.

The next step I figure comes right after the contest submission period ends. The judges are notified right away by email that the Director's picks are available for them to view. It's available right away because the Director has been building it while the submissions have been coming in (that's the page I stumbled onto, and in fact, later on, two more images were added to the Honorable Mentions category). The judges have to login to view this page because they don't want the process open to public scrutiny. (I stumbled on the page, and Google started indexing it, because the page was accidentally and temporarily given public access.) The Selection Panel judges are then asked to give their opinions and advice on the art that is presented on the page. Winners may become Alternates or Honorable Mentions and vice versa, but the card game comes to a close pretty quickly because the deck's been stacked. I'm sure this isn't the game most contestants thought they were entering.

And why wouldn't it work this way? Do you really think these people are eagerly trying to exhibit the a wide range of fractal art? If they were, why then would they dictate what the dimensions of your submissions have to be? The Director himself said in the Rules that he wanted submissions with lots of detail in it and even went so far as to state he didn't want any "garish" art. Why not let the judges decide what makes for good art? Isn't that what judges are for? Isn't that what contestants expect judges to do?

Why should the Director decide what gets submitted and what the judges are allowed to look at?

Technorati Tags: fractals, fractal art, fractal art contests, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009, art judging, Fractal Universe Calendar,

Winners First. Contest Later.

Verdict first. Trial later.

I showed in my last post what OT found: a winners page for the 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest that displayed current contest entrants placed into three categories: exhibition winner, alternate, and honorable mention. How could some entrants already have won when the contest does not close until October 10th? I asked a few more questions but mostly left you to draw your own conclusions.

Now I want to draw some conclusions of my own. Something is definitely wrong here. Contest defenders seem to be taking one of two tracks. It's either (a) a test page or (b) a glitch. And they're trying to blame this whole business on us here at OT. We were skulking about. We hacked into the site. We were being devious.

Two BMFAC judges have responded so far. Here's what judge Mark Townsend said on the Ultra Fractal Mailing List earlier today:

You could hardly come across a winners page by accident when it's not linked to from the main page, so Terry was obviously looking around backstage on purpose and came across some pages put up for testing. Unless he's a complete moron, he knows this -- so either he has a borderline IQ or he's being intentionally devious. Take your pick.

The winners haven't been selected yet.

See? It's our fault. We were snooping around where we had no business being. Either that, or I'm an imbecile. Neither slur addresses what this web site is and what it suggests. The truth is, of course, we did find it by accident. One of us was writing a post that made a point by linking to the (we assumed nonexistent) winners site for the 2009 competition. To our surprise, the page opened, and you can see what we saw screen capped in my previous post. We put up a link to the site which was still working as recently as late Thursday afternoon. If you checked it, you could see what we saw. Did you have to hack in to see it? Neither did we.

The link is now down, just as I predicted it would be. But it was up long enough for Google to index it. See for yourself. Google winners benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest 2009. In the first one to three hits, you'll see this:

Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 ~~ Entries

The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2009 is being held to select artwork for an exhibition late in 2009 and in 2010.
www.fractalartcontests.com/2009/winners.php - 20 hours ago - Similar

I suppose devious Google hacked the page, too -- poking around backstage with its ice-breaking bot.

Townsend says the winners haven't been selected yet. But it sure looks like someone has been doing plenty of personal selecting.

A second judge, Kerry Mitchell, followed on the UF List with this statement:

I suspect that Damien is using these pages in his process of creating the actual 2009 pages, and using images from 2007 as placeholders. I know that the images listed under "Panel Member Images" are from the 2007 contest.This year's panel has not convened, as the entry phase is still open, so the winners certainly have not been chosen.

See? The page was under construction. The images are innocent "placeholders" -- mere carry-overs from the last competition. Except they aren't. Either Mitchell is misinformed or trying to mislead you. The thumbnail images are not among the entries from either the 2007 competition or the 2006 competition. Check the links. You won't find any of the most recent pics among past contest submissions. No, it's more reasonable and likely that these are current entries in the 2009 competition. I suspect any one of the artists who appear on the "winners page" could verify my conjecture.

Mitchell's observation that "this year's panel has not convened" means that the judges have not yet reviewed the entries. That's stupifying. Someone certainly has. Someone gave them a good looking over. Someone built the page -- made thumbnails, imported them, typed in titles and artist's names. And, most important, someone judged them by placing each entry into one of three evaluative categories. This is not an error or a sequence of accidental happenings. It is the result of conscious decisions and deliberate actions.

Are you buying the "test page" gambit? What, exactly, was there to test? The template had already been built and apparently worked fine in previous competitions. And why would the director add so many images, specifically categorized, even going so far as to include thumbs, names, titles, and rankings? Importing one sample thumb would have been enough to test the page.

The glitch angle won't fly either. The site was acting up, was it? Sort of like when the director added a generator to Fractalus that somehow corrupted his hard drive? Next, he'll be telling us this is all the work of a bug. The page somehow forgot to check something -- or it accidentally let submissions through -- or it's gone rogue after becoming self-aware like SkyNet -- or other such hokum. Last time I checked, Fractalus was just a server. It had not yet evolved into an AI. No, a human being built that page. Why? And what does its existence suggest?

It does not suggest a test or a glitch. It suggests that you are seeing early results.

It suggests the director has been making contest selections before the contest has closed and before the judging panel has convened. It suggests the judging panel is a cover put in place to legitimize the director's choices. You think such a claim is exorbitant? Jump back to the screen caps in my last post and look again. The director, Damien M. Jones, who Mitchell notes is BMFAC's webmaster (the "winners page" is on Jones' server with his name stamped in the border) is making selections and none of the judges have had any involvement. In fact, neither of the judges who spoke in public can clearly explain what the page is about or why the director is "sorting" entries weeks before the contest has even closed.

