Eye Candy Fractal Post

“Alien Honeycomb”

Henry’s recent post about music had the quite unexpected (I expect) result of spurring me to think again about a couple of old hobbies I’ve neglected for a while. One, the creation of super-excellent* electronic music, is something I’ve largely left behind since the arrival of a couple of Junior Ricardipi, lo these nearly 11 years since. Although I hung on for a while, the gear eventually was mothballed some time in late 2008. Henry’s post (and comment by Benoit) resulted in me thinking about doing some more, mainly as useful soundtrack material for movies created by one of the aforementioned Junior Ricardipi, and also in me posting some of it to SoundCloud for your listening pleasure.** I even hacked together a new piece, using only archived sound clips and a tiny little bit of newly-recorded sound, provided by a digital piano more frequently used by the other Junior Ricardipus.

But this post isn’t really about that – it’s about another old hobby that I serendipitously started thinking about again – the creation of digital artwork using fractals, occasionally beaten and battered after the fact with good old Photoshop. I haven’t done much of that recently, either, as I’ve been concentrating instead on photographing large quantities of high-speed automobiles, a pursuit you can read about in a bunch of blogposts at my other haunt, including this one, for example.

One nice thing about fractals is that they’re tantalizingly abstract, and you can pretend they’re all kinds of things – plants, lighting, clouds, whatever tickles your fancy. This one, for example, looks like neurons to me:

“Synaptic Transmission”

This one, on the other hand, makes me think of fish scales:

“Scales”

Whereas this, after some pummeling with Photoshop and a few associated plugins, could be just about anything you want it to be:

“Arthropod Parts”

Yes, I know this is basically just eye candy (or maybe you can come up with a less flattering description, if you try), but it was fun to do, and some of the resulting images may actually end up as backgrounds in a PowerPoint presentation or two that I need to do for work. That’s a pretty flimsy justification for spending (my own) time on this, but hey, it’s a hobby. Or it was, but now that Henry’s indirectly reminded me of it, maybe, just maybe, it will be again.

Many more, if you can bear it, in this Flickr set.

*with very small values for “super” and “excellent”

** with correspondingly small values for “pleasure”