BEHIND THE CURVE

Dick Pountain/ Idealog289/ 7th August 2018 09:44:18

Regular readers might know that a favourite pastime of mine is creating computer art. For the last 12 years or so this consisted mainly of taking photographs, some of which I posted to Flickr straight but other times I’d modify to look like paintings, using my preferred tool Photoshop Elements. These modifications depended heavily on Photoshop’s layers, which I’d duplicate, filter and re-merge over and again until the visual result pleased me. My discovery of Silver Efex Pro – one of the Nik filter suite Google that so magnanimously gave away – was a leap forward as its ‘structure’ parameter gives great control over the levels of detail in a picture.

But regular readers may also know that over a year ago I adopted a Chromebook as my main computer, and Chromebooks don’t run Photoshop (except for Express which won’t do). I tried many photoeditor offerings like Photosuite and Pixlr, which have layers, but the only one that clicked was Sumo Paint, which looks a bit like PS Elements, and has some crazy fills, distortions and filters that at first I found a bit OTP. But one fine day I tried its Fractal Morpher filter and found a new hobby.

All Fractal Morpher does is take a simple line drawing and project it into a complex fractal figure around symmetry axes you can vary from 1 to 16, and I found the patterns it produces fascinating. They’re not the shiny, 3D fractal objects and scenes of so much online fractal art, but are strictly 2D – what grabbed me about them is their gorgeous curvature.

It’s not surprising that a fractal algorithm should produce curves that are visually attractive, because so many curves in nature are produced by similar ‘algorithms’ executed by animals’ and plants’ metabolisms. That sunflower seeds are arranged in spirals described by the Fibonacci Series is old news. D’Arcy Thompson described all this 100 years ago in ‘On Growth and Form’; Alan Turing did some of the maths, as did the Russian Ilya Prigogine; in 1990 Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, in ‘The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants’ even extracted some of these algorithms and coded them in C++ (see my Idealog 234, 7th Jan 2014).

Since we’re animals too, why wouldn’t our brains prefer some curves over others? Modern artists I love like Picasso, Miro, Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich all unfailingly draw curves that are ‘right’, in the sense that they could once have been alive, while many artists I like less draw ‘bad’ curves that couldn’t. Fractal Morpher always produces curves that are right.

I started making crude but highly coloured line drawings, feeding them through Fractal Morpher and then applying my layering techniques to produce abstract ‘paintings’ so psychedelically detailed that they look like they might have taken months to do, but in fact took minutes. It actually became habit-forming: if I ever feel at a loose end, it’s very satisfying to dash off another. (I can’t show you one here, but there’s a fair selection on Facebook at

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10157601291269478.1073741843.636729477&type=1&l=c4a07f83f0 )

I deliberately used the word psychedelic back there because these images, as well as seeming ‘natural’, display a deep complexity that resembles the hallucinations produced by LSD. (And yes I did, back in the 1960s, and no, I don’t nowadays). This too is hardly surprising because LSD works on the human perceptual system which is made up of neurons - in the eye’s retina and the visual cortex - that grow and connect according to rules similar to those that govern sunflower seeds or snail shells. There’s a good article by Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta Magazine (https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/) about the mathematics of Acid hallucinations. Basic shapes like lattices, cobwebs, honeycombs, spirals and tunnels recur because they do indeed reflect connection patterns in the retina and visual cortex, where they are components of the mechanisms via which we dissect and analyse perceived scenes. Our brain doesn’t employ Cartesian coordinates like a computer screen but these more organic forms.

So I must now be entirely happy with my graphical facilities on Chromebook right? Actually I wasn’t quite, because Sumo Paint lacked several of the Blend Modes available in PS that I used a lot, and also the Nik filters. Then came that upgrade to ChromeOS which let me run Android Apps, and that enabled me to use the marvellous Snapseed: a photoeditor with a unique and intuitive UI designed for finger use on phones and tablets. And, oh joy, several of its built-in filters replicate the actions of Silver Efex Pro, in particular that all-important Structure parameter. There’s now almost nothing that I need to go back to a Windows machine to do, which feels profoundly liberating.