But shouldn't the last entry in an art competition have as much chance as the first? In a fair contest, one that uses artistic excellence as a criteria, that would be true. So, what seems to count in BMFAC? Punctuality? Who you know? What you did? It looks like some people can be be winners before others even have an opportunity to submit.

It's like Alice in Wonderland. You know. Winners first. Contest later.

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Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, fractal contest, winners first contest later, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, mark townsend, kerry mitchell, damien m jones, you may already be a winner, pre-sorted for our pleasure, cruelanimal, orbit trap

2009 BMFAC Winners Leaked ?!!?

And the winner is...

Elvis' alien clone better move over. What is one to make of this?

Just by accident, OT wandered into the "winners" page of the current (and ongoing) 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest and found it active and showing thumbnails of entries listed as exhibition winners, alternates, and honorable mentions.

You can see for yourself here -- or you will be able to for as long as this link lasts -- which, I predict, won't be very long. So, before you can shout out "you lie" from the peanut gallery, here are some screencaps taken on Wednesday, September 23rd. Click on the full-page image below to open a larger and more readable view in a new window.

Here are a few detailed shots:

There is no shortage of head shakers here, like:

Isn't October 10th the deadline for the competition? So, are winners and runners-up being selected before all submissions have arrived and been critiqued by the judging panel? It certainly seems so. Moreover, are certain entries being given some kind of preferential treatment -- that is, has their placement in the competition already been pre-determined before all contest entries have even come in? After all, how can one "win" an art competition before the complete field of entries has been seen and reviewed?

Obviously, this page mirrors the 2007 winner's page. Is this an under construction page that adds selected winners and runners-up as the contest progresses? If so, has the entire judging panel fully reviewed and ranked these entries -- or are these entries being placed on the site solely by the director who, presumably, is the only person with access privileges to change and update this particular page?

Why is this page "live" before the competition has even closed -- especially if a forthcoming explanation (assuming the normally secretive director even bothers to provide one) is that what we are all seeing is merely some kind of practice template trial run kind of deal? If that is so, can we then assume that the artists listed as winners, alts, and HMs are not necessarily going to be receiving such accolades after the competition deadline of October 10th?

Bottom line: Have these artists actually won or placed in the 2009 BMFAC or not? And how is such a situation possible when the judging panel has yet to even view all of the competition's entries?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, 2009 bmfac winners leaked, win today close tomorrow, cruelanimal, orbit trap

The Road Stops at Digital

Several questions

Is the entire digital art medium just too new and different for the art gallery world? Has the art world, that great destroyer of cultural norms and traditions, found a free-flowing, anarchic, internet-based digital medium too ab-normal and un-traditional to dive into? Is it because digital art can't be cornered by track lighting and nailed to the wall? Do art galleries see the digital medium as irrelevant because a billion perfect copies can be made by anyone in an instant and therefore bought and sold by no one? Does the art world now revolve around making money and neither artists nor art-sellers have any interest in artwork that they can't make a buck off of? Do they see digital art as free for all and good for nothing? Did I mention they can't make a buck off it?

If the answer to all those questions is yes, then the 21st century art world is going to be radically changed. It's going to move from the gallery and museum to the basement and the Blackberry. It's going to be a movement of the anti-movement, because the road used to keep on going and going, but now it's come to...

Digital.

They haven't quite figured out if they're going to build a by-pass around it or at best, call it a wasteland and ignore it. Digital has literally pulled the plug on art. If art can be freely viewed by anyone with an internet connection and worse, much worse, collected and copied, and much, much worse --shared-- by anyone with an internet connection, then where's the cash? where's the gallery set-up?

How will artist's pay for their berets and oil paints? What's going to cover those big empty spaces on walls behind couches in the living room? Gallery owners are art lovers and will do anything to promote culture once they've paid the bills and filled their stomachs. It's a business to them.

The Radical Change

That's what's so radical about digital art. For the first time in whenever we started recording these things, art is going to stop. There isn't going to be any Digital Art movement or Fractal Art big mainstream exhibition/gallery/museum because the thing we have come to think of as the "Art World" is in fact a commercial entity and they aren't going to do all that for nothing. And without the money, art is nothing to them. Art, as we know it, is the domain of the unique, singular, original, "sold to the bidder for $1,000,000", tangible, stealable, buyable, exhibitible, losable, findable, heirloomable, medium. Medium. "Art" is a medium. We just didn't know until Digital showed up and suddenly the art world lost interest in art.

It's Different Than Printmaking

Printmakers have dealt with this issue of multiple originals. Printmakers will make limited editions of their prints and then destroy the printing plate so it can't be used to make original originals anymore. They do this because if their art is in (relatively) endless supply and easily duplicated it isn't worth much to most collectors. Apparently art collectors don't want everyone collecting the art that they collect.

Printmakers artificially created scarcity of their work and by doing so, higher prices for their work, by limiting the reproducibility of it. In short, they destroy the plate. They destroy their work. But it's seen as perfectly normal and in fact, it's the expected thing to do. Almost all prints will have a number on them, like 36/120, to show their originality (i.e. 36th) and their rarity (only 120 made).

Photographers do the same thing, they just destroy a negative instead of a heavy printing plate. Or at least they say they do. Many problems have arisen in the photographic collectors world recently over the discovery of previously thought to be destroyed negatives which have been used to make more prints --and to sell them-- of course. Some collectors will have the photographic paper dated and authenticated so that the new prints will be considered less valuable or even unauthentic.

Art and easy copying don't seem to go together very well. But for art forms that can be easily destroyed, like printmaking and photography, there are ways of restoring this traditional context of fame and immortality. But digital files, and hence, digital artwork, is infinitely reproducible and every copy is an exact original. That's good for culture and the dissemination of it, but it's bad for commercialism. And commercialism is what drives the promotion and exhibition of art.

