Orbit Trap

Earthscapes: Middle Row

2013-05-14T21:36:28Z

Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012) [Click on images to view at higher resolution.] The second of three posts about postage. You can skip the short context-setting intro section if you’ve already DVRed this series. If you’ve just wandered in, you might want to bounce back to the first post to view the top … Continue reading »

Earthscapes: Top Row

2013-05-09T23:45:26Z

Earthscapes. United States Postal Service (2012) [Click on images to view at higher resolution.] This is the first of three posts about postage. The U. S. Postal Service, as part of National Stamp Month, issued a series of Forever stamps entitled Earthscapes. Three rows of five are displayed in the stamp pane seen above. … Continue reading »

Fractal Artists are Deluded Narcissists

2013-03-26T17:43:20Z

First, let me explain. I make such a bold statement not because I hate fractals (or fractal artists) but because I love fractals and include myself among the hopelessly deluded. A quaint anecdote I came to this realization in a rather unexpected way: through rediscovering the joy of fractal artistry. For the last year or … Continue reading »

Uploading = Publishing?

2013-03-18T21:55:26Z

I created. I uploaded. I published. [Image seen here.] The so-called "little magazine," or more generic mainstream literary/art journal, has long been a tried-and-true avenue for artists and writers to distribute their work while insuring professional respectability. Why are such publications seen as more artistically credible? Since such journals/magazines are juried (screened or solicited … Continue reading »

3D Printing: Will this be Fractal Art’s Big Break?

2013-03-07T14:57:59Z

With 3D printing technology, fractal art can cheaply and easily enter the domain of sculpture. It’s an exciting development and offers the ever dazzling world of fractals another venue in which to capture that proverbial and elusive, “mainstream” audience. Will this be fractal art’s big break or just another demonstration of how hard it is … Continue reading »

Danger: High Voltage

2013-03-02T19:41:06Z

A Shocking Fractal I have previously written about both fractal fields of lighting and about shocking flowers, but here is an experiment that merges the two topics. A Pratt Institute student, Melanie Hoff, attached cables carrying 15,000 volts to what looks like plywood planks. One would expect the wood to immediately catch fire or … Continue reading »

X-ray of art! Fracplanet 0.4.0

2013-02-25T19:16:20Z

From the developer’s, Tim Day’s site: Fracplanet is an interactive tool for creating random fractal planets and terrain areas with oceans, rivers, lakes and icecaps. The results can be exported as models to POV-Ray and to Blender, or as texture maps for more general usage. The code is licensed under the GPL. It uses Qt … Continue reading »

Jump into Fractals!

2013-02-15T05:22:32Z

Stop what you're doing, forget everything you know --and just jump into fractals! Synthetic. That's a good word in computer art. You like synthetic things if you like computer art. There's too much color in this? It looks unnatural? It's synthetic, just like those chewy fruit candies that don't really taste like real fruit. They taste better than real fruit. Space age flavours. This image has space age colors. Love it, or the image will delete you. Continue reading »

Ode to Mandel Donut Vegas

2013-02-06T05:38:16Z

Dave Makin, in a thread over at Fractalforums.com suggested that the mandelbulb deserves more attention: Anyhow, while still shaking my head and wondering (like taurus66 in the quote) why anyone would be interested in that puffy, spiny thing called the mandelbulb, along came someone else, in a completely different thread, posting their marathon session, 6-core … Continue reading »

Food for Thought

2013-01-16T05:33:19Z

I travel the internet, I make “Viewmarks” of artwork worth reviewing, and sometimes I end up with little scraps of things that I just can’t seem to fit into a proper blog posting. But I keep them around anyhow because they’re food for thought, so to speak; singular ideas with potential. Here are a few … Continue reading »

More Microscopy

2013-01-03T20:03:25Z

Mosquito eyes. Microscopy courtesy of Oliver Meckes. I first wrote about microscopy on OT back in September of 2009 when discussing Luke Jerram‘s glass sculptures. I said then that microscopy "frequently reveals fractal characteristics in the microcosmic world." Was I ever right. The image gallery at FEI, a company producing high end microscopes, is … Continue reading »

Panorami Frattali by DorianoArt

2012-12-19T05:24:26Z

DorianoArt has a real talent for mixing fractals with photography and doing it with style. It’s not the typical marriage between earthy fractals and leafy scenery. It’s more like an extraterrestrial romance between mother earth and alien invaders. Despite such a disturbing courtship, the results are quite natural, or rather, quite unnatural, a hybrid landscape, … Continue reading »

