Art from pushing buttons and turning dials

Journey to the center of the machine

2017-09-04T12:42:00.000-04:00

These images were made with George Maydwell’s cellular automata java applets that used to be posted at collidoscope.com which now seems to be gone. George’s applets took ca to a whole new level. If you want to see some examples, here’s a posting I wrote years ago on Orbittrap: Collidoscope.com’s Modern CA –Animation Wonderland!

But these particular images have something special about them. I set the parameters to extreme levels which along with generating a very different kind of imagery also greatly speeds up the process. The result is these granular, pixel mosaics that flash on the screen in a rapid succession in a fraction of a second. It’s too fast to take a normal screenshot (there is no other way to capture imagery from these applets) so one just has to blindly take screenshots and see if they’ve captured anything interesting. It’s a bit like photographing race cars from the edge of the track as they speed past you.

These are the controls for the applet. I think this is what makes the fast mosaic things I’m posting here but I can’t remember. As you can see, it’s all about creative configuring and that’s really just a matter of discovery or experimentation.

If you look closely the gravelscape has very precise and detailed symmetry but it’s a little dull and repetitive and the only thing that catches my eye is the occasional pixelglyph (hieroglyph composed of pixels of course) that stands out.

They’re all different and they’re captured at a rate which is beyond that of human reaction. When these screenshots occurred, whatever it was that prompted me was long gone, ten or twenty frames had passed, and this was captured instead. Maybe it’s more like fishing but that analogy doesn’t contain the aspect of loss because even though you only save the best, you have no real idea what else was generated that was better that you never even saw. The scale of the creative output is stunning if you think about it: a Mona Lisa a minute; a Sistene Chapel a second. It’s these engines of creativity and just watching them work that makes automatism (my current term for all this) stand out in the world of seeing.

Looks like origami paper. Not really too exciting except for the clarity. The clarity with which this spark of creativity was drawn. Mechanical artistry sounds like a ridiculous thing but once you’ve seen how computer code can use geometric and abstract imagery and complexify it, you will see that if art is all about creativity –drawing new things– then the mechanization of it is as logical as the mechanization of any other aspect of living. I’ve often thought that if automatic/algorithmic art was presented as hand painted or drawn, it would have a deeper impression on most audiences. It’s a kind of prejudice I suspect people have and it comes from a lack of familiarity with what creativity is as well as a naiveness regarding how imitative and replicative the human mind can be; something one associates with machines and not humans.

Not symmetrical. There’s something more to the applet than I first thought because I thought it was taking a pattern and just kaleidoscoping it four times. After you’ve seen a thousand of these things anything different jumps out at you right away but capturing it is another matter. Perhaps it loops and goes through the same sequence again but I’ve never seen it happen yet.

This is the journey; seeing and wondering about what you saw. I find my attempt to explain what these picture machines are all about is like trying to find:

the lowest common multiple;
common denominator;
prime numbers;
central factor or essential ingredient

–to the art form.

I think now that thing is the principle of automata, which these applets just happen to embody in the form of cellular automata, a well known branch of mathematics that is both expressed in nature and can be used to explain other kinds of natural and social phenomena.

Automatic imagery is formed independently of conscious, human thought. Conscious human thought is of course the creative source of most kinds of art. But automatic imagery is the visual reaction to a mechanical configuration while hand-formed art is the expression of the human mind. That’s what separates the two categories of imagery or, you could say, the two artistic mediums: the medium of mechanical configuration and the medium of human expression.

Everything automatic imagery does (and doesn’t do) stems from that essential quality of independence from conscious thought. Similarly, the art of human expression is the same, stemming from that essential ingredient. This is what the surrealists stumbled over but abandoned in their quest to paint the subconscious. Surrealist automatism is a combination of real automatism and techniques that were thought to be an artist expressing their subconscious thoughts rather than their conscious ones. What I’m suggesting with the term “automatism”, “automata”, “automaton”, “automatic imagery”, is the principle of non-human rather than human formation of art work. The art term could just as easily be substituted for the more technical and neutral, “imagery” of which we then speak of an artistic medium from which art is made rather than a medium which is art itself.

This could be the bottom of it.

Painting with power

2017-09-04T12:35:00.000-04:00

I often like to quote things that have never been said before. The “quote style” of writing has a whole new feel to it and instantly transforms an otherwise common place statement into the realm of the legendary. In the same way I’ve often wanted to take images like the one above and make them into CD music covers that have yet to be made. It’s like the crazy stuff in the old TV series, In Search Of: we don’t care if it’s not really true because wild “theory” is a magical form of lies and becomes a kind of science fiction that has a strange new appeal and almost infinite potential. Call it creative non-fiction: History before it happens: Pre-recorded history.

These things are drawn in seconds and that’s in batches of 12 or 24 or whatever size you want. They’re then breeded with each other to come up with a new generation to focus on the specific visual genes of the parent images. It’s a program called, Kandid and is referred to as Genetic Art. It’s pretty weird to use because you really do “breed” visual parameters multiplying the variations of the parent genes (two images) over the unselected others in the previous set.

It’s bold and very digital and you need to have a special sensitivity electronic imagery to appreciate it or to even start to appreciate it. Art is hard to define and I think the only logical starting place is your own mind. If you find something engaging then that’s the first test. Should anyone else in the world agree then that’s the second. But art is elected one vote at a time.

I love the triangles. So monotonous and repetitive but couldn’t the human face or the landscape around us, the two greatest artistic themes be described in the same way? It’s the little variations that give the meaning and the message. I’m also not posting the huge pile of junk the program produced in the process of making these few images.

A cliff and side of a power dam. Patterns produce much of what we see in art, I think, so algorithms are not really so clumsy at producing art as one would expect. Especially when it comes to the sensation of vertigo.

Almost the same image but just with different color genes.

Comic book like. Superman’s Fortress of Solitude seen from the outside.

Cellular automata ought to be as exciting as a piece of asphalt pavement or a patch of concrete. Well, actually it is 99% of the time but the productive power of a computerized algorithm quickly turns that 1% into something substantial.

Nighttime travels

2017-09-04T11:08:00.000-04:00

The program Fractal Vizion does a thousand and one things. One of my favorites that I wrote about way back in 2006 was the random landscape function. It creates a random landscape.

