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Exploring Fractals
This gallery is a selection of works from my formative years as an artist, when I was focused on static 1/1s. They were shared as a series of tweets over 100 days in 2022 as a retrospective on where I've been, and minted as NFTs, but placing them together in a gallery helps tell the story of my journey into math art. I had a lot of fun organizing them according to the tools, techniques, or themes used -- categorizations I didn't give as much thought at the time of their creation!
In 2009, I'd just graduated from college and moved back to my hometown in rural Broadway, VA. I'd experienced a few years of immersion in math and programming, and an eclectic intersection of engineering/academic and EDM/psychedelic cultures. I was 22 years old -- at a turning point where it felt like whole rest of my life was in front of me. It was mine to do what I wanted with, but I had absolutely no idea what that was. There was a historically bad recession at that time, and a tough job market, so I took one of the only jobs I could find nearby in my field -- as a part-time software tester. This left me with a lot of free time on my hands.
My senior year in college, I'd taken a class on Cyber Art that resonated with me. I'd adopted the practice of sketching out creative ideas using technology, and soon found myself sketching for fun -- which I carried forward into my free time after college. It ended up being a prolific time where I was making art using fractals and photographs. Photography had become a hobby in college, and it was exciting to see how I could blend it with my new practice of digital art. The Cyber Art class had left me with a very "how can you hack this?" approach to art that led down a path of altering, distorting, or corrupting photos (a technique I called "photomod").
100 Days of Ixnay
I spent a lot of time exploring fractals with Xaos, a free program for zooming into escape time fractals. I'd explore, adjust the equations until I liked the colors, and then export for post-processing in Paint.NET (which was my go-to for image editing). This was my first experience with printing my work -- as posters, that I sold at music festivals. It was the first time I really felt like I was "making art"
A few of the themes I was interested in were: the relationship between order and chaos, the repetition of shapes or textures, glitchiness/chaos, and capturing shapes and colors that make me feel things. I think my photography practice came into play with these, as I thought a lot about how to "frame the scene" when zooming and cropping in Xaos. The interactive/realtime nature of Xaos also means there were a lot of opportunities to find shapes that look like things -- like hearts, mountains, snowflakes, etc.
Cloud Highlights
Some of my favorite photography subjects were clouds. There are so many interesting textures and shapes in clouds that feel connected to the world of fractals. I edited to emphasize contrast, and used artificial-looking color to remove context for the viewer and draw attention to the shape and texture. I was also playing with artifacts created by the pixels in the camera sensor.
Isolines
As I started writing programs of my own to generate fractals, I experimented with different ways to render them. One of the techniques I used was a sort of [isoline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_line) connecting regions of a fractal with some property in common. It's like a topological map of an escape time fractal's iterations.
Many of these show the structure or "bones" of some fractal, rendered at a high level of detail and often with a characteristic organic appearance. I would spend hours working towards a specific 1/1 output, so the colors are mathematical (not a palette), but carefully customized by hand for an enjoyable appearance. I experimented with bold, vibrant colors for most pieces, but tried subtler ones in works like "fact not fiction" and "lakeside".
Art from this period was made using Perl. I wrote some code to generate the BMP file header, and then wrote RGB values into the files manually. Some of the later images are from an evolutionary algorithm -- one of my earlier experiences with generative art.
Many Patterns Project
This project paired an evolutionary algorithm with the isoline technique to generate thousands of outputs that I curated down to a small set. It was a Perl script that would create an image, and scan the image to see if it was "interesting" or not. If so, the program would read its own source code into memory, make some alterations, and then output new child programs to run.
Most of the outputs were unusable, but a small selection were really interesting! This was probably my first experience with generative art, though I didn't know it by that name at the time.
Microsoft's Paint.NET, which I was using exclusively during this time for all my editing, came with a "polar inversion" tool that I found interesting to play with. I experimented with applying it multiple times with different parameters -- sometimes adding additional content between applications to achieve a warping effect. This effect was fun to apply to both math art and photos, giving it a wide range of uses.
Polar Inversion
Around the House
During this time, I didn't have much money for travel or supplies, so a lot of my art was made from photos of objects around the house. I enjoy framing everyday objects in ways that remove their context and make them seem otherworldly, or to highlight the math in them somehow. Looking back, a lot of these images capture the experience of poverty in a rural town, though I wasn't thinking about that at the time -- bare lightbulbs, cobwebs, weeds growing on fences and through concrete, a gravel road, a broken window, barbed wire on a junkyard fence, an old door with a skeleton keyhole.
My interest in "bringing out the math" in a photo took me beyond highlights, to a place where I was distorting photos beyond recognition to create abstract textures. In some cases, milder changes left recognizable objects, but with strange contexts.
Warping Reality
Math in Nature
There was definitely a feedback loop between my math art and photography, and between my appreciation of math and nature. I captured manifestations of math in nature and put emphasis on them. In some cases, I used photos of nature as mathematical texture in more abstract work.
Getting Detailed
Later in this period, I upgraded my computer, which opened some doors in terms of being able to create art at higher resolutions and levels of detail. A mix of captures from Xaos and outputs from Perl scripts, most of these works show a fine level of detail.
Selected Works, 2009 - 2013
ixnayokay
- ixnayokay