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.

Fine Art Gallery Now Open

I have a little announcement to make. Almost a year has passed since this blog started to exist, and I finally feel that the work I’ve been showing here is ready for something more. So I cherry-picked some of the best pieces here and put them up at my new online fine art gallery.

To properly prepare for this, I got myself a print of the most complicated image I could find, scoured over every little detail to see exactly how it looks on paper and how it needs to be adapted to create a truly great print. Using this knowledge, all of the classics were given a significant overhaul: Smoother colors, less noise and a sprinkling of little tricks and tweaks have brought them up to an entirely different level of quality.

As serendipity dictates, during september you get free US ground shipping thanks to Imagekind, the service providing this online gallery.

Check out the gallery now, and you may even find a piece or two previously unreleased 😉

Do you believe in magic?

A little over a year ago, I had a dream. “Do you believe in magic?” they asked me. To my surprise, I found myself unable to respond, and woke up feeling very strange.

I’ve said before that reality is a very flexible substance, but it’s something entirely different to have an experience confirming it firsthand. I strongly dislike the terminology and vibe associated with concepts like intention manifestation and the law of attraction, but when I say “magic”, I actually mean something pretty close to it, though it’s a bit harder to describe exactly.

Anyway, a couple of months ago I decided to conduct a little experiment. I’ve always wanted to see a Beethoven sonata playing live, So I decided to will it into existence. Just like that. I made that decision and then forgot about it and went on with my life as usual. Nothing happened, for quite some time, which was not very surprising. But then a couple of days ago, being at a friend’s place I saw a flier which just happened to be lying around, advertising a piano function featuring a famous soloist playing sonatas by, you guessed it, Beethoven.

Of course I wanted to go, but I was a bit concerned about the money. Tickets weren’t very expensive, but considering my current financial situation, the amount wasn’t meaningless either. But I couldn’t let that stop me, so I decided that the money issue was going to resolve itself, somehow.

This was scheduled for wednesday, so yesterday I got online to get my ticket, only to find out that they had moved the function to that same day. This meant rescheduling a lot of stuff, so I was tempted to back off again, but I the end I pushed through that inner resistance and decided to go no matter what.

I finally couldn’t get tickets online due to a random technical hurdle, but I had come way too far to give up, so I just headed to the venue to get one right before the function. I was already standing in line when a complete stranger, who had unsuccessfully tried to exchange her ticket, walked up to me and offered it to me, for free. So much for having a financial excuse to justify letting myself down.

The evening was amazing. The music moved me to my very core. It was every bit as great as I had imagined it. And it happened, all by itself, just because I wanted it to and acted on the opportunities that arose.

So, what does this entire thing mean? Well, it depends on your worldview. The circumstances are innocent enough for a skeptic to offhandedly attribute them to coincidence, and perhaps I would have done so too a year ago. But I don’t feel that particular version does this series of events justice. Belief is a thing of fabula, the personal experience we create around the things that actually happen (to paraphrase Corvus). I don’t care anymore what anybody else thinks, because from my entirely subjective point of view, the world just bent over backwards to make a little dream of mine come true.

Do you believe in magic? In my case you don’t even have to ask anymore, but what about you? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.