Digital Art Doesn't Need a Day-Job

It costs nothing to make and costs very little to exhibit. But try selling a digital file. That's the real digital stuff. I don't mean high-resolution giclee prints. I mean pixels. There's a lot of digital art that can't be printed because it lacks the resolution. It looks good on a monitor, but a 500x375 pixel image will be have to be postage stamp sized to look any good outside of it's digital aquarium we call a computer monitor.

Digital art can be a hobby and you don't have to support it with art sales like the old fashioned, beret-wearing, artists had to. The title of Professional Artist will be a little difficult. But your professionalism will come from making good artwork and not making good money.

Forget the art world and their wine and cheese gallery exhibition nonsense. If they wanted to see innovative, cutting edge artwork they'd be at home on the internet. Bunch of losers!

Technorati Tags: Digital Art, Art Galleries, Art Movements, Art History, Fractal Art, Fractals, Art Mediums, Stuck in Lodi again,

Phase Two: A Real Fractal Art Exhibition

Swine Flu by Luke Jerram

I think Tim's recent observations that fractal art is about to undergo into a new Phase Two paradigm shift are on target. Fractal art will never evolve beyond a curious, trippy, decorative craft until it moves away from being defined by software and instead starts thinking and acting like a legitimate form of expression within the broader parameters of the fine arts.

The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, serious conflicts of interest for half its organizers/judges notwithstanding, is also a throwback example of old school, Phase One thinking. The competition is deliberately designed to suggest that "fractal art" can only come from software -- and, in truth, almost exclusively from a particular software program favored, sold, taught, and scripted by some of BMFAC's directors/judges. But this is only true if a narrow Phase One vision of what fractal art is and must be carries the day. After all, as Tim notes in a recent OT post:

Fractal art is a fractal look and doesn't have to be something rendered from computing a fractal algorithm.

How true. If fractal art is art that has fractal characteristics like recursion and self-similarity, then the traditional mediums of the fine arts can be used for our genre just as easily as software. In fact, one could build the case that a true exhibition of fractal art would showcase art made using a variety of self-expressive tools -- including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphics design, and other recognized mediums. Software utilizing fractal algorithms to generate images would still be included, of course, but would merely be another component in the artistic arsenal, and such imagery might be broken into distinctions like algorithmic art or digital art, depending on the amount of graphic processing an individual artist used. But fractal art would be category of art, like abstract expressionism or cubism, and not winnowed down to be only the primarily Ultra Fractal images that will win this year's BMFAC.

In the spirit of Phase Two, here's my idea of a real fractal art exhibition that includes the kind of work you won't see displayed in next year's Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest show.

E coli (including detail) by Luke Jerram. Medium: Sculpture/Glass.

Working with glass sculptors and virologists from the University of Bristol, Luke Jerram creates transparent glass sculptures of disease microorganisms. Microphotography frequently reveals fractal characteristics in the microcosmic world, including crystals, bacteria, fungi, and (here) viruses. It's hard, though, to imagine the HIV virus, however beautifully depicted, to be merely ornamental. And that's exactly the kind of paradox Jerram wants to suggest. From his web site:

These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity.

It's worth stressing again. Decoration isn't enough. Meaning makes art.

Fractal Fish by Kevin Gordon. Medium: Glass.

The glass-blown objects created by Kevin Gordon emphatically exhibit fractal attributes but are grounded in a fine arts tradition. From his website:

[Gordon] fuses layers of glass, with engravings and incised prisms and lenses to trap and transmit light and colour. The prisms are influenced by fractals and the ‘Mandelbrot Theory’ where the image is composed of smaller reflections of the whole. Gordon’s preferred technique of engraved cameo glass, popular in nineteenth century France, is used by few glass artists in Australia because of its technical complexity and lengthy production time.

Isn't Gordon's work as worthy of being called fractal art as anything made in UF today and posted to the Fractalbook gallery of your choice?

Technomorphic Fractal Dragon by Art Videen. Medium: Sculpture.

Art Videen's kinetic sculptures and "suspensions" explore the shadowy province found somewhere between chaos and order. The dragon's scales in the piece above, including those seen in shadow, reveal intricate strata of self-similarity. Videen sees such fractal patterns as "loops" and notes on his web site that:

Another mechanical solution to an assembly issue, are the loops that are seen in much of his work. To Art, the loops immediately took on the meaning of dimensional bands in space and time. He saw the sculpture as objects suspended within the bands of space and, therefore, referred to the sculpture as “suspensions.” Others noticed the anthropomorphic shapes combined with the technical assemblage and referred to the sculpture as technomorphic . . . combining anthropomorphic and technical.

Doesn't Videen deserve a corner installation at the next BMFAC? Too bad he's using the wrong artistic format.

Broccoli by Natasha Harsh. Medium: Oil Paint.

If vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower display natural fractal forms, don't they retain those forms when painted or sculpted? Natasha Harsh's painting seems to reveal some common stalks and bubbles configurations I often saw when I first explored programs like Stephen C. Ferguson's Tiera-Zon. How unfortunate Harsh won't be able to meet BMFAC's entry specifications. If only she'd had the foresight to quit painting and instead import a photograph of broccoli into UF5 instead. Then, it seems, no one would question whether she was making fractal art.

A comic book cover seen on Patterns of Visual Math. Medium: Graphic Design/Comic Art.

While I'm not ready to argue this cover for a circa 1970's Harvey comic constitutes fine art, it does show recursion. However, I am ready to go out on a limb and predict this illustration will contain more obvious fractal properties than some of October's BMFAC winners and legion of runner-ups.