It's the automatic palette generator that really completes the effect coloring the "sea" and the "land" in just the right mysterious way. I added something else; I substituted black for the sky color instantly turning the land into a glowing moonlight landscape under a starless sky. It was a minor tweak. Inspired by the automatic machinery's artistry.

The sea is more sand like now and looks to be bathed in purple moonlight. The dreaming has started.

I don't care much for the sky here, but the green washboard sand and moon like mountains make me want to stay on this voyage.

Windswept rock now and light green plains. I like how the language of landscape is so easily spoken by the algorithm.

Every shore is different and even every part of the sand sea unique if you look. There's nothing else to do but look.

A golden sea in middle of the night. In the day time it will look darker. I think Fractal Vizion was intended to be a fractal program. Or am I dreaming?

One of my favorites. Clearly this is sea but the sea looks map-like. I always think of the Island of Doctor Moreau when I look at this one. It even inspired me to create a completely new website and call it, "The Art Gallery of Doctor Moreau".

Same color palette. I had to save the original one and then apply it to this image. The program likes to create a completely new one each time. I have to tell it to slow down.

Back into moonlight and the deserted, forgotten places of the Persian desert. I'm sure it was somewhere around here that Sindbad used the rocs to pick up diamonds for him. Mining is often the only industry in beautiful wastelands like this.

Is there a whirlpool in the blue sand out there? Sun is shining from somewhere. Perhaps this is no longer the Earth.

Another dream, another color. I never tire of these; it's like going for a walk on a magic carpet.

The perfect palette: colorful but silent.

Here it is again. The palette is like a set of genes and gives the image the eyes of its father.

Or the colored contact lenses of its father. Analogies are hard to come by in the synthetic kingdom.

This is new: an archipelago. When the water is frozen and covered with wind blown snow, its a new kind of desert.

The sand grows out of the land and just sits there.

Notice the difference when the sea is the horizon and not the land. The eye is drawn to it in a primordial way as Herman Melville in Moby Dick says, "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries."

"Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it."

The best assessment of synthetic art I've ever heard is by myself (I think I'm the only one who talks about it): It never rivals the greatest artists but it always rivals the average ones.

The Weird Image

2017-09-03T23:26:00.000-04:00

HP Lovecraft in his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) uses the word "weird" to describe a special quality in the works of a sub-genre of fiction that he labels, "The Weird Tale". I've found it to be a useful analogy to explain what the "synthetic aesthetic" is and what makes such machine made imagery surprisingly interesting. Just as Lovecraft speaks of The Weird Tale in fiction, I would speak of The Weird Image in art.

Quotes from Lovecraft:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.
[...]
Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.
[...]
And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

To sum up:

unexplainable... outer, unknown forces
conception of the human brain
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature
creation of a given sensation
the more completely and unifiedly... the better
atmosphere... atmosphere... atmosphere...

The Weird Image
Lovecraft speaks of weirdness entirely in the context of horror fiction and so his weirdness is really a horrifying weirdness. But the weirdness of the Weird Image provokes a much wider type of mental sensation and isn't oriented and defined exclusively by the disturbing themes of horror but rather is oriented around the broader theme of eccentricity. Weird images can be scenes of strange happiness. Of course horrifying weirdness may have made Lovecraft happy, too.

The weird image is one which inspires speculation and both a sense and sensation of the radically innovative. Consider if you can the visual art equivalent of: a peculiar aroma; or a strange new musical chord. One is confronted with something they can't categorize or identify and but which creates a clear, distinct and profound impression as if it was as real and as concrete and perceptible as a fragrance or a sound.

Max Ernst was there first
Some surrealist art employs what I would consider to be "synthetic" methods. These are what the surrealists referred to as "automatist" like grattage, fumage and decalcomania (scraping, smoking, paint squished under glass). Syntheticism is not limited to computers and so it's not surprising then that such surrealist works produced weird imagery in the same way computational methods do. They both work with the same senseless mechanical principles.

The Entire City by Max Ernst 1935 featuring grattage, what I would call a "synthetic" technique

Weird Photography
Ansel Adams' photo Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is a weird image in keeping with my definition of a "strange new chord".
Consider these three elements:

the moon,
the liquid, flowing clouds that reinforce and accentuate the eerie feeling of distance, silence and something rather hard to describe (the "weird")
the scattering of houses that forms the village of San Hernandez and echoes the mood of eerie peacefulness.

You see how weird a photograph can be? It's just a landscape, pastoral landscape even, and yet as Adams surely intended, it expresses a magnificent and mysterious sensation. That's the weirdness. But it's not really horrifying and wouldn't do well as a book cover to any of Lovecraft's works. The image is surreal however and if there's such a thing as surrealist photography this would be a good example. The "surreal image" and the "weird image" are probably pretty closely related.

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico - by Ansel Adams 1941

As a side note about art: notice how hard it is to describe what makes Moonrise as an image "work" and what gives it the impression(s) we have. Images are complicated in ways that the written word isn't. There may be more than one way to interpret a written work but there's always ten or twelve ways to interpret most paintings or photographs. The visual medium is powerful as well as mysterious. I think it's because our brains -- the real canvas in all this -- are a real mystery to explain.

The Mona Lizard

2017-09-03T23:06:00.000-04:00

The Mona Lizard by Leozardo, 2017, by permission of the Louvre

Where's the connection? It's in the sky. Notice up in the left corner, just to the side of Mona's head, there is an interesting but weakly detailed landscape scene in which a greenish flash of light is reflected off the night time overcast sky.

Compare with the old version:

I think mine has better irrelevant background details. Great artists like Leonardo were never very good at that. I don't think they even tried. There are limits to what you can do with a paintbrush.

The lizard started out as a Sterlingware fractal which was then processed in XnView using photoshop type filters that messed with the colors, textures (if in fact texture exists in a pixelized medium) and finally did a mirror image thing that produced that strange symmetrical look that transforms an image radically but simply --sometimes.

I was just testing out my 32 bit filters in a 64 bit program running on the wine emulator in 64 bit linux. In the synthetic realm the art is often in the details and the front and center main image can be less interesting than the little things hinted at on the sides.

