The ongoing art crisis
"Call the exorcist, the walls of this church are bleeding! Oh, wait...that's honey."
. . . . . . . . . . .
I'm still struggling with fractals, both the images themselves and the idea of making the damned things at all. I spent some time looking at pictures online, and going through my own folders full of old stuff, and wondering if it's at all possible for computer-generated stuff to turn into something legitimate. Fractals have a reputation for being psychedelic and cheesy, and there's a perfectly good reason for that. They are often composed of harsh, saturated primary and secondary colors. They often include the same elements of computer cliche that turn up in raytracings: shiny spheres, regular polyhedra, things mapped onto infinite planes. They lack subtlety.
That's not always the case, though: there has been a trend in recent years to try and make fractals tasteful. Sometimes it works, sometimes it looks like a really groovy hotel painting or Hallmark card, full of sickly pastels trying not to be offensive. The thing I really don't understand, though, is the tendency to try and turn them into pictures-of-things. Landscapes kind of make sense, since real landscapes are full of fractal patterns anyway. But then there are the elaborately-constructed images of vases of flowers, fish, birds, reproductions of famous paintings, all kinds of things. They obviously take huge amounts of time and effort, incredible knowledge of the programs used to generate them, and they all look...off. They are technical masterpieces, but I can never connect with them.
I've done a bunch of similar things myself. I know the program well enough by now that I can pretty much persuade it to do anything at all, in a self-similar and cartoonish sort of way. There's the simple stuff like the Bass Ale image I made to amuse the Professor, and there are more complicated things like the Oz series which I still need to post. And there's the more difficult problem of making a completely abstract image that is simply pleasing to the eye. Pretty. Pretty is a bad word in the art world these days. Not only that, but it's entirely subjective. There have been images that I liked a lot, but that caused other people to react with squeamish disgust. (I always kind of like it when that happens.) But I don't know what to think of them; are they illustration, are they art, are they mere mathematical curiosities? The Oz images are art in the sense that I made them with very conscious intent, with careful awareness of their symbolism both in terms of cultural reference and in terms of my own specific personal associations. I can spread them out in sequence, and see allusions to a well-known book and movie, I can see a little slice of my own painful past, and I can also see a bunch of brightly-colored spiraling cheese.
Again, I ask myself, why do I spend so much time on these silly fractals?
I still like them. They make patterns that are satisfying for the same reasons that ice crystals and ferns and seashells are. Maybe that's all I need to know for now.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I'm still struggling with fractals, both the images themselves and the idea of making the damned things at all. I spent some time looking at pictures online, and going through my own folders full of old stuff, and wondering if it's at all possible for computer-generated stuff to turn into something legitimate. Fractals have a reputation for being psychedelic and cheesy, and there's a perfectly good reason for that. They are often composed of harsh, saturated primary and secondary colors. They often include the same elements of computer cliche that turn up in raytracings: shiny spheres, regular polyhedra, things mapped onto infinite planes. They lack subtlety.
That's not always the case, though: there has been a trend in recent years to try and make fractals tasteful. Sometimes it works, sometimes it looks like a really groovy hotel painting or Hallmark card, full of sickly pastels trying not to be offensive. The thing I really don't understand, though, is the tendency to try and turn them into pictures-of-things. Landscapes kind of make sense, since real landscapes are full of fractal patterns anyway. But then there are the elaborately-constructed images of vases of flowers, fish, birds, reproductions of famous paintings, all kinds of things. They obviously take huge amounts of time and effort, incredible knowledge of the programs used to generate them, and they all look...off. They are technical masterpieces, but I can never connect with them.
I've done a bunch of similar things myself. I know the program well enough by now that I can pretty much persuade it to do anything at all, in a self-similar and cartoonish sort of way. There's the simple stuff like the Bass Ale image I made to amuse the Professor, and there are more complicated things like the Oz series which I still need to post. And there's the more difficult problem of making a completely abstract image that is simply pleasing to the eye. Pretty. Pretty is a bad word in the art world these days. Not only that, but it's entirely subjective. There have been images that I liked a lot, but that caused other people to react with squeamish disgust. (I always kind of like it when that happens.) But I don't know what to think of them; are they illustration, are they art, are they mere mathematical curiosities? The Oz images are art in the sense that I made them with very conscious intent, with careful awareness of their symbolism both in terms of cultural reference and in terms of my own specific personal associations. I can spread them out in sequence, and see allusions to a well-known book and movie, I can see a little slice of my own painful past, and I can also see a bunch of brightly-colored spiraling cheese.
Again, I ask myself, why do I spend so much time on these silly fractals?
I still like them. They make patterns that are satisfying for the same reasons that ice crystals and ferns and seashells are. Maybe that's all I need to know for now.