Fractal Tea Cup. Sold on Teavana.com. Medium: Ceramics.

It seems the concept of what a fractal is might be more imprinted in mass culture than some of us have been led to believe. The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest claims one of its missions is to select fractal art "that represents our art form to a world that largely does not know it -- or if they do know it, they know only garish, 70s-style imagery." If mass marketing has gotten a handle (no pun intended) on what fractals are and look like, can mission creep into the public mind be far behind? Is it just as possible that BMFAC wants to convince the world that its narrow definition of a UF layered and processed image is the only legitimate expression of our art form? And I wonder who exactly might benefit if such a meme started to stick in the collective consciousness?

Such a far-reaching but constricted view of fractal art is only possible if our community continues to embrace a Phase One mindset, but emphasizing software over artistic context and content is dead end. Breaking into the fine arts is our only hope for being seen as bona fide artists. Although your latest 1000+ decorative layers of UF epic technical achievement might wow some Fractalbook fanboys, it won't matter in the long run if your image is still meaningless schlock that looks like a bad Yes bootleg cover. You'll never be, as Dire Straits once sang, "In the Gallery." A real gallery, that is. No, you'll still be languishing in Phase One craft malls, and the shoppers strolling the flea market looking for trinkets won't be able to tell the difference between your lovely, over-saturated spirals and the pretty, painted rocks in the next booth.

~/~

Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, fractal art phase two, fine art, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, phase two a real fractal art exhibition, ultra fractal, phase one your booth is next to the guy selling driftwood, cruelanimal, orbit trap

Losers imitate winners

One of these is from the Museum of Bad Art

It occurred to me while browsing some of the greatest art of the 20th century to ask this question: Why don't we see more art like this today?

For instance, it ought to be very easy to imitate the famous drip paintings of Jackson Pollock with fractal algorithms. In fact, I've already done it. And yet, my digital drip paintings have not received anywhere near as much public attention and critical acclaim as Pollock's. Mine haven't received any attention or acclaim, in fact. And I think mine are better.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to imitate Pollock, but as far as I can see there hasn't really been very many attempts. And considering how easy it must be to copy the idea and the implementation of Pollock's drip painting style, or for that matter, anyone else's ideas and styles, there ought to be a lot more imitators of great works of art out there.

Or how about the famous Mondrian colored square paintings? The works, when done by Mondrian, received and enormous amount of attention and have gone on to be one of the most widely recognized styles in abstract art. So why aren't we deluged with all sorts of imitations? Just changing the colors would be an easy variation of this style, but there doesn't even seem to be much of that.

If these famous, classic works of art are so great, then shouldn't there be at least a little greatness when other artists produce variations of those astounding themes? In fact, it begs the question: What were those classic examples of modern art famous for? Or, What's so special about a Pollock drip painting that subsequent imitations can't seem to imitate?

You're probably catching on to this now. The classics are famous because they were examples of innovation; they suggested new areas to be explored. And those areas were explored, and from that exploration other artists produced work that may have been equally interesting but lacked the historical significance that came from being the original innovator. The classic works are just as valuable for the historical role they played as they are for their artistic merits. And as I've just suggested, later works by other artists may have had the same (or greater) artistic merit but haven't received the same popular attention because they weren't they weren't the ground-breaking examples. The favorite artworks of many people are not always ones that are commonly known or the ones that are held up as textbook examples.

If you're going to imitate anything, it ought to be the originality and creativity of famous artists. In other words, the best way to imitate classic art is by making something new. Initially people will ignore you and most likely the only attention you'll get will be insults and ridicule, but those have been the traditional hallmarks of the new and the different. Be suspicious of compliments.

And another thing. If you're afraid of being embarrassed or laughed at, your work will always be embarrassing and laughable.

Technorati Tags: fractal art - digital art - art lessons - Mona Lisa - Museum of Bad Art - Jackson Pollock - Piet Mondrian - Mana Lisa - Innovation -

Fractal Art Without a Computer?

Could this work be described as ...Fractal?
Admiral Otto Von Howitzerhead by Kris Kuksi 2009

Samuel Monnier, writing at Algorithmic Worlds, his new website - gallery - and blog, said some very interesting things about the fractal nature of sculptures done by Kris Kuksi.  Sam said that Kris Kuksi's scuptures "are very interesting examples of non computer-generated art with fractal characteristics (namely displaying structures on a wide scale range)."

In a more recent blog posting, Fractals In Traditional Art, Sam goes into more detail why the term "Fractal" could be used in this context of non-digital art:

• The artist pushed the physical limits of the medium to display details as small as possible. You generally do not expect sculptures to have submilimetric features, Kuksi's sculptures do.
• The details have as much artistic importance as the global structure of the work. On his deviantart page, Kuksi displays several photographs of each work, to exhibit details invisible on the global view.
• Self-similarity is present, through characters and objects of various sizes.

Sam's posting is cautious and doesn't make broad speculative statements like I do.  He says "I think these three pragmatic criterions give a starting point to determine the fractal character of a work."  Note the word, "pragmatic".  It means practical, hands-on, useful for getting something done.  Sam is talking about determining the "fractal character of a work" by looking at it and not by the way it was made.  That's an obvious conclusion, isn't it?  Kris Kuksi's work only looks fractal; it's a hand-made sculpture, it wasn't made with a fractal program.  He also says it's a "starting point".  Even so, I think I can see the finish line from here.

This is something very new and very dangerous.  I see it as something like the Copernican Revolution for Fractal Art.  Copernicus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around.  Until his time people intuitively assumed that the rising and setting Sun was moving around the Earth --rising and setting.  Copernicus changed their minds (not everyone right away, mind you) by showing them evidence that the Sun's apparent movement was actually the result of the Earth's actual movement.  He presented people with evidence that convinced them to see their world in a different context: a Sun-centered context instead of the old Earth-centered context.

