Strange Attractors

Aesthetic Explorations of Attractor Space

I have been experimenting with imagery generated by strange attractors since 2003. Mathematically, a strange attractor is a complicated set with a fractal structure to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time.¹

¹ See Wikipedia, Attractor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor (as of Sep. 30, 2007, 01:59 GMT).

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Conceptually, imagine a very chaotic pendulum that swings over a sand pit—after enough time, a traced pattern will emerge in the sand. The more chaotic the action of the "pendulum," the more interesting the emergent pattern.

There are many more images on this page—the record of my ongoing journey into the realms of chaos.

Chaotic Attractors From Create Chaos 2008

I have enhanced a few of the images I created live last fall at this event, producing two new pieces, Apparition and Sign Language.

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Work In Progress (2009)

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Real-time Video Projection

Æxploration (Aesthetic Exploration) represents a new direction in my artwork - a focus on interactive algorithmic motion as performance and installation. What once was my internal artist's tool has become externalized - the beauty and the mess exposed for all to see. This is experimental, in-progress work, as I revamp my codebase once again and seek opportunities to perform and collaborate using its generative visuals.

Until recently, my goal has been to generate individual, high quality, still images, and the interactive software I have developed has been geared towards that purpose - an artist's tool that is a byproduct of the process, viewable only by myself. But in October of 2008, I participated in Create Chaos - a local conference for creative professionals - as a performer, using my software to create new artwork live. The response was very positive, and opened up a last minute performance opportunity with MGFest.

In the course of a single day I made some changes to my code that completely revolutionized what I was seeing on the screen while using my software - suddenly, I was thinking about and playing with the principles of motion graphics design and time-based media. I also enjoyed and benefitted from the process of collaboration, both in the performances themselves and in discussions surrounding them. Based heavily on this experience, I have continued to develop my software in this new direction and look forward to seeing where this exploration takes me.

New Work (2007)

My recent work has focused more on finding unique patterns and elements, and pulling out the detail with interesting color palettes, which are often based on color samples from photographs. Note that some of these are test renders, and thus appear a bit grainy.

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Suspensions (2004)

Suspensions is a black & white series created from the Aesthetic Explorations series. Although they are digital, when these images are printed, the resulting effect is one of a detailed pencil or charcoal drawing.

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Aesthetic Explorations (2004)

A 4x4 matrix of high quality images, representing a small portion of the parameter space of these particular attractors. Click an image to zoom in (requires Flash player).

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Early Work (2003)

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Technical Information

These images are first generated with the Strange Attractors Explorer, a custom program written using C++, OpenGL, and GLUT. The algorithm for generating the basic attractors was set forth in Clifford Pickover’s Chaos in Wonderland; the equations used are iterated functions that plot between a hundred thousand and a few million pixels. Attractors are colorized by mapping pixel density in the range [0-1] to a user-defined color gradient. The appearance of the attractor is determined by its mutation (which equations it uses) and its four coefficients.

The program is structured such that it is easy to explore various forms of the strange attractor by moving sliders, clicking buttons, picking different color gradients, and rotating, panning and zooming the view. Suitable images are saved and later rendered at high resolution. Images are then brought into Photoshop to adjust color, composition and contrast.

Special thanks goes to Marty Altman, Scott Hall, Matt O’Connor, Michael Moshell, Lorraine Lax, and Paulius Micikevicius for their suggestions along the way.

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