Flickr Fractalist Project

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About Flickr Fractalist Project

This group is set up to share and explore the visual relationships of fractal patterns and fractal elements within images from painters, photographers, digital artists, sculptures and just about any other medium with which this subject can be explored through.

It doesn't matter what format of your picture the fractal elements occur in, Or how you come by them, it's the fact that they exist on an image that you can share with the Flickr Fractalist Project group.

I have seen a lot of pictures (photographs, digital art, and paintings) on Flickr that look Fractal but stand alone un-noticed and un-realised. This group brings these pictures together to celebrate the Concept of exploring fractal geometry in nature, the imagination and in computers, through these mediums Painting, Sculpture, Digital Arts, Textiles and Photography, together.

Fractal Structures which reoccur in very different places in different scales, around the world, in living things and outer space are so similar, it must be the language of our universe at least.

Our imagination and our planet is the largest part of our universe that we can easily explore directly. Maybe we can learn perhaps something about the nature of life and growth of this universe by studying the relationships of shapes In nature, computers and our imagination. By observing how natural processes create very beautiful Structures.By mimicking and echoing Fractal elements in paintings, drawings, prints, digital arts and often focussing also on these naturally occurring wonders through photography.


Why are trees and branches so similar in shape to the structure of blood vessels, lightening bolts and water tributaries? why do single celled life forms appear to share similar behavioral attributes as much larger creatures? Why do cauliflowers and other natural structures appear to have the same form when it is cut into smaller pieces?

These naturalistic, complex, infinate beauitful Shapes made by Fractal equations on computers were first noticed by mathmatician, Benoit B Mandlebrot. He calls this type of complex structure of self similar shapes, Fractal geometry. There is a very amazingly beautiful type of Fractal equation named after him, the Mandelbrot Set,z -> z^2 + c.

The Mandelbrot set is a dynamic calculation based on the iteration (calculation based on constant feedback) of complex numbers with zero as the starting point. The order behind the chaotic production of numbers created by the formula z -> z^2 + c can only be seen by the computer calculation and graphic portrayal of these numbers. Otherwise the formula appears as a totally random and meaningless list of numbers.

Only when millions of calculations are mechanically performed and plotted on a two dimensional plane, like a computer screen, a hidden geometric order of the Mandelbrot set is revealed. The order of Plots displayed in the form of a two dinemsional graph on the computer screen, show strange and beautiful patterns, containing self similar recursiveness over an infinite scale. The very first time Mandelbrot noticed one of these fractal patterns was printed out on a very old fashioned computer print out.

Before this point only two and three dimensional shapes where known of; Circles,speres,sqaures,Cubes etc ... The Euclids. These shapes are concerned only with an abstract perfection. Something which hardly exists in nature. Euclidian Geometry cannot describe the shapes of mountains, clouds, water, coastlines, Trees. Without fractals the language of our landscapes cannot be fully understood. It is the Non - Euclidean shapes that are the most daunting when attempting to draw and paint anything natural.


In one of Mandelbrot's Books The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983) he points out such observations;

Jonathan Swift, 1733, Verse based on works about the idea of recursive self similarity by philosipher Leibniz:
So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bit 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Lewis Richardson, 1922. A mathmatician studying weather predition, turbulance and the chaotic condition of liquids and gases:

Big whorls have little whorls,
Which feed on their velocity;
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity. -