Thoughts from a Recreational Physicist
This is a tighter version of the last fractal. Â The same equilateral triangle is in play with tighter compression factors. Â If you stare at it enough, you can see that the lines are still there, but the inverse grid of whitespace stands out more strongly. Â As commonly happens in these creations, the lines become obscured with the nodes that are just touching them. Â It doesn’t take much for our senses to erase the notion of lineness from our vision.
This one is the same as the last rendering, but I moved the center of the third transform over and got a resonance creating a neat subdivided triangle effect. Â The repetition around the edges is even more apparent.
The settings for this one are very close to the last. I’ve just cranked up the scaling factor for the third transform. I love how this generates a textured effect that reminds me of weathered paper. The edges still have that same repeated pattern, though it is harder to follow in the center where everything blurs together.
One thing I wonder about is if we perceive the amount of information in these images. While these appear more diffuse and random, they have just as much pattern and rigidness as the more geometric images.
The last grid introduced swirls, twists and rotations onto a “rectangular” partial grid. Â This is chopping parts out and replicating. Â Again, the simple form lets you easily find the parts that are replicated to make this image.
These static images are nice, but nothing helps get a good understanding of how the parts relate like firing up the generator and draging peices around.
This one reminded me of a fractal version of the tic marks on a ruler. Â It’s up there with the minimal spiral for one of my favorite illustrations of the self similarity of fractals. Â As they become more complex, it becomes more and more difficult to make out the relationships between the different parts. Â This one being more “one” dimensional seems to make it easier to take in.
This one feels like it is constructed out of lines rather than individual points, which seem to make the relationships less mind bending, even though the definitions only differ by a few numbers.  The moment it really sunk in that every individual point in the circles I was looking at really really was circular patterns all the way down.  I’d been looking at and computing images of various fractals for over 20 years at that point, but had never made that particular connection before.  I had to see the parts as an exact copy of the whole instead of  each one being subtly different.