Fog and Fyre

2009-04-18T10:49:00.001-04:00

When it comes to making art by pushing buttons and turning dials, there ought to be a general rule of thumb that says push every button, turn every dial. If it's there - turn it.

I just discovered the blur thing. It's always been there, but I guess I just thought it made things blurry and that's not terribly interesting. But I've discovered that the two blur parameters, blur-something and blur-something else are very interesting.

The second image in a series I've titled, Smudge. The first one didn't look cool when I looked at it a day later, so I deleted it. The blur effect is quite powerful and adds a unique style to the images. I guess you just don't know what the result of some parameter change will be until you see the results.

The above was left to render for a much longer time in order to made the light, translucent forms more visible. The blur does create the expected cold, foggy, wet, rocky seashore look and the black and white color limitation actually enhances the style.

Above, nothing in particular to say about this one except it shows more of the blotchy, translucency of the humble blur feature. I think the blur enhances the graininess which in turn gives an aged or patina effect to the image.

There's a minimalistic feel to many of these blurred Fyre images. In fact, the ones with more elements in them don't look as good, in my opinion. This combination of blur and the simpicity of Fyre (it only has a few rendering options) have a powerful effect. It's almost like the program has a whole new dimension to it.

If you have Fyre on your computer you can open these images in it and rework them as all the parameter settings for the program are stored in the images. The authors of the program, David Trowbridge and Micah Dowty, where pretty smart when they included that feature. The image, and the "genes" that made it, are right there. They're alive, man.

This algorithmic stuff is too far out.

The Wheel of Digital Art

2009-04-14T23:59:00.001-04:00

The digital medium allows for some very strange, head-warping things to be done. For instance, one can take one piece of art in it's final state, completed and ready for viewing, and use it as the raw material for another, completely new and different work of art. This is more than a mere "reworking"; it's a complete transformation of one thing into another where only the artist (i.e. machine operator) knows what has happened.

Made in Fyre, the above image is blown up to four times its size and transformed by Showfoto's block wave filter. I then cropped out a piece which is shown just below.

As always, sometimes it makes something interesting and sometimes it doesn't. I tried it on twenty or so images and came up with the following results:

The above, using the same procedure I just mentioned, yielded the image below:

The same thing again, from the above to produce the one below, which is a cropped out detail of the 4x image.

Above image used to make the one below.

Fyre makes very "clean" images. Normally, I use fractals or some other image treated with the India Ink filter that adds black engraving lines in an irregular way onto the image. The results from that are more messy and not so neat as the Fyre image results. The Fyre images produce almost a sort of black and white pen and ink style image that has a very distinct style.

One you get used to this sort of genetic recombination of image genes, one thing literally leads to another and I've even found myself going back into my old images made years ago because I've discovered a new filter that "feeds" on exactly that sort of raw material.

Can Bad Fractals be Good Art?

2009-04-04T01:12:00.001-04:00

Pantheon

Good software makes images that are too slick. It's hard to get good software to make smudgy, jagged, off-color stuff. Purebred imagery is predictable. Artists often make junk and crazy mistakes but it's a process of trial and error that leads to new styles. Good software and professional skills is a toxic combination that gets everything right the first time and inevitably leads to the best fractals -- a dead end.

I've given the fractal world many bad examples to follow and, unless my disciples are all off in the desert hiding, no one seems to be following my liquid path down the drain. But success and popularity are difficult obstacles to overcome. The encouragement of others is sometimes all it takes to keep someone going down a fruitless path to a heartless goal.

If you want to help someone produce better art, not necessarily better fractals, challenge them with negative criticism and encourage them to give it up. When the lights of success and encouragement go out, only the glow of your art will be left.

There is something that I call "Raw Style". It's imagery that looks better when it isn't anti-aliased and when it's not cooked and simply presented "as-is". As fractal software has progressed, it's become easier to process things and to do more to it. One would expect this to be a good thing, and it is if what you want to do is make better fractals, but it's bad because users quickly fall into a routine of tidying and polishing everything they make like obsessive-compulsive cleaning maids. Imagine what news photography would be like if before anyone took a photo of someone, the subject's mother appeared and combed their hair and straightened up their shirt collar before the photo was taken -- every moment would be ruined. Good art is often ready-made; but we overlook it because we don't expect it.

The Great Seal

I'm not saying you shouldn't tweak and process fractals. What I am saying is that you should ask yourself "Why?" and try to avoid it because it leads to much better fractals and really bad art. Fractal art is the domain of the Ugly Duckling; stop choking your swans.

The death of contests is good because contests take artists with talent and creativity and turn them into approval addicts. After just a few contests most artists already start to exhibit the symptoms of mental degeneration that accompany similar dependency disorders: restlessness; anxiety attacks; obsessive grooming; checking their mail every five minutes.

The anti-art tendencies of contests are easy to spot: judges who don't like art choose the best fractals and exhibit (no pun intended) an ingrained aversion to the bad ones. A good fractal art contest will present a very pronounced dislike of good fractals and show a real affinity for bad ones. But people like that don't run contests -- they run from contests.

A few rules of thumb: Great art is always unpopular because anything that's so intensely specialized and focused alienates at least 90 percent of its audience. It's almost a law of mathematics. But it's a good thing because it means that your own gut feelings about your work are probably more important and a more accurate measurement of it's value than the other 9 out of 10 people who may look at it -- if we can only stop deceiving ourselves. The majority is always wrong because whenever a lot of people think they all see the same thing it shows they aren't really looking very closely.

Art is all about taking the trivial more seriously. We can start by making bad fractals.

The Golden Shore 2

2009-03-30T21:43:00.001-04:00

Although I tried as best I could to hide from the ugly brute, he no sooner awoke than I was snatched up in one of his enormous hands. However, instead of consuming me like some dainty he in a very refined manner asked me who I was and how I came to be on this island.

Explaining to him as well as I could, for I had not yet recovered much from my unfortunate ordeal at sea, I told him I was Sindbad and had left my home in Baghdad and sailed from Bussorah almost sixty days ago. I had however been shipwrecked and washed up here after clinging to some timbers which were all that remained of my ship. I was suitably astonished when he responded in kind and told me that he too was a native of my own country and that if I was able to show him the way, he would carry both of us back there.

