Distance Fractals

Have been playing around with the latest in fractal art concepts, namely Distance Fractals.  There’s some fabulous open source Processing code here.

I often wonder, at being so disappointed at the generic, hackneyed sci-fi worlds in the likes of Prometheus and Avatar – why not give the art director & CGI job of such films to a code artist?

CGI in movies has become cheap and lazy – the FX are no longer special.  Surely, something like this fractal technology, pushing the frontiers of science and art, should be what sci-fi film makers should be embracing to show us worlds we’ve never seen OR imagined before.

I created my own small gallery of work, by hacking the code, tweaking the numbers.  The availability of this amazing new math art is just half the battle.  One still must explore its world, find composition, drama, a hidden painting – the eye of the code artist changes the numbers, but also must search for the vision.

Media Fractals

This is my latest animation, turning the entire world of media and internet into an endless animated recursive fractal. It’s actually a prototype of software I coded that generates in real time from a live feed. It’s all about turning information into art.

Data Art Music Visualizer

This is a test exploring the connection of graphically rhythmic visuals in sync with the beat and BPM of music. The individual short sequences, or graphical building blocks, were randomly created from a piece of generative code created in Processing, inspired by data visualization and looking at information as art.
Music by Moby (www.mobygratis.com).

The Art of Information

Some test pics from a new generative video I’m working on, it’s based around data visualization style art.

Data viz is the area me and my new studio at Culture Shock are moving into.

14 Paintings

“I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.” – Gerhard Richter

Just a little experiment to extend Richter’s thoughts into the world of digital by using his original paintings as a starting point, outlining the creative potential of computer code to enhance and/or alter the process of painting and image creation. The technique takes random source points to create simple geometric shapes that are based on the underlying color palette. The placement of the shapes is based on mathematical and programming logic.

Most people only see the end result of digital work, ignoring the process. But the formal workings of digital art have parallels with the techniques and theoretical concerns of fine art, offering limitless possibilities.