The whole act of synchronicity, or randomness, is a part of the magic of creating fractals. Shapes and colors and textures and hues appear at random, and sometimes---in my own life---I find they reflect events going on in my world, or my state of mind. Do you find this as well?

Since fractals are a representation of math, and math is nature, I have long said I considered fractals the "hands of God." I am not a traditionally religious person, but I am a spiritual one, and to me, fractals are a deeply personal representation of what I am experiencing, or what vibe I am sending out into the universe at the time.

For example, I remember a couple of years ago longing for my home---New York City. I have been a transplanted New Yorker for years now, and still find the country life a difficult transformation to have made--we live in the boonies of Vermont. I remain very much a city girl; I miss the museums, the restaurants, the taxis, the bustle, the hard glitter. During that time, my fractals all tended to look like cityscapes and skyscrapers and squared off buildings, or highly populated street scenes.

Likewise, when I am depressed, my fractals are dark and broody. When I am hopeful or enthused, the art reflects this as well. I don't know how this works---does energy impact matter?---but it has happened more times than not.

I was wondering if anyone here had any theories about this, or experienced a similar event.

 

 

 

Isn't it so that when you are happy and enthousiastic you would choose different colours and maybe even different shapes than when you are depressed?
When I'm down or worried all I make are dark and moody images. When I feel on top of the world they tend to be (too) light.
But that still leaves a lot of images that don't belong to either. I guess the swing in the emotional field is in the middle then.

Yvonne

I think that often our work reflects our emotional status. Though probaly not always. I have to watch what happens when I start something in a positive mood, and what it ends up as, if my mood changed in the middle of working on it over days!

I definitely agree with Yvonne on the color thing. When I'm in a cruddy mood, my colors often tend to reflect that. Probably my subject matter, too, LOL. Hmmm. Does that mean I have to watch what I'm "fractaling"?

Rita

No, I am talking about the raw fractals before I start fussing with them. The moods, shapes and tones that "come" to me being reflective. Sure, I can probably take most any shape or scene that pops up in my generator and change it to where it is consonant with my vision, but that's not what I mean. :)

What I meant was tendencies, proclivities that are too uncanny to be coincidental. :)

The biggest affect my mood has on my work is that when I'm bummed or maybe tired is simply that nothing at all "happens" to begin with. I don't reach that feeling of being in a groove where everything goes away until you come up for air in a panic at 3am on a workday. :-) And then spend the next 5 days totally wrapped up in the image, even at work. I tend to just listlessly and half-heartedly go thru the motions of making a fractal image and end up with nothing even halfway decent when I'm all blase' or tired out. When I reach that engrossed point I'm beyond "happy"...there's no word for it, I reckon...maybe "joy-sessed"? Those times don't come at will, so you spend a LOT of time waiting for the inspiration to take hold and you have to remember the "high" of the last one and persevere thru the dry spells and believe, sooner or later, it will strike again.

Rick

Hi all, I agree with what Rykk said about dry spells, for me it goes with both image creation and formula creation. I also find that when I've created a new formula or colouring some particularly good images usually follow, I'm guessing most folks are the same when they find a new way of using a formula or colouring or suss out a good way of using one they've not tried before. What surprises me is that how productive I am with fractal images or formulas seems totally unrelated to how busy I am in my "proper" programming work - I strictly keep "work" to weekdays from 9 to 6 but the amount of effort involved varies considerably :-) Sort of based on Rick's point, my rule is that I always keep the UPRs I've done even if I've given up on "finishing" the image at the time because I nearly always find that going back to such an image when I'm more "in the groove" produces a decent result, many of my best images (IMHO) over the last few months have been from works I shelved between one year and 4 years ago.

I have always felt that the work of an artist is the artist! It reflects things about us that anyone who knows you very well can read your emotions and feelings in what you create. Many of my images come from how I am feeling physicially and mentally and even my titles will reflect the same things. I seem to be able to do more when emotions are running high than I can when I just sit down at the comp. and say OK, today I'm going to render an image. It doesn't seem to work that way for me, I come up with absolutely nothing. I have always heard that artists are tempermental and difficult to work with because of their mood swings. Maybe this is a good thing to put one's self into their work, it probably means more to them when they finish it and the people who view their work may get more from it as well. Art with all the emotions and moods that an artist has will always be better than something created with no feelings. And yes, I do beleive that emotions can be expressed even through a computer!!!