The means of doing this were no less extraordinary, for he claimed that once the sun had set he was embued with the power of walking on the sea as if it were dry land. The only reason he had not already left this lonesome island he said was because he was unable to find his way from here to the next island in time before the sun rose and was sure he would drown in the open sea if he did not reach there by then.

I assured him that while I was merely a merchant and not a sea captain, I could certainly direct him as I had made some efforts to learn the ways of navigation albeit in a casual way primarily as a method of relieving my boredom while on long voyages. As we were not far off from a series of islands just beyond which lay the mainland, we agreed to set off as soon as the sun set.

(From the 8th Voyage of Sindbad. Image made in Sterlinware 2.)

The Golden Shore

2009-03-29T21:38:00.001-04:00

Finally, after more than a week drifting about at the mercy of the sea, I saw in the distance some land. The coast appeared quite rugged and at first I thought myself to be suffering greatly from my ordeal for I perceived the shore to be golden and glittering like a Sultan's treasury. On shore I discovered that the sand that surrounded the cliffs were in fact made of gold just as my eyes had thought when I saw it far off at sea.

I was greatly confused at this for how could it be that such wealth could lie exposed and easy prey for anyone sailing past and yet be as undisturbed as this? Furthermore, there appeared to be a settlement not far away with a fine harbor and several large ships in port. My wonder at all this gold was quickly forgotten however when I stumbled upon a enormous pile of human bones and another one of those monstrous creatures whom I had hoped I would never see again. I now found myself wishing I was back at sea clinging to the wreckage of my ship. I took some comfort however in the fact that the giant appeared to be sleeping for the moment and unaware of my presence on his glittering golden shore.

(From The 8th Voyage of Sindbad. Image made in Sterlingware and processed with Flaming Pear's India Ink, Bayer pattern.)

Journey into Bubbles!

2009-03-28T23:08:00.001-04:00

bubbled02.loo

There's an odd render setting in Sterlingware 1.7 and 2.0 called "27. gaussian sine dimension 9". It's not terribly interesting...

Unless you just happen to be in the mood for twisting dials. It seems that at the default setting of 30 iterations all you get are some dull swirly things. But when you lower the iterations to 10, then you get these circular, radial wave, glass-like patterns.

It just goes to show that you haven't really seen everything until you've really seen everything.

After that it's a matter of playing around with the color controls to get something half-decent looking. Once again, we have to depart from the default settings, that cow-path of creativity that leads to barren pastures and stuff you don't want to step in.

Low color numbers look good, but the higher ones aren't bad. The intense radial pattern tends to turn into dust if there are too many steps from the higher numbers.

It's all a good example of how algorithmic art, as a creative pursuit, can work. You change variables and see what happens and keep at it until you find a setting that looks interesting and then you try as many formula variations as you can to see if it makes something of it. You adjust the machine.

I'm not really sure these images are best described as fractal even thought they are implementations of a fractal formula; they seem more disorganized and more a product of the rendering method's style than anything resembling a formula.

Sometimes I see something Kandinsky-like in the circles and clusters of circles.

There's a printed quality to the imagery, but it's the areas of complexity where the patterns collide that's most interesting.

Sometimes I think that all the program is really doing is just mixing up a lot of circles and randomly pouring them out onto the screen.

The radial patterns, especially when they intersect, resemble 2D atomic drawings of molecules.

It's one of the simplest and yet also the most creative aspects of Sterlingware.

In the end it's all imagery and the labels are as remote and meaningless as the detailed ingredients on the side of a chocolate bar.

Ice Star

2009-03-22T22:03:00.001-04:00

The heat death of the universe appears to be more than just a theoretical supposition.

Already it has been documented that parts of the universe have reached the level of zero energy, that being absolute zero, zero degrees Kelvin, or -273 degrees Celsius.

This is the domain of the literally, frozen stars.

Observing these entities is quite difficult and requires special instrumentation because their state of zero energy - heat death - means they do not emit light energy or heat energy.

As a result, such domains have been purely hypothetical and impossible to confirm until now.

Now we have photoshop filters and these Ice Stars can be seen for the very first time.

Cheap too.

No probes. No expensive funky, hi-fi telescopes.

Just me and my Mosaic Toolkit by Lance Otis.

Saving NASA billions.

Since 2005.

Just by pushing buttons and turning dials.

Mosaic Toolkit Adventures

2009-03-20T20:07:00.001-04:00

Mosaic Toolkit by Lance Otis. It's a "photoshop" filter that I use in XnView running with Wine on Ubuntu Linux; that's why it's really not a Photoshop filter in my mind, but then I guess "Linux" is just a kernel too and not a whole operating system.

I start with the Vernissage filter by Mario Klingemann that makes colored squares and rectangles; it's part of his Instant Art collection of filters -- a good name, I think. Then I go over to the Mosaic Toolkit and change the default settings to Square Rings (from just plain Squares) and set the Cell Size pixels to 10. Then I wait a really long time (it works faster natively on Windows) and click on apply.

After that you have the square shapes with little square windows and railings on the sides and it's just a matter of trying out different filters to change the colors or other simple things like that. Because the shapes are so clean and simple, many of the filters have much pronounced effects than when you apply them to more complex and photographic type images. It also makes for very small file sizes because they can be indexed, often down to 16 colors, and saved as pngs with file sizes as small as 5k. Of course, we all have broadband now, so who cares about all that dial-up friendly file size stuff?

I learned something deep and profound while doing all this: creativity is inherently algorithmic. We experiment with things (styles, methods, techniques) not in order to make a single image or piece of artwork, but rather in order to discover a procedure that can produce a wide range of interesting images. The procedure is a style and style is a procedure -- an algorithm, set of instructions.

The mechanical or predictable nature of algorithmic art is therefore something which is common to all art forms, even ones which are "handmade" like painting or drawing. Artists develop styles by experimenting and finding combinations of things which work and discarding ones that don't. Personal style is a big part of many artist's career objectives and in some extreme cases, the only goal they have -- to make artwork that consistently reflects a unique visual flavor.

So when it comes to working with machines -- algorithmic art -- one should attempt to discover styles or syndromes of effects that produce a type of imagery that is reproducible but capable of great variation. Vernissage and Mosaic Toolkit are one of those discoveries.

