Aesthetic Explorations of Attractor Space

News & Updates

2-27-05
Suspension #1 was accepted to the "Top 40" LACDA International Juried Competition

Artist's Statement

The production mentality of film, broadcast, and video games has profoundly influenced the direction of computer graphics and animation. Tight schedules and tight budgets demand the use of relatively quick, efficient, and predefined processes. Furthermore, the computer as an artistic tool advances in complexity so quickly that we, by necessity, must carve these processing paths through the data without fully exploring the surrounding landscape.

Resisting these tendencies, I have chosen in this work to visually explore the interrelationship between mathematics and beauty. For the past three years I have been experimenting with imagery generated by strange attractors, visual representations of chaotic dynamical systems that can be intuitively understood as a pendulum tracing its path through space. As I progress towards intermediate goals, I enjoy taking detours and allowing the work to take new directions. Drawn to programming, I engage in the exacting precision of problem solving, only to be propelled from this depth of information to a land of artistic spontaneous interactivity.

Much of my inspiration for this work comes from the inherent beauty I see in mathematics. I am continually fascinated by the diversity and complexity of the images that come from a simple set of iterated functions. Modern study of fractals and chaos was only made possible by using the computer as a visualization tool, and it is this tool that I continue to use for its unmatchable raw processing power. While this is satisfying in and of itself, applying design fundamentals to the raw images helps reveal their beauty and carries them to a more refined level of composition.

So is it about the art or the science? They are inextricably linked. My art depends on science for its substance while simultaneously illuminating the science, unraveling its beauty.

Technical Statement

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.