David Works thinks that fractals appeal to an innatesense of aesthetic sensibility and he revels in

Apophysis, a freeware fractal flame editor for Windowswritten by Mark Townsend. “[Discussions on] the mail-ing list for Apophysis reflect an intense enthusiasm andeven joy at discovering and ‘making’ string fractals,” heexplained. “I think this is something that is often over-looked in discussions about digital art—instead of peo-ple viewing fractal art, they are now interacting withand ‘creating’ fractals. In this sense, I think some pro-grams like Apophysis are digital art—they facilitate theaesthetic experience.”

In generating his images, he says there is somewhat ofa conversation going on between him and the machineand that he engages in a feedback loop with the imagery.“Ideas come to mind during the process, these areapplied, and then new possibilities emerge to be con-sidered. There is a real dialogue with the imagery—thecomputer functions as the translator.”

Works received his BA in studio art from SonomaState University in 1978. “Although I was trained in thetraditional techniques, I’ve always been interested incomputer graphics, starting with an Apple II computermany years ago.” Throw in extensive perusing of

Scientific American’s Mathematical Recreations column,and Works was off to the races. He often implementedthe published pseudocode, and this was his first intro-duction to fractals and cellular automata, the latter ofwhich he recently used to create a new library of imagesfor his Web site.

Building the libraryThe original version of Unfractal 1 (the cover image)

was Works’ first attempt to work with larger sizes withstring fractals. The original image was 200 Mbytes andwas one in a series of several images that derive from aperception Works had while experimenting with stringfractals using Apophysis. “I noticed that you can oftenget expressive shapes that resembled brush strokes,something very different from what is typically consid-ered fractal shapes,” he explained. “So the general ideawas to use these types of string fractals as composition-al elements rather than as the main subject of the work.I assembled my own library of string ‘brush strokes’ andbegan experimenting. The first series of work was doneat relatively small resolutions (30 Mbytes), and a wholearray of filters was employed to create compositionscomposed of fractals, but not ‘looking like’ fractals.”

Using Apophysis, he started theprocess by generating a library ofpotentially useful string fractals andthen used Stephen Ferguson’sSterlingware, the ubiquitous free-ware program Fractal Explorer, andFrederik Slijkerman’s classic UltraFractal to build a library of tradition-al fractals. After several overlays andAdobe Photoshop filters, the finalimage was born. This was one ofmany in a series he titled Unfractal.

Combination 6 (see Figure 1) andCombination 10 (see Figure 2) aretwo images in another series derivedfrom the same library of fractalsWorks used in the Unfractal series.“In building this library, I acted morelike a photographer, roaming thefractal landscape and taking imagesthat I found interesting, that may ormay not be used,” he said. “Several

Gary Singh

Stringing the Fractals________________________________

About the Cover

4 September/October 2005 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0272-1716/05/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

1 Combination 6.

hundred fractals were accumulated. The basic idea herewas to put three (or more) fractals in the same space andsee how they interacted. Varying the blending modes(for example, hard light, soft light, normal, and so on)and adjusting colors for layers/channels produced alarge range of potential final states (a combining of thefractals). The decision on what compositional/coloralternatives to select is subjective, but I tend to look forcompositions that suggest processes rather than things—a sense of movement and/or subtlety that implies a tran-sitional state, something that is on the verge of change.”

The techniqueAs an artist, Works says he works in a number of par-

allel tracks and that his abstract images—for example,Gothic (see Figure 3)—are the same as his fractal worksin terms of process and execution. “There may be anabstract idea that frames the environment … and anoverall preference for dynamic, process-implied compo-sition, but everything else is wide open,” he explained.

He also admits that the failure rate in this approach isquite high and he has a gargantuan library of imagesthat didn’t quite make it. “When I go back and look atthese failures from a different internal perspective, Ioften find something that can now be developed. So ina sense, the art itself often becomes source material fornew art. Ironically, it is my amateur programmingefforts that most resemble the traditional belief that artshould be an expression of an intellectual idea/concept.But my efforts here are on producing code that will‘jump the image state’ in random, unpredictable waysthat fit with my experimental approach.”

Because this approach is primarily exploratory andexperimental, he believes the process is the art, ratherthan forming a concept in advance and then carrying outthat concept. And he deliberately sets up a conditionwhere anything can happen. Accidents can be equally asproductive as desired results. “The digital mediums areperfect for this process,” he said. “At the beginning of thisprocess, the imagery exists in a virtual ‘resting’ or ‘default’state (a matrix of numbers), it can be jumped to any num-ber of other states programmatically (filters and so on).My process generally starts off with big jumps until I findsomething interesting, then [transitions to] progressivelysmaller jumps to refine the image.”

The futureWorks is currently writing a Photoshop plug-in that

applies cellular automata transformations on images.According to his eyejam-works Web site (http://www.eye-jam.com/), the rules for transformation are derivedfrom the image. They can be taken from one or more ofthe color channels (R, G, B) and applied to one or moreof the output (final processed image) color channels.Depending on the options selected, you can get tradi-tional cellular effects (Sierpinski triangles, sliders), orsmoother, more abstract results. Some of the things he’sconsidering adding are additional methods of mappingrules to cell states, an option of smoothing, and overallimprovements to the interface.

Other than that, he has no definite projects lined up for

the future. “I want to do more work with multiple frac-tals,” he said. “I’m interested to see what offspring can beproduced by ‘marrying’ some of my failed abstracts andfractals. I’ve realized that a variety of different image char-acteristics come to light with the cellular transforms, soI want to see if there are additional ways of exploitingthis. I’m curious if I can implement a random composi-tion generator as a Photoshop plug-in.” ■

Readers may contact Gary Singh at gsingh@metronews.com.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 5

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3 Gothic.