Algorithmic Art Thoughts - 1

2009-03-12T01:30:00.001-04:00

Algorithmic Art is something like a space station. In a space station, Earth-people live and work just like they do on Earth; breathing, eating, thinking, moving. But they do so in an environment that makes many of their routines and habits awkward and simply -- foreign.

There's no gravity on a space station, so something that is completely intuitive on Earth -- which way is down -- becomes completely meaningless out in space. Out in space one has to arbitrarily decide where the floor is and sitting "down" in a seat requires one to be forced and bucked into it.

In the context of space, many previously held assumptions are revealed to be based entirely on external forces found on Earth (eg. gravity). Algorithmic Art does the same thing for art by taking it out into space where the familiar frames of reference don't exist and can't exist because they're based entirely on factors which aren't present in Algorithmically produced imagery.

Algorithms are mechanical and so there is no human intent or direction in algorithmic art. Algorithms don't reproduce imagery from the real world like trees or human faces because they such things are not algorithmic. Trees and faces are not mathematically expressible concepts and when they do appear in algorithmic imagery then it's an accident or more accurately, just something that looks like a tree or face.

Photography and human artists are capable of reproducing real things because they have the capacity to copy the things around them. Algorithms on the other hand are, ironically, are much more creative and what they produce is always original, always new. That's what algorithms do best; they create algorithmic imagery, not realistic imagery.

Is Algorithmic imagery abstract art, then? It would look that way by virtue of elimination, since if it isn't realistic then it must be abstract. But I would say that it is more accurate and more meaningful to describe Algorithmic Art as something distinct from both realism and abstraction and subsequently to get rid of concepts that are only relevant to "hand-made" art and just accept it for what it is: more art.

Algorithmic imagery doesn't look like real things and yet it often does look like concrete things, tangible things, just not really tangible or concrete because they don't actually exist outside of the world of computing. So Algorthmic imagery has concrete characteristics and for that reason isn't really very abstract at all and yet to include it in the category of realism would require one to have a very insane view of reality.

So algorithmic art belongs in a category all it's own. I know that sounds like a colossal compromise and taking the easy way out, but if you spend any length of time studying algorithmic art I think you'll agree with me that it simply doesn't fit into the categories of realism or abstract by it's nature or by it's appearance.

It really is something completely new and I think that's why it hasn't been recieved as the bold new exciting thing that it is: viewers and critics get stuck on the elementary question, "What is it?".

But like I suggested earlier, algorithmic art's presence forces many of the boundaries and qualifications for art to be changed. (That is, unless one insists it isn't art at all.) But I think these changes to the definition of art are actually just ideas that have been around for some time, just as the law of gravity has been around for some time but only in the context of space was it fully demonstrated and exhibited. Algorithmic art enlarges the domain of art and reveals all those Earth-bound ideas for what they are.

(Images made in Sterling2, a fractal program)

Fractal Guernica

2009-03-03T00:57:00.001-05:00

Fractal Guernica, (guernica03.loo)

In the same category as room-temperature fusion, perpetual motion and the age-old alchemical quest to turn lead into gold, is added yet another bold and fearful challenge: to make a piece of fractal artwork that rivals the depth of expression of Picasso's famous painting, Guernica. I threw down this challenge recently albeit in a very off-handed way, via a blog posting and near the end of it, suggesting it was merely something mythical and hypothetical which would be good for one to contemplate and aim at, even if it was out of human reach.

Well, wonder of wonders, here it is -- all algorithm and all art. You could call it an accident, I suppose, but that's the whole point of the hitherto mythical Fractal Guernica concept: algorithms don't express anything other than algorithms. If algorithmic art is just an accident then fractal art is all about chasing ambulances and spotting crash scenes.

For those of you who like big art, or are just getting old and need to see everything large, here's a large version.

Anyhow, let's get the discussion of rich, visual symbolism started, the kind which only a really great work of art can provoke. Hopefully we'll be able to decode everything the artist is trying to say, because these things can be pretty complex and convoluted. And that's without even attempting to psychoanalyze the artist or take a Marxist perspective.

What's it all about? Hey, slow down. How about, what's that bull with the half-moon head all about? That's what I saw first too (foreground, left). Did the artist rip that right off Picasso or what? Actually, we ought to get something straight, right off the bat: the artist is the algorithm. What does an algorithm know about that?

The bull is actually a cow (unimportant) and is an allusion to the cow jumped over the moon nursery rhyme. But the moon has now obscured the cow's head and left it confused and blind. This is a direct reference to the space race and how it got bogged down once it actually landed on the moon subsequently losing it's direction and which since then has literally gone nowhere. The strength of the space age has become deluded by it's own achievements. The big green thing beside it comes later.

Background, left (top,left) is one of the most shocking off all images. It represents aircraft and perhaps bears some similarity to the original Guernica. The airplane has a huge mouth and is attempting to consume the Earth (the blue round thing). While in most of the world aircraft represent modern, advanced transportation, in other parts of the world aircraft are entirely different and play the role of the most voracious of all war machines. Don't think Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet; think Mig-29 or F-18. If you've ever seen, and particularly heard, a modern fighter jet maneuvering in the sky above you, the deep rumble, the sound of the sky ripping apart and your chest reverberating, ear drums rattling -- then this image is easily understood. The aircraft is depicted not as a gleaming white bird, but like a crocodile, an ancient lizard with a long, teeth-lined snout, pursuing the Earth itself. Snake of the sky, King of the Air.

Bottom, right. It is modern man himself (herself). Notice how long the arms are; very long, they're extended. Technology has extended the arms of modern man but at the same time weighed them down and reduced their choices. The golden glow (a recurrent theme, representing technological enlightenment) distorts his face and his head is turned at an angle which is out of sync with the things around him. There's more, but it's obvious.

Middle, right, above modern man. The volcano has a strange eruption on top of it because it's not a volcanic eruption at all -- it's an allusion to the Biblical tower of Babel on top of a natural tower, a volcano. The tall structure is a broadcast antenna. Broadcasting what? Babel sounds. The communication that links and informs so many all over the world is ultimately a source of confusion and something which discourages people from cooperating: propaganda; biased news reporting; stock manipulation, liar-mercials. Well, it's a small part of the total work, so let's not dwell on it.

