The means of production
posted by WelshWench at 3:23 PMFurther out-loud musings and unanswered questions.
Once someone has been told what a fractal is, or had artwork with a high ‘fractal quotient’ pointed out to them (see my previous blog entry) there’s a chance they’ll recognise that fractal factor when they see it again. Is that important?
What about when the artist has either heavily post-processed the work and/or has produced an abstract work that is shape & line & colour and so on with no recognisable pattern and a complete dearth of ‘fractal factor’? My – possibly contentious - opinion is that many of these works could have been produced by other digital means and did not necessarily require fractal software.
Is that still ‘fractal art’? Or is it digital art that happens to have been produced by a piece of fractal software? Does it matter? Is anyone, apart from other users of the software, even interested in how the work was produced?
There are artists who use fractal software but who deride the spirals and repetitions and patterns of what I would describe as ‘high fractal quotient’ art and whose own work has little to none of that, yet they still want their place under the umbrella that is ‘fractal art’.
The question arising in my mind from that situation is whether ‘fractal art’ will eventually come to mean art which displays specific (i.e. fractal) characteristics, or all art created using software which facilitates the generation and manipulation of fractal equations. Personally, I tend to think the former will happen: I don’t think anyone cares what method a surrealist artist uses – pencil, oils, PhotoShop – what gives the art its description is the style of the resulting work.
What I also don’t know is whether that would be good, bad or of no consequence whatsoever for ‘fractal art’!
Are we all too hung-up on the means of production?
3 Comments:
I really like the idea of "fractal quotient." It's a good way of describing what we do without sounding too frighteningly technical.
I've been wondering lately about means of production in the other direction—what happens if you start with a high-fractal-quotient image, and translate it into a more traditional kind of fine-art medium? Does the art establishment still discount it as being too computer-ish, or does it suddenly become more legitimate?
I definitely think means of production is a much larger factor than it would need to be. Surely what matters is the final result of the work, and its effects on an audience.
Gill,
This is sort of the identity crisis for fractal art. Is low-FQ imagery still "fractal art", and does anybody care?
The answers to these questions are yes and no, and yes and no, respectively. Fractal art is a subset of digital art, but there's no bright line circling what is and what is not FA. The boundary is fuzzy, and some artists do their best to straddle that boundary no matter how wide or indistinct it might be. This is a good thing.
For some people, the journey is the goal; for others, the destination is. For some people, the tools you use (what types of software, what algorithms) matter very much to them. It's a point of pride to produce fractal art similar to Giuseppe Arcimboldo's work, using only fractal tools. Quite aside from the personal satisfaction, creating such work forces mastery of one's tools.
But in creating such work, the artist always gets more out of the process than the viewer. Even viewers who are also artists in the same medium will not get as much from the viewing as the artist did in the creating. For them, the end is still more important, because that is all they have. Viewers who are unfamiliar with the medium probably won't care at all; what matters to them is entirely whether they like the final result.
Besides, when you get right down to it, what qualifies as fractal software? I can create an action in Photoshop that produces a fractal image; I don't even have to use a plug-in. And it's easy to produce images that aren't fractal using tools ordinarily identified as "fractal software". That would seem to suggest the underlying math used in creating an image is what makes something fractal. However, there are fractal artists who take high-FQ images and manipulate them almost to oblivion. As you indicate, the fractal content becomes nearly indiscernable at that point. This is the stuff that straddles the line. It started out as obviously FA and then became nearly not.
"Is" and "Is not" are binary choices. Black and white. Not only is our world--and therefore our art--not black and white, it's not even shades of grey. It's in color. (smile)
--Damien
Thank you, Mr V & Damien, for your comments :)
@ Mr V: I do think the art establishment is coming around to accepting digital art as 'legitimate' and I do wonder whether some of the attempts to loudly proclaim "this is fractal art" may actually be doing a disservice to people who use fractal software to produce their work and we should be sneaking in under the wider banner ;-) On the other hand, fractals are fascinating to many, and if knowing the means of production generates interest for that reason alone, then there's no reason why that shouldn't be used as an identifier.
@ Damien : "Identity crisis" sums it up so well :) I agree with everything you say.
I'm staggered by the number of arguments I've seen about what fractal art should or should not be; what it is or is not in the relatively short time I've been using the software.
I tend to think that unless someone compliments the artist on their drawing or painting skills when some explanation of the means of production will be required then it's not otherwise relevant.
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