Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
i spy with my little eye ...
I can't resist this. Check out: http://obamicon.me
Frank Shepard Fairey's recent iconographic graphic portrait of Obama based on the Mannie Garcia's AP photo image on the cover of Time Magazine has fired off a whole industry of 'knock offs'. Fairey's use of palette and 'style' is vaguely 'Soviet Constructivist', and yet his intention is clearly reverential. His portrait of Obama by far exceeds the IMPACT of the original photographer's image. It is a stunning tribute to the promise and the hope that one man, Obama, has managed to engendered in the global imagination.
In the spirit of this 'fire', I too have 'twiddled' with the palette ... The possibilites are endless.
Update: February 10th, 2009. Interestingly enough, Fairey's use of Garcia's ORIGINAL photo image has come under it's own 'fire'. Lawyers are now having a hay-day over 'copyright' , 'trespass' and 'fair use' issues ... see: http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/01/27/the-obama-hope-poster-shepard-fairey-and-photographer-mannie-garcia/
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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