Pre-fractal art

May 10, 2011 10:53 PM

Fractals may have become a cliche in modern computer graphics, but they have a long and rich history in art.

Before anybody even knew Mandelbrot, artists were seeing fractals in nature and transferred the patterns in painting, design and sculpture. Fractals, as you may know, are geometric patterns that are repeated on smaller and smaller scales to produce intricate designs, through self-similarity, described by the Mandelbrot Equation.
posted by Leisure_Muffin (22 comments total)

This is really interesting. I love seeing the depths to which creative people go without realizing what they're tapping into.

I also recently came across this explanation of AfterEffect's Fractal Noise plug-in (Photoshop's clouds filter) that blew my mind with how clearly it explained what the function did. Now us creatives plumb the depths of fractals knowingly.

okay maybe its just Perlin noise
posted by Brainy at 11:07 PM on May 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Many of those are not fractals, they just look like fractals that one can generate. The first one under "Fractals in Spiritual Art", in particular, is nothing like a fractal. Also, the cloud.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 11:19 PM on May 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

You forgot the word 'some'.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 11:22 PM on May 10, 2011

Fractals, isn't that the method of drilling for oil nobody likes or is it what they did on Battlestar Gallactica? I get confused....
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:22 PM on May 10, 2011

Some of those are a big stretch.
posted by delmoi at 11:38 PM on May 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

fractals exist in nature, no question of that. I've seen them erupt out of thin air more than once whilst rather high on lysergic acid diethylamide.
posted by philip-random at 11:43 PM on May 10, 2011 [5 favorites]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli
posted by gen at 12:01 AM on May 11, 2011 [5 favorites]

Fractals, as you may know, are geometric patterns that are repeated on smaller and smaller scales to produce intricate designs, through self-similarity, described by the Mandelbrot Equation.

At the risk of being 'that guy,' the Mandelbrot 'equation' describes the Mandelbrot set. Other fractals are described by other things.

This article gives the impression of someone who hasn't really done their homework.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:46 AM on May 11, 2011 [8 favorites]

I'm not convinced by some of these examples, but the concept has been explored before. See, for example, this old Discover magazine article on the fractal nature of Jackson Pollock paintings.
posted by Jakey at 1:31 AM on May 11, 2011

For a more authoritative source on the fractals in Pollock’s work see this article though more recently another paper has claimed that this property is not sufficiently unique to Pollock to be used to distinguish him from other artists. Of course, this is the interesting point that is being made in the original post.

By the way, you'll find rather more in-depth discussions by following the sources the author cites- though most of them are broken links. In particular, he's sourced a lot from the journal of visual mathematics, and this paper in particular.
posted by leibniz at 2:56 AM on May 11, 2011

I've always thought this high res image of a sun spot resembles the Mandelbrot set.
posted by panaceanot at 3:20 AM on May 11, 2011

Funny how this works. Mandelbrot fractals became popular because they are visually compelling, resembling art/plants/coastlines/Jesus Christ. Now fractals are so ingrained that the association goes the other way around: if something is visually compelling then it must be a fractal...
posted by eeeeeez at 3:39 AM on May 11, 2011

ACTUALLY, the Fractals were first popularized in a children's live-action puppet TV program created by Jim Henson. The dramatis personae of "Fractal Rock" include five key Fractals: Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Boober and Mandelbrot. Together, they form a tight-knit cadre of fun-loving friends, each with a distinct personality and a Hausdorff dimension greater than their topological dimension.

Gobo Fractal is the "leader" of the five Fractals. He is a level-headed, practical explorer of the intricate geometry of Fractal Rock. He was generated from a segment of the real number line by removing the central third at each iteration. He is nowhere-dense and is not a countable set.

Mokey Fractal is a spiritual and artistic hippy, who is the Julia set for c = 1/4.

Red Fractal is exuberant, athletic and incredibly annoying. She is the limit of the Gosper curve.

Wembley Fractal is Gobo's neurotic best friend and homoerotic love interest, a quadratic von Koch curve (type 2) nicknamed the "Minkowski sausage".

Mandelbrot Fractal is a depressed and pessimistic cardioid with period bulbs.

The final episode of the series, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen," was set during the last days of the Korean War, and involved Gobo being sent to a mental hospital after he accidentally causes Mokey to suffocate an infinite number of Doozers. It was extremely popular because Doozers are stupid, and that is why fractal geometry is considered to be such an incredible advance in our mathematical understanding of the universe.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 4:05 AM on May 11, 2011 [10 favorites]

Well, Mandlebrot invented fractals (for certain values of 'invented') to cope with natural phenomena that weren't yielding to the math that he had at hand. The showcase example is a coastline, where no matter how closely you zoom in, it still looks just as wiggly (in technical terms "self similarity at multiple scales").

So it's more a case of "Math copied nature, but art has been copying nature even longer."
posted by benito.strauss at 6:15 AM on May 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The author was certainly playing fast and loose with the definition of "fractal," but I enjoyed the artwork regardless. The designs in the Book of Kells are really incredible (the animated movie The Secret of Kells is an enjoyable watch too).
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 7:14 AM on May 11, 2011

Deep Mandelbrot Zoom with great techno background music. My 3 year old son calls it "the tunnel".
posted by joecacti at 7:53 AM on May 11, 2011

that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: "that ain't no fractal but this is: """"""""""""
posted by ~ at 8:24 AM on May 11, 2011

A much more comprehensive site.

I just don't get why some people have to dump on fractals. Is it because the subject threatens to popularize mathematics? Is it a way of demonstrating mathematical superiority? Several comments in this thread are just plain mean-minded. This might be a fascinating subject of inquiry in itself.
posted by No Robots at 8:41 AM on May 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm sorry, I was captivated by the standing wave in this canal.

Whatdidyousay?
posted by humboldt32 at 10:01 AM on May 11, 2011

This article is very relevant.
posted by Kiscica at 5:34 PM on May 11, 2011

Um, at the risk of spoiling the joke, that "Mandelbrot Monk" page Kiscica linked to is a (very clever) April Fools Day prank.

And, not to be a math snob, but most of these examples are not really fractals. They may look sort of fractal-like, but that does not make them fractals. For example, the shape surrounding the figure in #5 looks sort of like the outline of the main part of the Mandelbrot set, but it is merely a superficial resemblance, and doesn't have the infinite levels of detail that the Mandelbrot set has.
posted by crazy_yeti at 6:36 PM on May 11, 2011

Way to read the article crazy_yeti.
posted by Leisure_Muffin at 7:20 PM on May 11, 2011