Yeah, it sure looks like things are being rattled all the way down to the foundation in the world of fractals these days. That's one of the things that's good about the Renderosity "phenomenon". Fractals are now not just the province of a few ecclectic individuals, like me, scattered about the globe - they are becoming MUCH more seen, created, used and recognised all over the place. The second largest group at 3dc is now the fractal artists! This is inevitable and the changes we've seen with all of the different tools, post-processing and the like are the natural result of an ever growing number of artists wildly and exhuberently tossing out new ideas and processes, much to the consternation of the established status quo. I know it can be unsettling to see an old "friend" starting to change after being essentially unchanged for so long, but I liken it to the wild days in music and society in the 60's where anything was game to try and the more off the wall the better. Nothing is "sacred" to the newer fractallists and anything that looks cool goes - post-processing, flooding and all kinds of other ideas that will surely be imagined and explored and thrown into the mix. This is, IMO, good for the genre and for digital art as a whole. Fractal shapes are beginning to insinuate themselves into all sorts of other types of digital art. "Chaos Unleashed", indeed! :>) That said, I do think that fractal art (though maybe not the kind of images I sometimes make - too structured with the chaos "leashed") is the purest and most seminal form of digital art. Fractals came way before PovRay and Bryce, etc. It was first described to me in a lab the mid-80's as the mathematics that describes the shapes of life and nature. From the shapes of crystal lattices to the branching of amino acids to the branching of prehistoric ferns to the branching of an oak tree to the branching of limbs of an animal.......to the whorls on the tips of our fingers. No two exactly the same - "God's mathematics"? You can't just go and get fractal "free stuff". Everything has to be crafted "by hand" by finding just the right formulae and coloring algorithms. If you look at Maria Kinsey's and some others' recent work, you will see that her images consist of dozens of these most pure of fractal shapes composed very skillfully and artistically to create a larger whole - a representation of our surroundings. We live in a veritable sea of fractal forms swirling about us. I'm sure she could have used Bringitin and composed the image in Ultrafractal but the end result would have been similar though maybe not as nice as what she did with PSP. The composition of the fractals she used is AT LEAST as interesting as the one small PSP tube in the images. Some of us have been around the fractal scene for decades and have watched the artform since its inception. But most of the artists creating fractal art images today are very new to the game and, for some, fractals are just another tool to create something else. The changes we see are inevitable and will grow and I believe the genre is fast approaching a nexus where it will have to redefine what it is and what it is not to avoid becoming - or remaining - some "miscellaneous", catch-all type of artform. Choose too narrowly and it will be seen as stodgy, quaintly odd and something that only white-haired mathematicians in lab coats do. Choose too widely and it could be marginalized as a catch-all, "other" category. I agree, btw, with Keith's remarks about the Bryce images that have as their only fractal aspect an Apo flame in a rectangle hanging on a Bryce wall in a Bryce room. I DO think they are VERY cool images and my wife bought me Bryce for Christmas to try some of that stuff because I like them and think the artists who make these images are very skilled and talented.(been too into UF and lazy/scared to make time for it, as yet). Yet, they are predominately Bryce images or "mixed media", IMO, and would surely make a good impression in those galleries, as well. They probably wouldn't bother anyone except that, occasionally, they have been deemed the best "fractal" image at Rendo for a given week. They certainly were among the best "digital art" images posted to the fractal gallery that week, IMO. A fine line, I suppose. Hard to describe - we know fractal art when we see it. But...there are only so many types of spirals that can be made with the current tools at hand, at least that are pleasing to human eyes/sensibilities. I don't think using filters or textures to enhance the appearance of a fractal disqualifies them for being considered "fractal art". Or the fact that one used Bryce to shape a flame into an orb rather than UF doesn't disqualify it, either. Or the fact that an image is a composition of multiple fractal shapes. In the end, though, something somewhere has got to give to avoid stagnation. Rick