Fractal Mathematics in Alternative Photography
Computer Generated Imagery in Van Dyke Brown
In a society where we live two lives, one analog and the other digital, it is an overlooked truth that we don't have to choose one or another but can embrace both lifestyles.
The computer-processed environments of the pixelated age are not an antithesis to the world as we knew it-- it is a new rendering of existence as we know it. Our equilibrium is off because we are caught in the transition, not knowing where to stand. Some brilliant people learn to adapt and adhere to the new progression of technology, others celebrate the traditions of the past. Why can't we do both at the same time without it feeling uncanny or blasphemous?
In an age where there are so many tools and methods to achieve a goal, we would be intentionally ignorant to ignore one method or the other. The wiser people find a balance. The point of least resistance that exists in both planes of human interaction might be the most practical place to act, by 'going with the flow'. In a world of chaos and entropy, the only certainty is change.
The place of transition is an anxious state, one where actions can feel like desecration. Facing a void of the unknown, the future and the past influences our present decisions. The past and the future are guides, they are ideals we reflect on. It is the present moment, the moment of constant change, that determines our relationship to those ideals.
Digital Manifestations
Fractal Van Dyke Brown Photographic Prints
Transition: Chaos Fractal Bulb 5, Chaos Fractal Bulb 12, 2021.
Van Dyke Brown Photographs, 7.5"x 11".
The computational power of graphic generators can create patterns of intense shape and form. These ones, which use fractal algorithms to generate imagery, create alien and organic fabrications of form and texture.
They are graphic and ominous, with deep cavities of dark space detailed with rippling and bulbous grain. Their origin is a running set of zeroes and ones, yet their final state of existence is material. There is an irony in digital images becoming analog photographs that I find particularly enticing, because in a world of digitizing it is usually the physical copies that are turned into digital files not the other way around.
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