Fractals as an Art Form
"Fractal computer programs provide a way for people
with no artistic talent to create beautiful images."
Anonymous
This statement was made occasionally when art museums and art galleries first began to show displays of fractal images. Almost everyone agreed that some of them were beautiful, but there was considerable disagreement over whether or not they were works of art.
Before trying to provide a rebuttal to this comment ( with which I disagree ), it might be interesting to consider what is meant by "art" and by "beauty".
All languages are ambiguous, and the word "art" has many different meanings. There are the "fine arts", the "decorative arts", and the "useful arts", among many others. The purpose of an artistic creation could be just "art for art's sake": to create something beautiful solely for the joy of doing it. Or it could be to illustrate religious themes, myths, or historical events. All of these have been major sources of inspiration for artists in the past.
Works of art might also be a way for an artist to communicate with the public to serve some social purpose: to advocate a reform, to illustrate a social ill, or, more invidiously, to provide propaganda for some cause. Such images might be designed primarily to stimulate and interest the viewers, rather than merely to provide a beautiful image. Scenes from real life can often be ugly, but they may also be inspiring.
The philosophers of art, or "aesthetics", seem to agree only on one thing: that a work of art must involve some element of human creativity. Scenes from nature, of places, animals, and people, or views through a telescope or a microscope, might be beautiful - but they would not be considered works of art.
This would appear to rule out photography as an art form.
Computer generated images, based on a Julia or Mandelbrot Set, have no parallel in nature. But, if no form of human creativity were involved, they would also not be considered to be works of art.
People in every culture have always used the tools available to them to create works of art. Paints, brushes, and a smooth surface were once made from natural materials. Now, they are often synthetic. But the process of creating a painting is still the same.
A computer, having a sketchpad for input, with a set of digital brush images and an electronic palette, can be used to create a digital version of a painting. It can then be transferred to paper using any of a number of different types of printers. This would be considered a genuine work of art by almost anyone. The computer is merely the tool being used by the artist.
But the use of a computer program to actually generate the image is rather different. Using such a program, however, does require considerable human intervention.
While it's easy to explore various regions of a Julia set, artistic judgement is necessary to reconize when a pattern is interesting enough to be a potential basis for a stimulating or exciting image. Creating this image then requires choosing the way colors are applied. There are a huge number of variables that can be manipulated to achieve the final result.
Creating a fractal image that evokes an emotional response from the viewer requires, in my opnion, both artistic judgement and an appreciation of beauty. Is that sufficient to justify calling it a "work of art"?
I think that it is clearly enough to qualify this as a fine art for the talented few, a decorative art for the rest of us.
Science attempts to analyze natural phenomena using the language of logic and mathematics. Nature, itself, provides the standard whereby scientific theories can be judged as being successful or as being failures.
There is no such impartial standard for judging a work of art. People instinctively recognize whether or not an artistic creation is interesting, or stimulating, or even beautiful. Its appeal is on an emotional and intuitive, rather than a logical, basis.
Keats
Anonymous