I do the same thing, Dave. I've got 5 "wip" folders that probably have 100 upr's apiece in them and go way back to '03. Probably even a few things in there started in UF2.04 even. It IS cool to go back to something that petered out long ago with new eyes and maybe some new tricks and the thing takes off like a rocket. My only problem is it's so hard to part with any of them and I have to really hate the image to get rid of anything so there's a LOT of stuff to go thru searching for inspiration when whatever I'm currently doing gets old. I lose track of a lot of things because I forgot what I called it 2 years ago or whenever. Freaken packrat, I am! lol

Rick

Oh, BTW - Mindy, the fractal you posted at the start of this thread is great! Woulda been a good one for the last challege theme, imho...

Rick

This is very interesting...I have been reading two books the last few months that touch on just this subject..."The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art" by Roger Lipsey and "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Wassily Kandinsky.

Kandinsky speaks of the "inner need" of the artist. Very interesting as he touches on why we create, and particulary why we create art. He draws strong parallels between art and music. One line that I found particularly interesting was "It is the conviction that nothing mysterious can ever happen in our everyday life that has destroyed the joy of abstract thought." Cool, no?

Lipsey's book looks at the writings and philosophies of this century's modern artists...from Mondrian to Klee to Picasso and may, many others. They all express the idea that they are just "conduits"...creative wonders passing through them to the canvas.

If fact, Klee is quoted: "Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will."

Can you identify with that, Rykk? I know I can...

FWI...you can read Kandinsy's book online:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/cnspr10.txt

And Lipsey's book is at Amazon...

G

Sure can! That's a good description of how it feels to be in the groove when creating a "good" new piece. Nothing else matters of even registers much to your consciousness in the rare - for me anyway - occasions when a fractal grabs you by the short hairs.

Hmmm...."piece"...hope that doesn't sound pretentious, I don't mean to be. It's just that fractals and digi-art are always called "images" as if they aren't "real" and can exist only as ethereal wraiths on pc monitors. Much better to dispense with the descriptor, "image", and free our stuff out of those confining, glowing boxes and onto walls where they belong with the other "works" and "pieces" of art, eh?

"It is the conviction that nothing mysterious can ever happen in our everyday life that has destroyed the joy of abstract thought."  ----- Great quote! I've always wondered why some people can look at abstract art and feel, "whoa, cool", while others might look at the same piece and go, "whuzzat 'spose ta be"? - Looks like a pickem up trukk". Abstract art many times isn't supposed to be ANYTHING neccessarily and is more a "vibe" that one feels. I once had a thought - and this might seem a bit over the top - that, since we maybe are like conduits of God's creativity, that abstract art that looks like nothing ever seen in life might be a more direct expression of His boundless and incomprehensible imagination inspired in the folks who make such art. And the ability to "feel" that type of art is a great and sometimes rare thing. Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have listened so much to the philosphy major roomie I had in school for a while - dude was 28(!!) and on his 5th major without ever finishing a degree - lol. "Professional student" with doting parents, I guess.

I've thought, too, about what an odd couple of bedfellows art and mathematics make. The overwhelming majority of engineer types I've known really didn't have a great appreciation of art, especially "traditional". Not all that creative in the "humanities" sense of the word. Though, the more innovative, "sharper" ones seem to get off on fractals a lot more than seascapes or paintings of flowers. Almost as if, subliminally, the algorithms "speak" to them and they sense "something" in the eddy and flow of algorithms in a fractal image. It was one of the "scientist" or "top"  engineers at the job I had in the 80's and 90's that first introduced me to fractals by bringing a cobbled together computer into the lab and setting it about the week and a half (really!) task of drawing this neat new math he read about called the "Mandelbrot set".

Sheesh, I doth wax seriously philosophical....and wane dangerously over my lunch break! lol

c-ya!

Rick

The way I see it, there's a lot more creativity in fractal art than a lot of 'non-fractalists'  and also some fractalists believe. Everyone has heard the butterfly flapping its wings in China causing a hurricane in Cancun (or where ever) thing. It has to do with chaos when there are many variables (like 3!). Things are so unpredictable but they are still not random. Heck, total randomness is more predictable. Anyway, when we modify parameters and make hundreds, or even thousands, of decisions along the way we are truely creating something that is unique. It may look a lot like a many others but it's not. It's a lot like people's faces. To another race we all pretty much look the same, just as other races tend to look the same to us (no matter what race we are). But I haven't see too many people that look like me - poor bastard if he does.

But what I am getting to, if anyone is still reading ... yawn, is that with every little decision we make (a lot of it is subconscious) we are imbibing our creation with what we are at the time. Maybe just a little bit; it may be just a flap of a butterfly wing but it definitely has an effect on the final 'piece' (I like your reasoning in this, Rick).

Keep flappin',

Tim