Vertiginous

Vertiginous (1998)

My father once told me that this was his favorite image of mine. He said he liked the detail in it. I'm putting it up today just for him.

I'm not sure what he saw in it. I never thought there was anything special about it. It's just something that popped out of Tiera-Zon one afternoon when I was first exploring fractals. I was just beginning to have mysterious vertigo attacks at the time -- hence the title. Later, I was diagnosed with Meniere's Disease -- which explained my increasing bouts of dizziness and hearing loss.

My father visited my web site often, and he often expressed an interest in my art. Once he retired, he'd meet his morning coffee buddies and sometimes tell them about my fractals. They'd ask him what fractals were -- and how I made them. He said he wasn't exactly sure what fractals were, and he'd almost always add: I have no idea how he does it.

My father passed away in his sleep last week.

I'm really going to miss him in so many different ways -- including hearing what he'd think about my recent art work.

Like others of the "greatest generation," he served his country during WWII on both Peleliu and Okinawa. He lived with my mother for 56 years. He raised six children. He wrote poetry. Even after suffering a stroke several years ago, he volunteered at his local hospital in order to help others.

I often admired him -- but never so much as when I became a father myself. Many times, as my mind reeled with the complexities of raising a child, I asked the same question -- just as I do now that he is gone:

I have no idea how he did it...

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Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, digital art, greatest generation, vertiginous

Nude Descending a Waterslide

Nude Descending a Waterslide (2007)

With apologies to Marcel Duchamp...

Unless the splash park is now the new royal ball...

Lower right corner detail of Nude Descending a Waterslide

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Made with Sterling-ware and post-processed until I lost my trunks and water went up my nose.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, digital art, water park, marcel duchamp, nude descending a staircase

Questions about the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest...

A New Way of Seeing (2007)

…you should be asking -- asking now that Version.2006 has a year of dry paint and Version.2007 has just rolled its wet pixels off the assembly line-- asking before you start your generators and begin revving your fractals for next year’s Version.2008:

~Why is the judges' work exhibited with that of the winners? Isn't this breach of universally accepted protocol in itself enough to invalidate the entire contest? Can viewers easily know which artists were self-selected and which were juried? In other words, are distinctions between judges (who this year are semantically disguised as “panel members”) and winners thoroughly and consistently made obvious -- at the exhibition in Madrid, in every online gallery, and in all promotional materials? Who made the decision to allow the judges’ work to be shown with the winning art? Who selected the judges, and what criteria were used to make the choices? And what is one to make of the 60/40 ratio in this year’s exhibited work ( Winners: 15 / Judges: 10)? Is this whole thing really a competition at all -- or is it more of an invited exhibition where the judges walk their own work in through the delivery door and hang their art (with apparently no shame) beside the winners? How can anyone then tell the winners from the choosers? Shouldn't this competition be either a juried contest or a by-invitation-only exhibit -- but certainly not both?

~What percentage of the exhibited images (including art from the judges) from both last year and this year were created using Ultra Fractal? Over 75%? Higher? Don’t these numbers suggest the competition is just a facelift of the old Fractalus art contests dressed up in formalwear to better glitter for the press, seem more cosmopolitan to the viewers, and appear more inclusive and broad-based to the artists? But, if this actually is a retread in new duds and on steroids primarily designed to pump up UF art and artists, shouldn't all the contest’s promotional and advertising materials make that fact explicit?

~Why is the submission size for entries so large when the director surely understands that artists using programs other than UF, as well as artists who post-process heavily, would face obstacles that could easily exclude them from competing? Why, in fact, do all prints have to be made to the specifications of doors and picture windows, as clearly seen in this short video piece about last year’s contest found on YouTube? Is bigger always better to display fractal details? Do we need to blow up the Mona Lisa or The Scream to plasma TV dimensions to “improve” them? Wouldn’t an exhibition of prints of an assortment of sizes be just as elegant and even more aesthetically pleasing? Or are the titanic entry requirements intentionally mandated to insure a certain fractal program (guess which one) is emphatically privileged?