Above the moon which is on top of the cow's head is a series of legged creatures enveloped in a golden glow (remember the golden glow?). Bonus marks to the art history students who guessed, Bruegel's Blind Leading the Blind. Except in this case it's the technologically enlightened who are blindly stumbling, one after the other.

Finally, the main element in this work, the golden glob of stuff dropping down (mid-picture) colliding with the green glob rising up. The golden glob is filled with things coming down from above -- space industry spin-offs -- biotechnology, genetic engineering, creatures dark and intriguing. The golden glob is the descending technological world which should be ascending, but has reversed direction and now comes into sharp conflict with the green movement of environmental responsibility and technological restraint. (Notice the purity and simplicity of the green glob as contrasted with the complexity of the golden one, although there is something like a red scorpion with his tail sticking out, in the green glob.)

On the large scale, note how the elements are at the same time detached from each other and yet in collision with each other. It suggests that their movements or trajectories are conflicting but not intentionally conflicting. Instead, the collisions come from the expression of their nature and not any sort of conscious will -- a sort of Babel like manifestation of decay through mental confusion rather than through conflicting or competing desires. Everything just falls apart because it no longer has any connection. The modern world is freedoms in collision.

Stepping back even further, there is some irony here that a work that depicts technology as some horrible thing destroying people and their relationships was in fact made using a fractal generator, one of the most technological of all things I would say. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this artist is in fact a hypocrite; demonizing technology and yet at the same time using it to to make art just for fun. Is he blinded by that golden glow too?

Whoa. Far out. That is so 21st Century.

Sterling-Worlds - Interactive Fractal Art

2009-02-20T00:58:00.001-05:00

Climb the mountain, explore the caves, or check out the little islands off shore... Just load the parameter file (shellcity02.loo) into Sterling2 and this whole little world is yours.
Fractals are a unique form of artistic imagery. They are more like sculptures and dioramas than the flat, static paintings they are often presented as because they can be viewed from more than one perspective.

Fractal Art in it's simplest form is more like photography because the image is made up as much by what is left out as what is included. Fractal Art is an artform of editing and selection -- browsing and choosing -- from what the generator creates.

In a simple, single-layer program like Sterlingware however, there's no reason why an artist has to limit himself to merely presenting still images to his audience. It's possible -- with fractals -- to present the viewer with the parameter file that will recreate the entire fractal environment and allow the viewer to explore it like it was a sculpture to be walked around and viewed from many angles.

In this way, fractals have the potential to be an interactive art form just like the Grand Canyon in the United States is interacted with by tourists. Despite the fact there are plenty of photographs and documentaries of the Grand Canyon, people aren't satisfied with all that and still want to see it for themselves and experience it in its natural, interactive setting.

I'm a big fan of Sterlingware because it's a creative tool that I just seem to get better results with than other fractal programs. I've always included parameter files alongside the images I posted on my blog and website because the parameter files are the Grand Canyon itself, so to speak, while the image is just a single view of it. With a program like Sterlingware, you can share an entire world with your audience and not merely a snapshot of it. The program automatically saves a parameter file everytime you save an image; and they're small too -- a 300 byte simple text file.

It's like the image is a door and the parameter file is the great big world behind the door. When given the parameter file, viewers can walk through the doorway and explore the whole world instead of just standing there and looking at the door.

Maybe I've looked at fractal generation differently. The way I've always worked right from the start with making fractal art is to adjust parameters and watch the effect it has on the appearance of a formula, in general, and then go hunting around for something to take a snapshot of. A good parameter setting in Sterlingware sets the stage for an ongoing harvest of interesting images. The combination of formula, render setting and color settings and a few other things creates a gigantic tree which now needs nothing more to complete the creative process than to be climbed and picked.

With multi-layered programs the process, I suspect, is fundamentally different and yields results which are also fundamentally different. The parameter file of a multi-layered fractal program (like Ultra Fractal, for instance) is like a photoshop file composed more of layers and transformational effects than "fractal stuff". The result is that one doesn't create a Grand Canyon, one creates a Grand Photo. Nothing wrong with that except that the process ends with just an image or two instead of starting with it and opening up a whole new realm for exploration. It's just a difference in the way the two types of fractal programs and creative processes work.

Single-layer programs produce imagery; multi-layer programs produce images. The imagery from a single-layer program is dynamic and almost limitless because it can be explored, zoomed, browsed, etc..., this gives it the potential to be more than just a still image creator and to exist as an artform which can be viewed from many different zoom levels and explored in many different locations. There's a term for this sort of thing; generative art or interactive or something. This sort of art is more than just a picture to look at and as such, the viewer's experience can be more than just look-ing; it can also be zoom-ing, search-ing, discover-ing.

I'm not saying something crazy, such as a program like Ultra Fractal doesn't produce fractal art; I'm just saying that the way it works is much more complex and input-oriented and because of this it lacks a feature that the simpler, single-layer programs have, which is the interactive, flowing, real-time, mission-to-Mars capability that makes a program like Sterlingware so much fun to use and so much fun to share.

When I first started using Sterlingware I saved thousands of images because using it was like going on a journey or expedition. I took snapshots of everything I saw because it was all so freaky and awesome. Later on I calmed down and learned to just capture the things that were really exceptional. But now I'm thinking that the journey and the expedition are unique aspects to the fractal artform and ought to be something presented to the audience as a form of fractal art in its own right.

Sterlingware Reloaded

2009-02-18T10:27:00.001-05:00

Made in Sterling2
(parameter file: shell01.loo )

That great fractal classic by Stephen Ferguson, Sterlingware, has been been reconfigured by Tad Boniecki (aka Soler7) with 50 new formulas and released for download as Sterling2. And it's totally free too.

Now many of you will know me as a sort of Sterlingware sage; the renowned author of Tim's Sterlingware Tutorial, that classic guide to using Sterlingware 1.7. I've spent thousands of hours experimenting with Sterlingware 1.7, the previous version made in 1997, and learned just about everything there is to know about it.

So you'd think a guy like me would have known that an updated version had been released -- a whole 6 months ago!