I think this could be the beginning in what could become the complete unraveling of fractal art as a genre.  After this we will all see fractal art from a Visual Context instead of a Software Context.  We will see that Fractal Art revolves around visual appearance and not around the software that made it.  Fractal Art will be defined by visual criteria and not by its association (whether it's noticeable or not) with fractal software. 

If a piece of art can have fractal characteristics derived from something other than a fractal formula, then there's really no difference between an image made in a fractal program and one made in a plain old graphics program as long as they both have a similar, fractal style.  Furthermore, fractal art is then really nothing more than this fractal style which is, of course, easiest to produce with a fractal program but could also include any kind of image resembling the output of such fractal programs.  Fractal art is a fractal look and doesn't have to be something rendered from computing a fractal algorithm.  There can be examples of fractal imagery made in a non-fractal program and similarly, examples of non-fractal imagery made in a fractal program.

In fact, Samuel Monnier's pattern piling (see his Portfolio on Algorithmic Worlds) is an example of why we should adopt this more visual definition of fractal art than hold onto the traditional, software definition, because his artwork is, in my opinion, as fractal as any two-dimensional image will ever be and (visually) indistinguishable.  In fact, if you don't adopt the visual definition of fractal art then I guess you have to exclude the kind of work that Sam is making.  Even though it is made with Ultra Fractal, it's not really the usual Ultra Fractal fractal output. Sam has used Ultra Fractal's programing features to create work that uses non-fractal algorithms and is therefore, by the usual criteria, non-fractal --unless one makes that decision on the basis of visual criteria.

Just for illustration purposes, a quick glance over the winners of either years of the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contests will show you how overly simplistic and possibly meaningless is the term, fractal art in its current form.  What do these images, all chosen as winners in a fractal art contest have in common? and how easily would one distinguish them from artwork in other abstract, algorithmic, or simply digital (eg. made in Photoshop) categories?  The rendering methods that are used to produce "fractal" images contribute enormously to the final result and artists can easily start to focus on aspects of an image that are largely created by the rendering algorithm and not the fractal formula without realizing it, and thereby create work which is better called "render-ism" than fractal.  Add layering to the process and the ultimate result can be something quite interesting, but also quite non-fractal.

Fractal formulas produce a style of imagery, but that style is not exclusive to fractal software.  But if we are to include as fractal art, images that portray the fractal style but lack a traditional fractal "pedigree", then shouldn't we also question the presence of fractal art images that have a genuine fractal "pedigree" but lack that clearly defined fractal style and even perhaps exclude them?  Will fractal art survive such a revision, including it's neighbors as part of the family because they look like them and abandoning some of it's own children because they, by the same criteria, don't look like them?  That's why I think it's not such a crazy thing to say that fractal art, as a strict and simple category, doesn't really exist, and probably will become much less distinct in the future, if in fact it doesn't simply merge with algorithmic art or with the larger, and more general, digital art category.

It could happen because fractal artists will see themselves and their work in more general terms and not identify or associate as strongly with the label fractal art as they will digital art or algorithmic art.  And why will they see themselves that way?  Because they'll look at their artwork from a different perspective and describe it in visual terms like "I make abstract, decorative type work with multiple layers using things like fractals, masking and other graphical effects".  I think that currently describes ninety-percent of all fractal artists.  They've been revolving around a specific artistic style for centuries (I mean, years) and not around fractals or anything unique to the software they've been using.  But like the Earth-centered people in Copernicus' time, it makes sense to them, it seems natural to them to think that way.  They see the Sun revolving around them and not vice versa.  But a closer look at fractal art --and fractal-like art-- I think reveals those beliefs to be superficial and merely a matter of habit and convention.

I think that's what Samuel Monnier in his observation of Kris Kuksi's work has discovered, although he hasn't come (jumped?) to the same conclusions as I have.  If we judge fractal art by it's visual characteristics, then the genre will be extended to include work previously considered non-fractal because of the non-fractal process by which it was made; but the genre will also shrink to exclude works which were previously considered 100% fractal by virtue of the "fractal" software used to create it --because it doesn't display any fractal characteristics.

Technorati Tags: Fractal - Fractal Art - Samuel Monnier - Algorithmic Worlds - Kris Kuksi - Digital Art - Art Genres -

Fractal Multiplication Concepts

Editor's Note:  This is a guest posting by Rich Jarzombek.

I'm always fascinated by what I call "The Infinite Powers" of fractals. Most fractalists know that the fractal computational process is iterative and therefore could go on to infinity but intentionally terminates when a programmed condition is reached so that an image existing at the time of that terminating condition can be displayed. While I know that fractalists are aware of this "Infinite Computational Power" I suspect that few make adequate use of fractal's "Infinite Magnification Power".

Personally, I find great satisfaction in utilizing this "Infinite Magnification Power". In fact, all of the 1200+ fractals in my website, Realistic Fractals, http://realisticfractals.com were produced at high magnifications, typically several hundred to several thousand times standard (default) magnification. This means that most of my images didn't exist as even a single pixel in the initial display!

The following example shows the result of one of my earliest ventures into high magnification. The image below was derived from an equation of my own creation. It is displayed at 1.0 initial magnification.

My first impression was that this was an ugly, useless fractal. However, for some unknown reason, I was curious to see what might exist in the area to which the arrow points. After a series of magnification which finally reached a 63,433 times magnification, the following image appeared, which I titled, "A Rose Is A Rose Is A - - -"

When I saw this image my immediate reaction was, "Who woulda thunk it?!!". The significance is that even within an ugly fractal there may exist a beautiful image if you take the time to explore using the "Infinite Magnification Power" of fractals. As an analogy of this degree of magnification, if this image were viewed at a width of 6 inches, its primary fractal would have a width of 6 miles and contain 4 billion different images of the same size!

