Pretty isn’t it? But guess what was my involvement in all this? A few clicks. To be precise, just 3. One to open Apophysis, other in the menu to select “Scripts”, and the last one to select a script. (OK, there was another one, to run the script, it’s 4 clicks actually, sorry!). There were a few more clicks required to render the images, but these aren’t related to the actual creation of the images. And these images look quite similar not only to each other but to most of these so-popular “amazing-whatever” batches of fractal “art” spread all over the internet. So sad.
I decided to do this after reading so many of these “this is my fractal wallpaper for today” posts (and all these links to “amazing” galleries with 100 images as well) and being disappointed with most of the images I see there in this specific kind of link. OK, tastes might be different (and they are) but it’s very frustrating, I barely want to see these whenever I see one of these “please click here” titles like “amazing gallery” etc. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed.
When you say “for today” I think it implies you’re doing one of these images every day. After some time, even if you used to have any involvement and care while publishing one single image a day (you always did, didn’t you?), it gets lost eventually, because even if you don’t have any motivation to make a good image that day for whatever reason, you must publish one, to keep the commitment to have the “fractal of the day” posted in time. Then or you’ll make something sub-par to keep it going or you will rescue one from your “demo tapes”. Some of these “demos” can even have as much quality as the other ones though, they might have been left behind just because you had this idea of publishing a limited amount of images at a time and maybe it was a special creative week or day or month where you did more images than usual, but you said you would publish just X images at once, so you’ve picked the best of that (creative) batch.
My problem is with these other, sub-par, common images, that are still labeled as “amazing” and that are being delivered daily like rabbits or mice. Images that have a lot of self-similarity – within themselves and with every other low-quality fractal art available, the 3-click batches. A very good example of self-similarity (a basic characteristic of a fractal), but in an opposite way.
Very few people that use this method of posting images (both the “daily” method or these who post in big batches in a very short time frame) can produce decent results IMHO and few actually make these images with an artistic purpose (or even scientific, in some cases). Instead it’s mostly people just running some batch script just to not be forgotten, if they don’t post their “fractal of the day” at that specific hour they will be ignored and people will start paying attention to other “artists”.
I could have kept my site going and with daily updates like that forever, and probably by now I would have around 10,000 images, but would all of them have any quality, meaning, or value (I’m not talking about money here) – to me? I doubt so. If you don’t have anything meaningful to say, shut up, it’s simple as that. If it’s not working and you can’t make images that YOU think are worth showing to anyone, don’t do it. For today.
PS. I hope nobody thinks that this “special” gallery was really meant to be called “amazing”. It was done just to illustrate the content of this post. The only amazing thing there was the amount of time spent to render them. If you can’t understand irony and/or sarcasm, I’m really sorry.
PS 2.: for the reason(s) above, these specific images don’t have a watermark and are “freeware”. The 16 image format was kept. As you might (hopefully) have noticed, I didn’t even bother to give them a name, they have the random/automatic naming convention of Apophysis batches.
Related Images:
