close
2002 was dominated by childcare - and since a little dude under one
year will sleep a lot, that means many hours of sitting on call witing
for him to wake up. Never quite the freedom to do much useful, but
lots of time to waste. Consequently, 2002 might well have been my most
productive year in terms of algorithmic art. (It sure wasn't terribly
productive in many other ways).
Since I was starting to have a decent grip on the technology of the UF
fractal engine, I was now able to actually compose images; to work
with them until they passed muster. My muster. At the time. And less
than 3 years later, I'm already surprised how my taste has changed.
In addition to just creating parameter files (and their visual output)
I started writing code for the engine. It's like expanding your
driving style by learning how a car-engine works and how to modify it
- you don't have to,
but I think complete mastery of your tools is necessary to reach
excellence in any field. I already knew the underlying math, so the trick
was just picking up the UF language and starting to make serious
modifications... "Contact", "Splat", "Rosettas" and "Construction
Paper" are all examples of images created with my own UFRs,
some
of which I shared through the UF public database
Some of my all-time favorite images were created during this time:
"Breath","Eye of the Storm", "Interaction". Unfortunately I lost much
of the code behind these during a hard-disk crash late in the year,
and the images are all that remains - I have been keeping backups
since and a similar crash in 2004 was "only" able to destroy part of
my data.
In addition to trying to push UF beyond the places it was supposed to
be able to go (like in "Outline", which is a fairly simple operation
in many graphics programs, but a pretty nifty trick if you want to do
it directly in UF) I picked up an early version of Apophysis and two
of the images here ("Flame" and "Smoke") were created with it. I never
really warmed up to it, though, and stuck to trusty old UF2.05 - even
after UF3 was released. I have yet to meet any real limits in the
program and see no real reason to move to something different.