Fractals And Art

Image by Jarosław Wierny. Click to enlarge.

Originally Posted by Pat Rafferty

The project Sean and I worked on was concerned with fractals and art. There were two parts to the project: fractals in art, and fractals as art.

Fractals in art showed how various works of art were created using fractals. For thousands of years, dating back to ancient times, people have used fractals to create fantastic art pieces. Some examples of this include religious mandalas, Dali's Visage of War, and gothic architechure. These different art forms each portray a fractal nature, but are limited by the physical boundaries of reality.

Fractals as art considered whether or not fractal created images should fall under the same label as other artforms. Fractal landscapes and other fractal generated images were given as examples of some pieces that might be considered art. Our discussion concluded that art is a personal preference and that there is not right or wrong answer.

Comments

[Rachel Hensey]

There is no doubt in my mind that the definition of art is subjective and varies from person to person. When I think about fractals, I automatically think of fractals created through computer software, and I say to myself fractals are art, no way. Then I look at gothic architecture and Jackson Pollock's painting which are made up of fractals, yet I would never question the fact that they are art. Thus, the idea that fractals can be found within art gives a new meaning to the term art for me.

[Meridyth Mascio]

Pat and Sean: I thought that your presentation was visually stimulating. I never really thought of Gothic cathedrals as being "fractal," but the architecture suggests so, and this makes sense since as a place of worship, it would attempt to portray the infiniteness of God.

I also appreciated the discussion generated about what art is. To me, creating fractal images generated by computer programs may produce aesthetically pleasing pictures, but I feel the real "artist" is the computer programmer who constructed the program. In this sense, the coding of the program can be considered art more so than the actual picture.

[Tom Plick]

The final line of Meridyth's post reminds me of something from Dr. Andrilli's "G�del, Escher, Bach" class - in that class, there was mention of a computer program that discovered a geometrical proof previously unknown to anyone. There was the same question, How do we reward a computer for its great thoughts when computers can't think? If I recall correctly, the author of the program was given the credit, laudations, etc. normally bestowed on the discoverer of a great theorem. In my opinion, he certainly deserved it; consider that he had to teach the computer the principles of formal logic and geometry: how to conceive geometrical diagrams, how to derive one step in a proof from a previous step.

The fractal software that creates sophisticated designs or landscapes - such as those programs with which Jeremiah regaled us in his final presentation - is much more complicated, I imagine, than the theorem-proving system I mentioned above. But the different complexities create an odd twin problem here:

The theorem program was simple, and when it discovered something, people were hesitant to give it credit for its discovery to it or its creator. The creator didn't show much ingenuity on his part, but neither did the computer. (I surmise that the author received credit because it violates mathematical decorum to have a theorem just existing, without anyone having proved it. Imagine a text reading, "Theorem 4.3 was proved in 1973, but not really....") On the contrary, the fractal software likely has multiple authors, and its user adds further input into the process of generating fractals. If one particular fractal captures the heart of the country and ends up on the cover of Time Magazine, who is going to get the praise? The user who supplied some seed values to the program? The programmers who "made it all possible" - indeed, who made everything possible, and so nothing in particular? The executives of the company, who supplied the computers the programmers used and the salaries the programmers earned?

Modern society wants artists of all stripes - painters, writers, musicians - to be wholly responsible for their work, to rely on no one else in creating it. Many people bristle at seeing musicians who sing without any real knowledge of music; these same people welcome singer-songwriters-instrumentalists who can perform their songs (no one else's!) onstage strumming a guitar, or playing a piano. A breath of fresh air in a world of manufactured pop.

Fractal art of any sophistication would have to buck this trend, since the efforts of many individuals come together in its creation. This collaboration fits more with the sciences than with conventional art; in math, for instance, one often uses many existing theorems to prove a new theorem. Proving a complicated statement completely from scratch would be excruciating. Still, fractal art possesses something of the volition of its creator, in a way that a scientific theory cannot fully capture. It would be a strange mathematician who, upon proving a grand theorem, said, "I don't like the way that looks," and changed his original statement. An artist can change his work without invalidating it: a piece of art is not subject to the objective dichotomy of right and wrong, as a theorem is.

Art has a different dichotomy, a subjective one: it is liked, or it is not. If enough people like it, then society will call it art. If most people hate it, art critics will turn their noses up at it. Either way, the judgment of art varies from person to person, and especially from epoch to epoch. Keats died amid critics' scorn and gained his massive fame posthumously; and who can tell whether the best playwright of all time might have lived thousands of years ago unknown to us, his or her work lost to us because his impatient children deemed it a major bore and threw it onto a bonfire?

It appears to me that what determines art vs. non-art is general consensus; it also appears to me that consensus can be wrong. In a hundred years, there might be some agreement on whether fractals are a proper art form. Until then, we look with our own eyes, and disagree with one another - for history will determine the victor, but without disagreement, history would stop. If fractal art finds widespread acceptance, we can point to it years from now and recall that we witnessed its infancy; if fractal art falls into the dustbin of history, we will have had a thrill looking at it now, seeing beauty etched in our memory, beauty lost to the ages.

[John Sehi]

Pat and Sean: I do feel that fractals are art. I do not think that they should be valued as much as a real paintings. Such things such as scenic paintings or photos are better than fractal landscapes. Fractals are nice, and I'll consider them art, but its more of a fun art than a symbolic, deep-rooted meaning filled painting of the tortured soul. I also would say that some modern art really is not art, as you have proved in your presentation. You did a good job presenting the fractals in art. You definitely brought up some interesting points.