~How many of the winners, alternates, and honorable mentions are now taking or have taken classes from contest judges who teach art students at the Visual Arts Academy? Did one of the judge’s students report her two entries were recognized in the contest-- one as an alternate and the other as an honorable mention? Did another student selected for the exhibition note her his winning entry was created as a masking exercise in one of the judge’s classes? Did these judges recuse themselves from passing judgment on entries they recognized as being from their own students? Moreover, were any safeguards put in effect to insure judges refrain from making a recommendation when they recognized a friend’s work? Aren’t such reasonable guidelines commonplace protocols in literary and art contests? Here is an excerpt from the entry requirements of the annual literary contest held by the Associated Writing Programs:

To avoid conflict of interest and to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, friends and former students of a judge (former students who studied with a judge in an academic degree-conferring program or its equivalent) are ineligible to enter the competition in the genre for which their former teacher is serving as judge.

How can the people responsible for the contest not see such an inherent conflict of interest? And doesn’t a situation where winners are thanking other winners for their formulas and where students are selected for inclusion by their teachers run an increased risk of presenting an exhibition showcasing a single, inbred, highly homogenized style?

~Isn’t Professor Mandelbrot generally considered to be the father of all fractals? Did he know that the work exhibited under the auspices of the "contest" that bears his name caters to the UFractalus school and is nowhere near a representational sampling of the current, multi-dimensional breadth of contemporary fractal art? Would he maybe prefer "his" contest to display more diversity in its range of fractal styles, programs, forms, and visions?

~And, in the end, isn’t the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest just a publicity stunt by the director and the judges to concoct a “prestigious” contest out of whole cloth and gild it with a veneer of juried rigor? Isn’t it both a sham and a scam that allows their own work never to risk the uncomfortable scrutiny of being judged itself -- but to instead be safely grandfathered into an exhibition of their own creation?

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Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, fractal contest, digital art, Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, Visual Arts Academy, Ultra Fractal, fractalus

Homage to Sonny Rollins

Homage to Sonny Rollins (2007)

Happy birthday to Sonny Rollins -- one of my favorite jazz musicians. He's 76 today.

Here he is, age 29, playing "Weaver of Dreams" with just bass and drums in the Netherlands in 1959. Enjoy...

Lower right corner detail of Homage to Sonny Rollins

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Made with Fractal Zplot and post-processed until it slipped away into improvisation.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, digital art, sonny rollins

Shining Light into the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest

Liturgical Torch (2007)

Tim Hodkinson over at Orbit Trap shines light into the darker corners of this year's Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest.

You might recall I wrote about this same contest earlier this summer and raised a few points questioning the propriety of its operation. My writings led to spirited discourse with the contest's director that culminated in this very revealing email exchange. In the end, he denied me access to my own web site that I paid him to host on his server. As a result, I was forced to move my web site to a new host and domain. Given the level of vindictiveness displayed toward me, I admire Tim's courage for also speaking up. That's why I'm inviting my readers to hear Tim out.

Among Tim's observations...

He suggests the contest is designed to showcase a specific fractal software program and the artists who use it:

First off, it ought to be perfectly obvious to anyone who reads the rules that the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest is ultimately going to result in an exhibition made up of highly polished work made in Ultra Fractal. It's there. It may not be intentional, but if you ask the question, "Why?" (and you should always ask that), the answer is plain: those are the attributes that they think makes good Fractal Art.

The required image sizes alone immediately narrow down the possibilities. Check out the names of the judges and see the sort of work they produce online and you'll get an even clearer view of where this contest is leading. Check out last year's results. That's the sort of artwork this contest is all about and was directed, by design, to be.

Tim also questions the appropriateness of inviting the judges to have their own work hung in the exhibition beside the works of "winning" artists:

If you read carefully you'll also realize that the "exhibit" is not the same as the contest results. The "exhibit" is made up of two groups of work: the contest winners and the judges own, self-selected work that is not judged, but is included with the contest winners for reasons I still can't understand, although it may have been a half-baked idea -- the first year. Why have a "contest" and then add unjudged work to it? Why is it considered a conflict of interest for the judges to submit their own work to the selection committee, but not when they select it themselves and have it automatically included in the exhibit? (Rules 2.1) Why not simply have the judges submit their work like everyone else, but abstain from voting on it? Or just not submit anything at all?