The following example shows the result of an experiment to determine the maximum magnification capability of the software based on its computational precision (significant figures). The image below was derived from an equation of my own creation. It is displayed at 1.0 initial magnification.

I then chose to magnify a pinpoint location in the area to which the arrow points. After a series of magnification I reached a magnification of 'ten to the thirteenth power' and the image below appeared.

This image is not displayed to show esthetic value but rather to show its sharp detail even at such high magnification. (Any higher magnification will result in a distorted, highly pixelated image due to exceeding the system's mathematical precision.) If this image were viewed at a width of 6 inches, its primary fractal would have a width of 10 times the average distance of the earth to the sun, and would contain 'ten to the twenty-sixth power' different images of the same size!! Due to this analogy I gave it the title, "Alien Horizon".

Since it is difficult to imagine what 'ten to the twenty-sixth power' images means, I decided to compute another analogy: If these images were divided evenly to the entire world's population of 6.8 billion, and if everyone took only one second to view an image while working on a 24/7 basis, it would take over 400 million years before all the images were viewed! (Unfortunately, this would also be about the same amount of time that "traditional" artists will take to accept the fact that "Fractal Art" is a "legitimate" art form!).

If someone asked me if it were possible that one of that huge number of images might be a perfect replica of the "Mona Lisa" I might have to reply, "Don't bet against it!"

Sometimes I like to think that every fractal image I initially create is imprinted on an enormously huge microscope slide. Therefore I am looking through a microscope with the ability to move the slide to any position I choose and view whatever is there, and at any magnification I choose!

Wow! Can't you just feel the awesome energy of fractal's "Infinite Magnification Power"?!!

Rich Jarzombek

(Note: The images and interpretations were obtained using Tierazon V2.9 software. However the concepts should relate to all other true fractal software.)

I'm sick of Eye Candy

Even my own homemade recipes leave me with an unsettled stomach.  I used to get a thrill out of making some colorful lollipop of an image, but that stuff is for kids.  If you still crave candy, then you're still a kid too.

Call it Decorative Art, or The Decorative Arts, it's still the same old eye-candy.  In fact, Decorative Art isn't really art at all --it's decoration.  Pretty fractals may be nice to share and talk about and sell to the great mass of decorators out there looking for something nice to cover the living room wall or front entrance, but it's only art in a broad, general, graphical sense.

Previously I've said that fractals aren't very fertile subject matter by which to express deep thoughts or make bold political statements but I realize now that that's letting fractal art off a little too easy.  Like a father speaking to a child who's setting themself easy goals in life, I say, you can be more than that, you can be art, you can be anything a pixel can be.

But I know better than to give advice to someone who's happy doing what they're doing and hasn't arrived at the point where they see things the way I do.  So to all those of you who aren't happy with eye candy and occasionally get a deeper thrill out of artwork that is something else, that's good.  And to those who find their stomach turns at the sight of a super sour gumball or a bright orange fruit chew, that's even better.  It's good to feel bad about bad things.  And eye candy is bad art.

Bad art?  Yes, I know there is a subjective factor to tastes in art and all that sort of argument that people often pull out to neutralize artistic criticism (except their own, of course), but graphic imagery that merely looks pretty and doesn't engage the viewer's thoughts in some deeper way hasn't ever qualified as art in any serious circle of intelligent people before except in some trivial, functional way like the way a vase of flowers does in the front entryway in someone's house.

That sort of thing is a Craft and those who make it are Craftsmen, not artists.  It's perfectly respectable to be a craftsmen; there's nothing derogatory about the label.  What's not so respectable is when craftsmen want to call their fractal flower arrangements Art, and themselves, Artists.

It's not that they aren't good at what they do, or professionals, or anything else like that.  They're good craftsmen, some of them are excellent craftsmen (craftspeople), and many are very professional and quite highly skilled in the technical aspects of their craft, but it's just that what they produce has no other dimension to it than to be decorative --something pretty to look at.  But don't call it art because that's being pretentious, shows ignorance and trivializes what art is, and what art is all about.

And art is all about thoughts, feelings --mental action and reaction.  Maybe it's possible to say something with flowers?  Not likely.  That's why they're such a popular decorative item, they're just something pretty to make a room look nicer, like visual air freshener.

Fractal art isn't eye candy or visual air freshener.  I guess I could give some sort of pep talk here or rallying cry for more art in fractal art, or lets all try to put more meaning in our fractal art, but really, if you're happy with what you're doing making eye candy then you're not going to do anything like that.  People don't make art because they're told to, they make it because they're sick of eye candy and don't get a thrill from it anymore.  They make it because their gut tells them to.

Technorati Tags: fractals | fractal art | decorative art | digital art |

Fractal Art, Phase Two

Bold, new, full-color, fractal art
What? You didn't know even know there was a Phase One? Well, let me begin there, then. At the dawn of fractal art.

Phase One, the first stage of fractal art, has been oriented around software. The big developments in fractal art came from developments in the software that made it. True color fractals were a big development in fractal art over the more primitive, 256 color fractals.

More primitive? See, I'm talking like a phase one fractal artist. Good art, or even great art, can be made with 256 color fractal programs. In the same way, bad art or even awful art, can be made with true color fractal programs. Who cares how many colors your program uses? Or more to the point: who cares how many colors your artwork has in it?

That's the essence of Phase Two thinking. And it's all about thinking /perspective /approach. Phase Two fractal art focuses on the image and not how it was made. Perhaps in Phase Two fractal art the word "fractal" is no longer relevant because the word fractal only has meaning if the artwork exhibits a fractal appearance. Images made from details of fractals or images processed with filters are really derivative works and whether one wants to call them fractal art is really a pointless matter and unresolvable argument.  And Phase Two artists don't care anyway how an image was made. Whether it has that parameter file pedigree or not isn't as important as whether or not it's...

