... and now for something completely different ... yup, I've been messing with fractals again, feeling the seasonal mood coming on ...
Showing posts with label fractals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fractals. Show all posts
Friday, November 19, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
A Fractal Gem for the New Year
... thought I'd get things started for the year with another fractal odyssey. The following slide-show is the result of 'tinkering' with ONE little ol' fractal. The possibilities are, by fractal definition, endless ... ENJOY!
p.s. For more information & additonal visuals about 'fractals' on this blog, type 'fractals' in the SEARCH box on the right ...
Here's an alternate 'viewing tablet'. I'm still TRYING to figure out which is the BEST of these video formats. No sooner do I figure one out with all the bells & whistles when they re-design it!!
Vimeo seems to have done just that since I last tried them out ....
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| From canadadaPHOTOGRAPHY |
p.s. For more information & additonal visuals about 'fractals' on this blog, type 'fractals' in the SEARCH box on the right ...
Here's an alternate 'viewing tablet'. I'm still TRYING to figure out which is the BEST of these video formats. No sooner do I figure one out with all the bells & whistles when they re-design it!!
Vimeo seems to have done just that since I last tried them out ....
Thursday, January 1, 2009
FRACTALS: An Introduction
Benoit Mandelbrot's most famous 'Fractal'In October of 2008, I was watching a television program on PBS, 'The Hidden Dimension' about the life and work of Benoit Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who has almost single-handedly rejuvenated how we perceive 'Reality'. I had an 'aha' moment. What I was viewing really began to resonate with many of my own evolving ideas about art, science and Nature ... I soon got hooked on 'fractals'.
Integral to Mandelbrot's 'theory' is an understanding of the underlying 'broken' precision that creates recognizable 'patterns' in Nature that, for lack of better word, 'reverberate' into infinity ....
"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." So writes acclaimed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in his path-breaking book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Instead, such natural forms, and many man-made creations as well, are "ROUGH," he says. To study and learn from such roughness, for which he invented the term fractal, Mandelbrot devised a new kind of visual mathematics based on such irregular shapes. Fractal geometry, as he called this new math, is worlds apart from the Euclidean variety of smooth triangles, circles and squares that we all learned in school. It has sparked discoveries in myriad fields, from finance to metallurgy, cosmology to medicine.
Mendelbrot has SHARPENED our vision and given us a new 'tool' to not only investigate but UNDERSTAND this wonderous world around us.
In the spirit of his ground-breaking 'theory', I've created a few of my own computer generated fractals for your viewing pleasure. The fractals that follow are somewhat 'raw' (& 'rough'!). It will be obvious to more sophisticated 'fractal generators' that I've only been 'doodling' with fractals for a couple of months. Even so, I hope my efforts will please. For the layperson, fractals are visually 'generated' by numerical computations using the seemingly 'infinite' 'memory' of the computer. Manipulating 'colour filters' make fractals 'pretty', (or not).
'Fractals' have changed forever how I do SEE. They are visible in the micro of the sub-atomic to the macro of the galaxies ... They're everywhere. And yes - SEEING is BELIEVING.
Are fractals 'ART'? ... well ... that's a very BIG question with many ricochet responses ... Tell me what YOU think ... I'd be interested to know.
My first computer generated 'fractal' ....To view an on-line version of the PBS broadcast, and to 'work-play' with an interactive fractal generator, link to:
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/
Update: March 2013 ... I have just discovered apophysis fractal art. Images galore on Google.
You can download an (addictive) 'generator' here ...
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