Tim reserves his most direct criticism for the contest's judges:

Why separate [the judges'] work from the contest? As I mentioned, contests set standards and make statements about what is good (selected) and what isn't (unselected). Conflicts of interest regarding selection undermines that standard and in the extreme case, invalidates it on the grounds that motives other than artistic quality influenced the selections. Pretty simple reasoning, don't you think?

This is the achilles heel of the contest and it ought to be eliminated because it's insulting to the judges as ultimately it makes them look like they're cheating and using the exhibit to present their own artwork under the guise of having received critical acclaim (ie. selected by the judges -more than one) when in fact it only reflects their personal choice (one judge). They're all respected fractal artists. They don't need this private, back door to the exhibit.

If you're interested in fractals and fractal art, Tim's entire essay is well written and worth your time.

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Technorati Tags: Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest, fractal art contest, madrid, art criticism, ultra fractal

Fiends without a Face

Fiends without a Face (2007)

Weird for the sake of weird...
Moe Szyslak, The Simpsons

We know fractals are said to be supposedly infinite, highly recursive, and sometimes interpreted through aesthetics. But can the exaggeration and irony of camp be one of those aesthetic crash dives?

The critters in this image reminded me of the "monsters" from that psychotronic gem Fiend without a Face.

I ain't got no/body since she left me
And I don't know why
But I'm startin' to cry
I ain't got no/body...
--"Ain't Got Nobody", Grand Funk Railroad

Another one of those remarkable strings of nuclear accidents in the 1950s unleashes a rash of caterpillaric brainstems snaking through the Canadian countryside and snacking on the locals' left and right hemispheres. Viewer empathy begins to leak into the mix as many of the spine-sucking creatures are dispatched with macho gusto by pistols at point blank range. When shot, their brainstems curl like ribbons, and their cerebrums emit leaking oil sounds as strawberry preserves dribble out of their lobes. Once the bumbling technicians have their skulls drained like unwanted swamps and the responsible nuclear plant is destroyed, each rampaging neck-clinger becomes a literal no-brainer and melts into what looks like bubbling custard.

Hi there. You're only the peripheral romantic interest in this film. So you won't actually be needing your brain for this role.

And you thought all you had to worry about were Chernobyl collateral damage and truly infinite waste storage in Yucca Mountain and elsewhere.

I've argued previously on this blog that fractals have attributes associated with fine art. I guess the reverse is true, too. Fractals can also take the low road. As we learn from hey I coulda written that crap on Wikipedia:

Camp has been from the start an ironic attitude, embraced by anti-Academic theorists for its explicit defense of clearly marginalized forms. As such, its claims to legitimacy are dependent on its opposition to the status quo; camp has no aspiration to timelessness, but rather lives on the hypocrisy of the dominant culture. It doesn't present basic values, but precisely confronts culture with what it perceives as its inconsistencies, to show how any norm is socially constructed. This rebellious utilisation of critical concepts was originally formulated by modernist art theorists such as sociologist Theodor Adorno who were radically opposed to the kind of popular culture that consumerism endorsed.

So can fractal art now be considered postmodernist? After all, someone once told me my art(ifact) was "all surface."

And, yeah, I think this post could be seen as a metanarrative...

Until someone totally deconstructs it in the comments...

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Image rendered in QuaSZ and mildly post-processed until my brain went missing and I stopped.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, digital art, postmodernism, metanarrative, fiend without a face

The Bed You Made

The Bed You Made (2007)

Old expressions from labs of lust
where spliced mice make nests from shredded
paper. Once you take off
your clothes reactions are tested.

You can't go back
and your skin is unlike a sheet
blank and type free. What is written
on your face is a maze

of fear
you run each day.

Upper left corner detail of The Bed You Made

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Image rendered in Sterling-ware and post-processed until the exercise wheel squeeked and the mattress sagged.

Please note my art web site has a new URL and domain:
Rooms with a View
http://wrightart.net

Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, poetry, bed you made

Who Dissected Roger Rabbit

Who Dissected Roger Rabbit (2007)

The function of art is to disturb. Science reassures.
--Georges Braque

Andrea Yates believed that cartoon characters told her she was a bad mother who fed her children too much candy...
--Court TV News

For some reason, disembowelment and bloodshed is a helluva lot funnier when it's animated. We have no idea why. It's just the way it is.
--Atom Films

This image has, well, guts.

