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.

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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