Art. Yes, that's where I see fractal art going. Taking an artistic approach and evaluating the image rather than the software that makes it, is an instinctive next step. It's instinctive I think because that's how art has always been viewed and evaluated. No serious critic ever categorized oil paintings by what kind of paint brushes they were made with or whether they were painted by men or women. Or by nationality?  Is it American Art?

Art is studied, viewed, collected, practised, and criticized according to the style of artwork -- what it looks like. That's how things will be, and even already have started to be, in phase two of fractal art. I've groused about Ultra Fractal, but really what I was criticizing was the excessive layering and masking of fractals. That's what most people do with Ultra Fractal and that's why most of what is made with it is so boring. But there are others who use Ultra Fractal for very, very different things and they use layering as an algorithmic tool rather than a way to apply make-up to fractals. The program is as advanced or as primitive as the images one makes with it. In fact, the program is irrelevant; it's the artwork that's important.

Phase Two thinking says, "If this image was a painting, what style of art would you say it most closely resembles?" Phase Two thinking calls fractal art that looks nice but lacks expression to be Decorative Art. It calls fractal art that evokes feeling, emotion or vivid thoughts to be Abstract Expressionism. Phase Two thinking enters fractal art through the art door and not the math door. Phase Two speaks respectfully to the Rocket Scientists but explains that beauty, while taking many forms, is the only parameter in art.

Jackson Pollock is the true father of fractal art (even if his drip paintings aren't fractal). Benoit Mandelbrot is the father of fractal software. This is the Phase Two perspective. Pollock said, "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said." Phase Two listens to the art, not the artist.

In Phase Two we don't call it art until we hear it speak.

Technorati Tags: fractals | fractal art | art history | digital art | abstract expressionism | decorative art | art categories |

Nothing New in the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest

I don't want to hear about why art competitions should be run professionally using fair play to promote excellence and diversity rather than favoring a select group. I'd much rather be openly exploited and cynically scammed.

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan....
--The Beatles, "Revolution"

Guess what's new on the 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest front?

Nothing.

Is that what you expected? It's what I expected.

If you thought Garth Thornton's resignation from the 2009 BMFAC selection panel, or, better yet, his ethical example and thoughtful public account of what prompted his action would make any difference, well, then you just haven't been paying attention for years.

If you haven't done so yet, I urge you to read Thornton's public post announcing his resignation. You can clearly see who he is and what he believes. His post also provides a contrasting window into some of the BMFAC judges revealing who they are not and what they do not believe.

If the director and his friends who serve as BMFAC judges could be shamed, they would have been from the start. The competition is, as Tim and I have long argued, all about them. It's always been a publicity stunt to garner personal gain and to further their professional careers. From the beginning, it should have been an invitational exhibition for the director and his circle, a showcase for the particular Ultra Fractal school of fractal art they've all been pushing for years, but that would have looked more insular than prestigious. So, a "contest" was concocted -- a contest that would allow them to place their work inside what would appear to outsiders to be a juried, international art competition. The catch, of course, is that they were the jury who ended up selecting themselves for nearly half of the previous two exhibitions.

And how could they insure that this international show "that represents our art form to a world that largely does not know it" would really be about the kind of art they actively promote? And, furthermore, how could they also advance the profile and sales of Ultra Fractal, the fractal software many of them either author, sell, teach, code, or otherwise push? One shrewd way would be to set the submission requirements for entries at a large scale that only Ultra Fractal could easily reach. After all, an art contest can only draw from the entries it receives, just as it can be consciously designed to choose judges and make rules to ensure that it gets only the kind of entries it wants.

But, of course, this is a new year, and the contest has made at least one ethics-friendly change. Probably. The rules make clear that the judges' work will not be included in the 2009 contest, although some readers have pointed out the rules explicitly say nothing about the judges' art ending up in the exhibition. Semantics -- or loophole? Time will tell. The "contest" is the web page, listing winners, alternates, and honorable mentions. The exhibition is another matter entirely, as demonstrated by the 2007 BMFAC where no information about the physical show was ever included on the "contest" web page.

And if the previous contests weren't slanted enough towards openly fostering UF, what with primarily UF judges picking primarily UF winners, this year's contest actually includes Ultra Fractal's author as a judge. Given BMFAC's history of overt UF bias, this is such an arrogant, in-your-face move that it surely cannot escape notice as a gross conflict of interest, especially after another author-judge of commercial software did the right thing and resigned.

But mum's the word, and the director isn't commenting -- on anything. Not on the many conflicts of interest tied to the judging panel. Not on the rules ambiguity that could once again slip the judges into the exhibition. Not on why smaller entry sizes would somehow mar the exhibition. Not even on a prominent judge's resignation and possible replacement. Apparently, the less all of us know, the better.

Not that anyone much cares, though. Obviously, the sponsors don't care that the contest isn't managed with the customary professional protocols, especially if they are as hands-on as past sponsors who insisted work by judges be included to insure against the exhibition's "insufficient quality." Obviously, some of the judges don't care that the whole thing is UF-friendly and that they face visible conflicts of interest leading to their own financial and/or personal gain. If the sponsors cared about how the contest was run, they'd intervene. But they haven't. If the judges in question worried about having conflicts of interest, they'd resign -- especially after reading Garth's recent post and witnessing his moral example. But they haven't.

