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| Stan Schwartz: Lost in abstraction - original work | Fractal picture after transformation |
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Spot Light Corner: Stan - Reversing the fractal process Usually when you are making a fractal picture you start from a math formula, which is transformed into a picture. well, this would be too simple for Stan, who wished to combine both worlds - the real expressive world with the virtual analytical one. Stan had to create his own tool in order to make his artistic wish come true, and so he wrote a special kind of fractal generator. Not like any other fractal software, Stan's will take as a input layer not a blank page but a picture - any picture. This base layer is checked now by an inside coloring method, that will invert pixels color within the bailout limit. This is a most interesting new concept, which may quickly spread in the fractal community, as soon as such a freeware program will be available. On the top-left you can see the basic picture, that was "hand made" by Stan. This picture was used as the input basic layer to be transformed into the negative full Mandel form (top-right) and to an enlarge Mandel Shores in the following picture.  I think it will be best to let Stan describe his method: "The images in this gallery were created by using a C program I wrote to selectively invert pixel color, depending on whether points within a chosen subset of the complex plane, corresponding to the scaled pixel locations, are contained within the Mandelbrot set. For a given point, (x,y), membership in the Mandelbrot set is determined by calculating the value of the infinite series: z[t+1] = z[t] * z[t] + x + iy, assuming a starting value of z[0] = 0, for some large number of iterations. If the value of the series calculated using the x and y of a particular point stays within a narrow range, that is, remains bounded, the point is assumed to be within the Mandelbrot set, and the color of the pixel corresponding to that point is inverted by my program. The alternative is for the value of the series calculated using that point's x and y to start diverging more and more, in which case the point is known to not be within the Mandelbrot set, and the color of the corresponding pixel is not inverted. The color mappings shown here were derived by using my painting "Lost in Abstraction" (currently on display in my main gallery) as program input and varying the subset of the complex plane within which Mandelbrot set membership was determined. Stan Schwartz The curator February 2001 |