There's been quite a bit of talk on this blog about breaking the traditional assumptions that fractal art is grounded in an aesthetics of beauty. Fractals are abstract. So how can they "mean" anything? And, if they are non-referential, does this imply they can only be wildly pleasing to the eye? Exhibit A: Another saturated spiral explodes from its slick paper as one turns over each new month in a Fractal Universe calendar.

Still, there has also been plenty of talk here lately about "ugly" fractals. Fractals "with dirty faces." Fractals that refuse to be eye candy. Fractals that assault rather than soothe the senses.

Is my image today in bad taste? Or merely a comment on the exaggerated violence found in many cartoons. After all, a far worse fate usually awaits Tom in every Tom and Jerry short. Lawnmowers shaving him from tail to skull. A falling iron transforming the top of his head into a landing strip.

Wile E. Coyote gets today's picture -- even if Itchy and Scratchy feel it doesn't go far enough.

One of Tex Avery's whistling wolves getting smashed with a frying pan that turns his face into a dinner plate is funny. Cartoon characters whispering to Andrea Yates and telling her to drown her kids in a bathtub is not funny.

And fractals, as art, can steer viewers either way.

So is my image today disturbing? Or as funny as being pulverized into an accordion shape by a falling anvil? Or is it just silly or pretentious or bland. Whatever. You -- the viewer -- get to decide.

But I'm betting it's not pretty.

Upper left corner detail of Who Dissected Roger Rabbit

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Image made with Sterling-ware and post-processed until I chased it off a cliff, waved goodbye, and disappeared downward leaving only a small cloud of smoke behind.

Rooms with a View. Please note the new address. Here's why I was forced to move.

Technorati Tags: fractal, fractal art, digital art, art, cartoon violence, roger rabbit

Minos

Minos (2007)

Hopefully, one day, Dick Cheney will have to stand before this dude...

From you could have written it yourself Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, Minos...was a mythical king of the island of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. After his death, Minos became a judge of the dead in Hades. The Minoan civilization has been named after him.

[...]

Minos reigned over Crete and the islands of the Aegean Sea three generations before the Trojan War. He lived at Knossos for periods of nine years, at the end of which he retired into a sacred cave, where he received instruction from Zeus in the legislation which he gave to the island. This included the establishment of pederasty as a means of population control on the island community: [They] “segregated the women and instituted sexual relations among the males so that women would not have children" (from Aristotle's Politics).He was the author of the Cretan constitution and the founder of its naval supremacy.

In Attic tradition and on the Athenian stage Minos is a cruel tyrant, the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed the Minotaur. It seems possible that tribute children were actually exacted to take part in the gruesome shows of the Minoan bull-rings, of which we now have more than one illustration.

[...]

In Dante's The Divine Comedy, Minos sits at the entrance to the second circle in the Inferno, which is the beginning of proper Hell. Here, he judges the sins of each soul and assigns it to its rightful punishment by indicating the circle to which it must descend. He does this by circling his tail around his body the appropriate number of times. He can also speak, to clarify the soul's location within the circle indicated by the wrapping of his tail.

Upper right corner detail of Minos

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Made with FraSZle. Post-processed until the image proclaimed me to be a heretic, wrapped its tail around itself six times, and sent me to my proper circle.

My art web site is still off line. Here's why.

Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, computer art, minos

So-So Shepherd

So-So Shepherd (2007)

Best keep an eye out for those wolves in sheep's clothing.

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Made with Fractal Zplot. Post-processed until it got lost and could not find its way home again.

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Please note that the address for Rooms with a View has changed -- and that my art web site is presently off line at this time. I'm not sure when sections of the site will be operational again. Moreover, most of the click-to-open larger versions of my posted images on this blog will no longer work. I am sorry for any broken links or inconvenience.

Why is my web site suddenly down? Here's why.

Upper left corner detail of So-So Shepherd

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Technorati Tags: photoblog, fractal, fractal art, digital art, computer art, shepherd, wolves