Flowing Chaos

This is a good description of my life right now. So much going on behind the scenes, so many options to explore,  it overwhelms me sometimes.

My love for fractals hasn’t diminished in any way. In fact, I’m busily working on my own fractal editor, which is such an absorbing undertaking at times that I forget the reason I arrived at this point in the first place is that I’m an artist.

A strange paradox to be living in, but somehow appropriate when you consider the medium I’m working in.

Secret Garden

Into this fractal garden you can always retreat, surrounding yourself in calm, dim light and listen to the deepest heartbeat of the world, to the rhythm that sweeps you away gently into your own dance, your own ritual; unique yet connected to the steady pounding of this inner core.

This place is real, I can feel it deep within me. So can you, if you only care to listen to the subtle but constant drum that marks this most sacred spot, the very center of the world.

A small update

I’ve been incredibly busy these past weeks: I moved, went out of town over the long weekend (Chilean national holidays), and have been devoting my attention to the half-dozen or so ideas and projects I have cooking right now.

But this place, the fractal forest, is still very important to me, and as I’ve said before, not having more than 5 minutes is no excuse to stop posting.

The Gallery should receive some more fractals over the next couple of days, and I’m really thrilled at the quality the prints turned out to have. In the meantime, I’ll be posting my most recent works here.

This is one I’m particularly proud of, it resembles a flower made of smoke in a strange way. There’s something magical about it.

Shattered Realities

(Click to enlarge and to save as wallpaper)

Sometimes, it’s reality that fades away when confronted by your dreams. Which side prevails, the rougher, more real one or the subtleties of the imagination – that is just a matter of perspective.

Mysteries

They’re not always meant to be solved. I think the most interesting part of being human is having no idea what it all means. Things just are, and you can’t prove any of it to exist. Even questioning is a paradox, the paradox itself is a paradox, ad nauseam. It’s called being too smart for your own good, letting your mind take over when it has no idea what to do when encountering anything that doesn’t fit nicely into its own illusions.

But I question the validity of all these logical constructs and black holes of thought: What happens when your mind has collapsed entirely? Where does the strenght to keep living come from? There’s something else there, beyond all this existential angst.

These circumstances don’t have to dampen your joy of living. It’s definitively not a productive way to spend your time.

At the end of each day, even if you still find yourself utterly clueless, unable to comprehend even the tiniest sliver of existence, you can still choose curiosity instead of fear, wonder instead of despair. And that is, to sum it up, why I believe in divinity.

Fundamental Understanding

(Click image to enlarge)

It’s amazing how doing something yourself instead of just observing it can deepen your understanding of that thing tremendously. Above are 6 screenshots of fractals generated by a tiny program I wrote using only 153 bytes, which is 1000 times less than the size of the image itself! When stripped to the bare essentials, there’s really not that much to an iterated function system (the process behind the creation of a fractal).

Nowadays, computers provide the structure which carries an amazing amount of the human soul in it – communication, expression, creativity, connectedness. It might just be an external manifestation of the major shift towards freedom humanity is experiencing.

With that in mind, I have to tell you: the first time you run a program which actually makes the computer do exactly what you intended, creating something meaningful out of a bunch of dead numbers and instructions, it feels a bit like being god.

Passion or Balance?

So-called insanity occasionally takes over my life, and I’m quite proud of that fact. One of the latest creative bursts I had involved Python swallowing me whole for a couple of weekends, capturing me with its intricacy until the break of dawn. While I don’t know exactly what will come out of my newfound ability to write hacky code, fractals have already been thrown into the mix – as a prime ingredient no less.

The point this ultimately brings me to is one of passion: Truly great things never happen without it. They don’t happen when there’s a clearly defined plan, when everything is laid out. They don’t happen at a relaxed pace, or even a 9-5 hectic one. No, what we need is something entirely different. Something which can’t be forced.

Letting my mind wander for no apparent purpose, having the opportunity to explore things I’m curious about (just because), gives me the chance to refill my creative well and let it spill out over all areas of my life. Even if its practical applications were not clear from the beginning, finally being able to program a bit is actually a childhood dream come true. Isn’t that what we life for, after all? And it might just be the secret to make things happen.

Purple Moon

I just can’t bring myself to see the moon as a pale white or yellow entity. For me, it has a very full, deep, red-and-blue feel to it.

Except for the few times it does humor me on this point of contention, I am forced to recur to my artistic tools to make that fanciful vision just a tad more real. Makes you wonder what “real” ultimately means, doesn’t it?

Self Censorship

Learning how and when to censor yourself is very important when developing any artistic skill. The way you go at this process can have a huge impact in your skill. I try to keep my learning curve steady and steep, in a way that actually makes it enjoyable and worthwhile. In that sense, it’s important to allow myself to go in different directions, and knowing when an experiment is proving worthwhile.

I see a lot of people telling themselves that their work is not good enough. Most of the time, that’s just not true. There is always something worthwile to be found, even if it’s hard to spot at first. True skill lies in laying that something bare, stripping it of all fat and needless filler, and be confident enough to put it out into the world. That skill is what makes true artists.

Path of Spirit

Do you often focus on your goals, your target, imagining the life you want to be living? I know I lose myself that way from time to time – that’s why I’m writing this piece right now. I’m tired of running in circles, chasing ill defined measures of “success”.

The path of spirit is not as straight as your mind would have you believe.

Lately I’ve started challenging all the definitions and preconceptions floating around in my head, and they have slowly given rise to some very interesting questions: Do I even need to define a destination, and end to my path? Isn’t that besides the point of living, isn’t every step along the way a worthy place to reach?

Why does the notion of already being where we need to be sound so absurd to the logical mind? Why are we unable to just stop and look around?

If you narrow your own view to the point where you can only see straight ahead it can surely turn you into an efficient machine, but it also makes you miss all the beauty present in life. This world is surprisingly malleable – whenever you’re not sure where you’re going, all you have to do is to set one foot before the other with intention, and a new way will form itself before you.

Never be afraid of straying a bit. When you walk all paths of life as if they were only one, you will never get lost.