No. I only found out about it because I was surfing around and - I forget exactly how - found myself at Paul N. Lee's list of fractal programs. My first thought was how old and out of date these listings must be. I could remember visiting this very same web page back in 2002 when I'd first discovered fractal programs and wanted to find and try out every one available. In fact, I think this was where I originally found Sterlingware 1.7. So you can imagine how stunned I was to see right below the link to that venerable, decade-old, SterlingWare 1.7, a brand-new link for SterlingWare "2.0".

Tad Boniecki tells the story this way:

In mid-2007 I contacted Stephen [Ferguson], as I thought that Sterling was an excellent program that lacked one key feature - a formula editor. He told me that adding a formula editor would be a huge job and that in any case the development environment to compile all the parts of Sterling was no longer available, as it is obsolete. However, he encouraged me to do the next best thing, which was to change the formulae in the program. With his help I set up the development environment on my PC and was able to recompile Sterling and to make changes to just one part of the program, ie the formulae. Other parts could not be changed.
(from http://www.soler7.com/Fractals/Sterling2.html)

Tad seems to share my view of Sterlingware (aka SterlingWare, Sterling, Sterling-Ware). The program does an awesome job of rendering fractal formulas and it lacks nothing in its creative powers except for just more of those formulas to render. The natural response to this, as Tad already mentioned, is a formula editor (parser,compiler) which would allow users to input whatever formulas they like.

I don't know all the ins and outs about how Sterlingware was built. Actually I don't know any of those sorts of things. But I do know that Stephen Ferguson has other fractal programs, such as InkBlot Kaos and Tierazon, and they both have formula "parsers" which allow users to input and experiment with custom formulas. I've used the formula parser in InkBlot quite a bit and it really extends the creative abilities of the program although it's not as fast as the built-in formulas that come with the program. Sterlingware is different in some basic ways, and this is what I'm sure gives it its special, photo-realistic capabilities. Sterlingware does things that I've never seen any other fractal program do.

More of the story from Tad:

Between June 2007 and August 2008, I spent some 100 to 200 hours changing formulae (that's the quick part) and then testing them to see which ones produced interesting images. It turned out that creating good formulae was much more difficult than I expected. In the process I made and saved some 1,600 fractals. That's not counting about 30,000 that I partially made but did not save. I have finished this process, so Sterling2 now has 50 formulae, all different from those of Sterling.

"100 to 200 hours changing formulae". It's a lot of work to produce even just a modified version of a program like this. If Tad spent that much time just adding new formulas, I wonder how many hours Stephen Ferguson must have spent designing, programming, testing and debugging all the other parts of Sterlingware? It takes real dedication and devotion to produce software of this quality.

I can confidently say that Tad has done a magnificent job in his selection of these formulas. I've spent at least 10 hours over the last couple of days since I downloaded it (only 437K) and I'm very excited about the potential for making great images that these formulas have. The image up above was made with one of Tad's new formulas and it's precisely the kind of formula that worked so well in the original Sterlingware (1.7) and is the kind of formula I would have hoped a new version of Sterlingware would have. Tad's new formulas are right up there in the same category as the original ones Stephen Ferguson included in version 1.7. A really excellent addition to the previous Sterlingware version.

I want to stress that all credit for creating this program belongs to Stephen Ferguson. My role was restricted to modifying the algorithms. I also want to thank Stephen for helping me to modify his program and for allowing me to release it as freeware, here on my site.
(from http://www.soler7.com/Fractals/Sterling2.html)

Hey, that's no empty, trifling comment that Tad is making. Not only has Stephen Ferguson helped him out by providing the source code and help with configuring the "obsolete" development environment to allow for recompiling the program, he's also allowed Tad to give away the revised program for free from his website!

Three cheers for Steve, man. He's made one of the greatest and most creative fractal programs ever, and now thanks to Tad, one very talented and hard-working fan, it's just been reloaded with 50 spectacular formulas for a 10-year anniversary encore performance.

Let the fractal feasting begin!

Scrollica

2009-02-10T23:10:00.001-05:00

I subscribe to the Project Gutenberg (public domain electronic books archive) recent additions RSS feed and it often brings to my attention books that I would never go looking for. One of these I checked out recently was called Pictorial Photography in America 1921 by Pictorial Photographers of America. I was just curious...

I found this passage interesting (1921):

Is Photography to Remain a Black and White Art?

[Question] “What forecast, Mr.White, do you make of future developments in photography? Is it to remain a black and white art, or are photographs in natural colors to supersede the familiar photograph of the present day in our exhibitions and in our homes?”

[Answer] “I think that the fundamental expression of photography is in black and white, and as we develop what I would call the definite photographic quality, black and white will maintain its present ascendency.”

Anyhow, at the end of the long gallery of Pictorial photos I found this ad. Everything is in black and white in this book and the various shades of gray and the great variety of small details made me think that this would make an excellent candidate for block waving in Showfoto. As usual, it turned out differently.

Once again (I did this before in a post called Spider Writing) I discovered it was the text areas that were the more interesting parts when block waved. I guess the construction of text is so complex and the combinations of characters has such variety that one gets an enormous amount of unique imagery when you do strange things to it like block waving. The camera images were all pretty much the same.

It's a type of artwork that consists of details. I would call it nano-art.

This is what machines do. They don't take photographs -- they make photographs.

Stones in the Abyss

2009-02-02T23:25:00.002-05:00

In Star Trek's greatest scenes we seem to see
the face of outer space
exactly at the moment when
it first attained the title of
"caribbean cruise"

They run about the screen in an
interplanetary rage
of curiosity
Heaped up
glowing with crystals and orange sand
under pastel skies
in an abstract landscape of painted trees
sculpted rocks alien make-up and silver toys
slippery mind game computers and
and all the final speculative sub-plots
of the
"imagination of science"

[...]

[...]

Anyhow, you get the idea. It was a nice vision of space back then when traveling to the Moon was seen as just the beginning instead of just the end. But now, sending out space probes, which ought to be the start of a great real-life drama instead of the start of a trickle of data, is less like launching a mechanical Columbus and more like tossing stones into an abyss.

(Image made in Kandid.)

Evil Seeds from Space

2009-01-31T22:35:00.002-05:00

As beautiful and wondrous as the cloud stars are, we must not forget that they also contain dangers.

Just as the enchanted world of the coral reef holds both spectacular sights as well as some of the most ferocious predators found in the sea, cloud stars have been known to have sinister things lurking in their shadows too.

Early on, both space probes as well as Earth based sensing equipment detected small clusters of highly radioactive debris inside a number of cloud stars.

Just as some trees have thorns, these radioactive masses emitted sharply focused, intense beams of ionizing radiation in the form of gamma rays. The actual number of these "jellyfish" clusters is quite small yet would pose a significant threat to probes and of course to the crews of a manned space craft.

Ironically, these radioactive masses also have the potential to play the role of navigational beacons as their radioactive beams are so focused that they can easily be used in the way a magnetic compass utilizes the directional aspects of the Earth's own magnetic field. Barring that, they also serve as their own lighthouses as they're easily detected by onboard sensors which all spacecraft already routinely employ to avoid radiation hazards in space.

(Images made in Kandid using the Affine thing in grayscale.)

Nanosphere

2009-01-30T22:49:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I can see it. I can see them. Street lights, apartment buildings; a bustling city on a grain of rice. The tail lights of cars; the gritty sidewalks and the busy people. There's sky too. A bit. The smog gives it a golden glow. A dirty golden glow. It's five o'clock in the afternoon and it's winter. In the shadows you can see the night. People going home. But some of them are not too tired to see the great dirty city and the dots, connected, that make up the bigger dot.

It's a thousand streets and sidewalks; electric wires and railings; data flows and networks. This is the x-ray of the city - everywhere in one place. The abstract is real because that's what our minds see.

Howler Stars

2009-01-25T00:43:00.002-05:00

Although cloud stars have only very recently been discovered, it is already apparent that there are many kinds of them.

One of the most recent types added to the list are the howler variety.

Howler stars received their name because of their characteristic radio frequency emission which when received on standard radio-telescope equipment resembles a howling noise similar to wind or the suction sound associated with a whirlpool.

It's not understood how a cloud star can also be a radio frequency emitter (RFE) because, once again, their low density eliminates the usual sources by which normal stars emit light, heat and all other types of electromagnetic radiation.

One possibility that's been suggested is that cloud stars that "howl" don't actually create the radio transmissions themselves like a pulsar does but rather only alter the signal produced by another star just like a pocket of gas can act like a prism when regular light from another source is passed through it.

This is similar to one of the theories used to explain the existence of cloud stars themselves, that being resonances or eddies in the gravitational fields of stars which creates areas of stronger than normal gravity where gas and other matter subsequently collect yet without the presence of any mass which would normally be necessary to create such a gravitational field.

In fact some astronomers at first referred to these cloud star formations as "sargasso" stars in reference to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, a central area where debris becomes trapped due to the ocean currents which revolve around it and independently of any influence by land.

Candle Ships

2009-01-24T15:25:00.002-05:00

While still in the very early planning stages, NASA has released plans for a space ship that is powered entirely by the energy released by a single wax candle.

Owing to the weightlessness of space and the complete lack of drag which slows down terrestrial aircraft, the actual energy requirements of space travel are relatively small. So small in fact that a small, efficiently designed craft could theoretically travel at 1,000 mph using no more than 1,200 Joules -- the energy released by a 400 gram candle in one hour.

As is often the case, however; the Candle Ship is competing for research and design dollars with another similar project called the Boxing Ring Ship.

The Boxing Ring Ship utilizes the heat given off by the human body during strenuous exercise. Enclosed in a special room whose special walls absorb heat and convert it into electricity, two astronauts would literally fight it out in order to power their space ship and reach their destination.

Owing to the design of the Boxing Ring Ship, a much larger crew would be required but they would not have to be so carefully picked or trained. In fact, a ship with a particularly poorly trained crew and much less discipline may actually move faster and generate more energy than the average well-trained and highly selected crew which NASA currently favors for all its missions.

The Boxing Ring Ship came about as a spin off from the Screaming Crew Ship which was powered by the sound waves generated by the crew screaming in a specially designed compartment made to collect vibrations and convert them into electric power. Early on however, it was found that crew members had much less endurance when it came to screaming than fighting and so the Boxing Ring method was substituted.

Most researchers favor the Candle Ship design although it has been suggested that a combination of all three would add greater reliability.

Isle of the Dead

2009-01-23T22:03:00.001-05:00

It's not such a great image, but I posted it because of it's interesting similarity to Bocklin's Isle of the Dead.

Bocklin's painting is surreal, and yet there is really nothing overtly surreal; the effect comes entirely from our mind. Which is why I find abstract or semi-abstract works are the most expressive and powerful works of art. They look like something real; but they look like something more than just real. There is something unpredictable and unnatural about the alien hand that made them -- that is, the computer algorithm. This Isle of the Dead was painted by dead things -- a machine.

Still, Bocklin's painting is a fine example of the greatness of what I call, "Handmade Art" -- the human stuff. He has really captured the dreamlike vision he saw in his mind.

Iterated Isle of the Dead 2. Sounds like a trashy horror movie sequel.

The images were made in Kandid -- spontaneously and mysteriously, like an island on the horizon where there should be none.

Cloud Star

2009-01-22T12:06:00.002-05:00

Pictured above is an image of a recently discovered Cloud Star. Although theoretically impossible due to their low density, the Cloud Stars are ready for display and discussion at the beta level.

Early speculation has determined that these Cloud Stars are not actually stars in the normal sense as their surface temperature is relatively quite low. While they do emit a significant amount of microwave and infra-red radiation, it is considered to be at a level which is not harmful to human life and in fact may be very complementary to it.

A Cloud Star can best be described as a low density energy emitting gravitational field (LDEEGF). Within the cloud cosmic rays and other forms of radiation common in space are greatly reduced in the same way that Earth's atmosphere shields us from these dangers and makes space suits unnecessary.

Since Cloud Stars have such a strong resemblance to an atmosphere without a planet, it has been suggested that it may be possible to build space stations there or even inhabit the surface of small planetoids that are already there with a minimum of effort since the environment is much more sheltered and much less inhospitable than the lunar surface or that of asteroids in ordinary space and therefore life support systems would be less complex and less expensive to provide.

(Images made in Kandid using the Iterated Function System (IFS) Affine Transformation. Text from my own imagination. But who knows? Perhaps it's possible. It's nowhere near as crazy as relativity or some of that other "science" stuff.)