Down the Fractal Beanstalk

You know how But Does It Float fades in its wordless content slowly and one at a time, leading to a sort of dreamlike user experience? Well the other day, I was wading through its abstract wonderland and a few scenes from another world caught my eye.

They’re by notable generative artist Tim Hutchinson. Impressed and intrigued, I looked into Hutchinson further. He’s made algorithmically generated art using a variety of software and runs a thoughtful and serious blog about Fractal Art called Orbit Trap.

The ones that most impressed me were made in a program called Fyre. I’m not the right sort of a geek to figure out how to run this on a Mac (command line? DarwinPorts? Unix?); I’d appreciate anyone’s help because, damn do I want to play with that. Please.

Four pieces of iterative art I did today, after the jump.

As for the clouds, they’re made in a program that runs in javascript called Kandid. It runs using genetic principals — that is, you run the computations generationally and can choose results with which to breed the look you want. I should point out that as you breed these evil clouds (well not evil but you must admit they’d make good elements in a death metal album cover), they grow as if from fractal seeds out of the darkness, as dreamlike a flowering as any I’ve seen. Its user interface is fun and simple and given how hooked I was to it immediately (up late in bed, on the train to work all morning) I really wonder why some geek hasn’t made an app of it yet. I’d pay.

I used the same subsection of the program as Hutchinson and just run through a pho’sho’ duotone. I’m not trying to bite his style; there’s actually a lot of other types of parameters Kandid can run, but from what I could see the the “iterated affine” seems to have the most visual potential.

(And yes, those last two were bred for “ghost ram skull” and “space age fabric” respectively)