And what about you? I have to assume you've noticed how BMFAC is run and realize its operation is suspicious. So, I have to assume that many of you probably don't care either. A crooked contest is better than none, you will tell me, and BMFAC is the only game in town. I'll put up with shady doings, you'll say, because participating is the only chance to promote myself in the hope of getting to join the privileged, piffling group literally running the whole show. You OT guys can keep your idealistic revolution for inclusion of all fractal artists and schools, you'll say, because I want BMFAC judge status and privilege for myself, so then I, too, can lord it over others-- just like they do. After all, you'll tell me, their immoral example is the surest path to success in fractal art marketing: tie everything to your own self-promotion -- even to the point of creating callous publicity stunts and calling yourself a "prestigious fractal artist".

When all is said and done, I predict the 2009 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest will be considered a success. It will have more participants than ever, perhaps even handing out up to 100 meaningless Honorable Mentions this year. Blogs will cite it as a representative sampling of the most important fractal artists in the world, instead of mostly and merely a narrow UF school that features masking and layering. The competition's judges will profit both personally and financially, as a certain software sells and online classes on how to use that software fill up. The director will be hailed as a noble philanthropist, instead of a career-boosting manipulator.

And, maybe -- maybe after a cycle about as long as the Fractal Universe Calendar's existence -- maybe as the same people and styles of fractal art benefit from a deliberately devised system of inbred favoritism year after year after year -- maybe after a fourth or fifth go-around of winding up as the 99th HM -- maybe then whispers of a revolution will start to be heard in every Fractalbook forum and journal and chat room.

And, maybe then, you will remember. You once saw the plan.

~/~

Tags: fractal, fractals, fractal art, fractal blog, fractal contest, art contest ethics, benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, nothing new in the benoit mandelbrot fractal art contest, we all want to see the plan after a transparent publicity stunt, cruelanimal, orbit trap

Do You Need Professional Help?

Sure you do. But, the kind of professional help I'm talking about is online software courses. I know that sounds like a common subject line for spam, but this is the real thing and it includes some of the most popular fractal art programs in use today --taught by experts and reasonably priced.

The place is Visual Arts Academy and according to Virginia and Sparrow, who run the place:

VAA started about five years ago, answering a specific need for a venue for two classes based on PhotoImpact. It was an offshoot of the PhotoImpact International bulletin board, with which we are still associated.

Since then, the virtual campus has exploded to include courses on Ultra Fractal, Apophysis, Xenodream, Bryce, Poser (the lingerie dolls on Renderosity) as well as many of the more mainstream digital art programs like Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, and PhotoImpact. There's also some courses on web design, MS Office and Photography.

Perhaps you know all that stuff and aren't interested in taking a course by "experts"? Well, you --yes you-- could be one of those experts! Let's call you, "Expert Without a Course".   Here's what Virginia and Sparrow say about that:

We are always interested in new classes for a variety of software. We do tend to lean to digital art but would be more than willing to talk with a potential instructor for any class he or she thinks could work in an online setting. We're also open to different class structures than our usual six-weeks-plus-one format. The instructor and the school split the tuition: VAA keeps an administrative fee and the rest goes to the instructor. Those interested should contact us at admin@visual-arts-academy.com

I think this is exciting. There aren't too many places where you can find courses for something as exotic as fractal software and here is one which already covers three of the most popular programs and is open to providing more. Based on what I've seen in various online forums and mailing lists, there's a lot of people asking for help and much of it revolves around the same basic things. Yes, there's already quite a number of online tutorials available (I've written one for Sterlingware) and there's always the option of asking for help in a forum.  But I know from my own experience that a significant number of users really would prefer something more formal and structured -- and that's Professional Help. But first there have to be some Professional Helpers.

Although I've never taken any of these courses, I think the fees are reasonable, ranging from $25 for a one semester, several week course to $50 for double semester courses. The fees of course cover the basic cost of running the online school as well as providing some compensation to the instructors for their efforts and the careful attention they give students. If you think you have specialized expertise in the area of fractal art, or in some other area of digital art, then this could be a great way for you to share that expertise in a more organized and formal setting and be compensated for it.

The instructor won't be in the room with you.  But maybe that's better.

You probably won't make enough to quit your day job or anything like that, but I think the way the Visual Arts Academy has set things up is one which benefits both instructors and students. There are some real advantages to this over the more casual forms of online help.

Anyone could conceivably start up their own online school and start teaching students independently, but working through an established online entity like the Visual Arts Academy might make it easier for them as well as their students. Just as Ebay provides a secure and trustworthy environment that attracts individuals to do business with each other, an organization like VAA can bring instructors and students together and handle the basic administrative functions.  These administrative things in any business, online or offline, can become a real headache for people just getting started.

Current fractal art courses at VAA include: Apophysis Exploration, and Apophysis: Beyond the Basics, by Travis Williams; Working with Ultra Fractal, Ultra Fractal Masking Techniques and Ultra Fractal Artistry by Janet Parke; and XenoDream by Joseph Presley. Although not currently offered, Kerry Mitchell used to teach a course on working with Ultra Fractal formulas.

What's missing from that list? The course that only you, the expert without a course can teach. There's got to be a million things people can learn about Ultra Fractal, and let's not forget about that other thing --art-- how about something on Post-processing in Photoshop or something a little more general like Design Theory for Fractal Art. Or why not something like Programming With Fractal Math?  If you know how to do something, there's a good chance that other people will want to know how to do it too.

Don't think that because you're going to be charging students a fee to take your course that no one will want to spend the money. $25 to study an exciting area of fractal or digital art for several weeks with someone who has an established reputation in the field is a trifle, even for an online venue. Think of the possible mentoring relationships that could be formed and the influence on the art form it could have in the years to come.

Come to think of it; maybe the one thing that fractal art really needs right now is a school. A place where serious students and experienced instructors can engage in some disciplined training and development. You can tell your friends you're an online Professor and put Dr. in front of your screen name.

Seriously, this could be a really big thing.