Pauldelbrot’s Mandelbrot Safari and other Journeys into the Unknown

2012-12-12T16:30:53Z

Back, several postings ago, when I reviewed the latest Fractalforums.com calendar, I heaped abuse on Pauldelbrot’s image from his Mandelbrot Safari series calling it retro and not cutting-edge. The owner of Fractalforums.com and publisher of the calendar, Christian Kleinhuis, informed me that what Pauldelbrot was doing was in fact very cutting-edge as it was utilizing … Continue reading »

The Varieties of Fractal Experience

2012-12-05T02:04:56Z

There’s a theme that binds all these images together but I can’t seem to find the right words for it. Freaky; harmonic; other worldly; sacred symbols; journey into mystery: they all fit for some but not for all. I guess variety is best; with a play on the famous book by Henry James, The Variety … Continue reading »

Name! That! Comment! OT “Biggest Fans” Edition!

2012-11-27T02:30:19Z

Welcome back, readers, once again to the home edition of the Fractalbook Network’s much idolized game show: Name! That! Comment! Tonight, due to the panic of sweeps week and the fear of ratings slippage, we’ve cobbled together a most prodigious presentation. Our crackhead team of scientologists has scoured cyberspace (and beyond!) to seek out only … Continue reading »

The Epiphytic Art of Comments

2012-11-20T00:11:54Z

Like the elegant orchids and other surface-dwelling plant species called epiphytes, image comments can have a richness and uniqueness that is surprising when one considers their tiny size and extremely casual origin. And also like the epiphytes of tropical forests, comments can become almost as great, collectively, as the underlying tree they’ve attached themselves to, … Continue reading »

Blocked Drones and Shocked Flowers

2012-11-19T16:07:47Z

Death from Above [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] "New aesthetic" visionary James Bridle‘s latest project is Dronestagram –an Instagram feed that posts satellite images tied to U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East and Asia. The feed, according to Bridle, shares a similar purpose with Josh Begley’s Drones+, … Continue reading »

The Physical Clouds

2012-11-10T23:32:52Z

Such perfect fractal clouds are too perfect to be real. Photograph by Rüdiger Nehmzow [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] I wrote recently about Google opening their data centers to writers and photographers and thus revealing how fractal the digital cloud looks. Let’s not forget, though, that physical … Continue reading »

Arvinder Bawa’s Fractal Exhibition in Spain

2012-11-11T04:08:40Z

Arvinder Bawa recently had a showing of his fractal artworks in Laredo, Cantabria, Spain at the Sala Ruas gallery. The poster explains it best: ~Click on images to view full-size on original site~ Arvinder has written an interesting explanation to accompany the exhibit. I like his simple language and layman’s terms: …For the exhibition it … Continue reading »

…Plenty of room at the Hotel Fractalfornia

2012-11-08T01:20:24Z

~Click on images to view full-size on original site~ Just a neon sign, cloudy sky and moon, but what a transformation. A number of 3d fractalists refer to having an “architectural style” and here you can really see what’s meant by that term and why it is such a natural one in the world of … Continue reading »

Iterations of Hurricane Sandy

2012-11-02T20:52:28Z

Hurricane Sandy’s Fractalscape Renders But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: –T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" A pervasive side effect of working with fractal art is that one begins to develop a heightened sense of fractal pattern recognition. Self-similar forms and recursive … Continue reading »

Brother, can you spare $58?

2012-10-31T13:15:40Z

Fractalforums.com’s owner, Christian Kleinhuis (aka Trifox) is attempting to put out another fractal art calendar this year. I reviewed last year’s and called it, “The Best Fractal Calendar Ever!“. I hope that review scored me enough points over there with the Fractalforums.com folks to cover this year’s review. Here’s a brief summary of the discussions … Continue reading »

The Fractal Cloud

2012-10-26T21:17:36Z

Inside a Google Data Center [Click on images to view at higher resolution on source sites.] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. –Ted Stevens, Former United States Senator … Continue reading »

No More Flat Fractals!

2012-10-25T18:42:31Z

Does it seem that no one has any interest in the old, 2D fractal images anymore? And furthermore, does it seem that since the advent of the 3D fractal craze that there are more fractal artists making interesting work than ever before? I’d answer yes to both those questions. Numerous times while browsing further and … Continue reading »