So it seems everyone in Boulder is rightfully getting psyched for the Younger Brother show on May 9th.

When I was last in Boulder, we hit upon the idea of doing a custom piece of art for a Conscious Alliance poster for this show. Most of you probably already know how great Conscious Alliance is, but for those of you who aren’t in the know yet, this is how it works: you bring 10 cans of food to the show and in exchange you’ll get a limited edition poster (created by yours truly), this food then goes to where its needed most. I think its brilliant, personally and I’m honored to put my energy towards the cause.

So I wanted to write a little bit about the design I ended up creating, but I should warn you now, I don’t end up showing the full design and I kinda start nerding out, but that’s just how I roll.

My main area of interest lies in 3D fractals - These are 3D objects that can rotate in 3 dimensional space. The banner at the top of this site was made of a collage of different 3d fractals I created with a PC based program called Xenodream. While most standard fractals are 2D, even the ones you can zoom into - the addition of a 3d dimension allows for much more expression and control in creating images. I started off by remixing the 3d fractal I used for the Younger Brother flyer and spent a few days rendering it (it takes a looooong time to render the size I need to do full resolution 18×20″ print) - This is a section of the fractal - Click to see more detail

Once that was done I started collaging it all together, I hit up all my friends to see who had a copy of the first Shpongle album to scan it for me so i could integrate the shpongle mask into the design, I am a bit shamed to admit I just recently sold my copy of it on vinyl to fund my gear addiction. From there it was some simple design work to make the whole design cohesive. Below you’ll see some sections from the design and some links. That’s all from me - If you want more you can always check out my site.

xoxoxo kris phidelity

more 3d fractals

animated 3d fractal video of Rena Jones - Open Me Slowly

 

 

 

So it all started with a challenge that was posted on the Xenodream pix list to work with the Pythagorean Tree. As illustrated below, The Pythagoras tree is a plane fractal constructed from squares. It is named after Pythagoras because each triple of touching squares encloses a right triangle, in a configuration traditionally used to depict the Pythagorean theorem. Garth, the creator of Xenodream had posted the initial .xep file with the simple repeating squares. From the left each image is an iteration of this function growing exponentially more complex. The top is a 45,45,90 triangle and the bottom is a 30, 60, 90 triangle resulting in a lopsided tree.

Since squares are 2 dimensional I decided to add a third dimension by making the squares into cubes and exploring the geometry in 3 dimensional space. The tree itself was interesting but since I’m reading Samuel Colmans “Harmonic Proportion and Form” I decided to test some of the ideas he’s pushing in the book; I decided to play with angles derived from the geometries of platonic solids and lo and behold I got a Dragon Curve. The cubes were rendered 95% transparent so you can see the geometry inside of it.

(above) Pythagoras Dragon Curve .xep
(below) Same image with outlines instead of cubes and not viewed from an angle. .xep

 

I continued to play with the angles of rotation I found an interesting setting: if you rotate the left square 135 degrees and the right 225 degrees you end up with perfectly nestled fractal geometry of the Pythagorean Triangle, which ends up extending and filling a space proportionate to the original triangle. The squares themselves are subdivided by four of the triangles illustrating their geometric relation. I suspect the white lines are due to the manner we are drawing lines in Xenodream and that perhaps the geometry would fit together perfectly if I were to model it more precisely, which I will probably do with Processing at some later date. Click the image to explore the 4000+ pixel render of this image!

Pythagoras Triangle Fractal (above) and close up of detail (below) .xep

 

Below are a few other images I made playing around with this shape

geomeTree

Below is a side by side comparison of the by now familiar tree and below that the same geometry with a little variation; instead of a square I created a shape that was very very vaguely trunk like. I apologise for the mid ’90s 3D quality of this image I wasn’t setting out to create a realistic tree, Just to see how convincing the branching patterns were. And for the little amount of work that went into it I’m impressed.

very 90’s looking 3D tree .xep

While researching for this article I found an artist named Koos Verhoeff who has made a bronze sculpture using this base geometry.

All the xep files which are for Xenodream are released under a WTFPL public license and you can do whatever you want with them.
That’s it for now! If you’ve made it to the bottom of this page you have a special sort of geekiness that would probably enjoy my RSS feed of random nerdy and geeky things like this. Look near the top right

Ive been playing with a slew of fractal programs generating images for projects and testing scripts and what not below is a random assortment of images I came up with.

 

Expansive Flowering - made with Fractal Explorer

 

Mandelbrot Deep Dive made with Ultra Fractal

 

Mirror Shards created with Apophysis

 

evils made with Xenodream

 

Flourite fractal made with Apophysis

 

Bipolar Fractal Flame made with Apophysis

 

Fractal Flame Made in Apophysis

Gnarls

Not as in Barkley but as in gnarled. The color is my favorite part. This and the image below are colored versions of a series Im working on (Click here to see the series)

 

Another Robo Snail?

Sure, you can never have too many. Click to view the hi-res

 

Intensities in Ten Cities

This is a remix of the Sierpinski buildings that are now included in Xenodream 2.0 thanks to Garth and Dirk. To create this ethereal image I zoomed in quite a bit and clicked render. I waited two days on this one. The haze comes from the cloud/haze overlay. Be sure to click to see the full detail.

 

Space Junk 5

Another patently ridiculously long render. Its not really complete as there are still some holes here and there. I gave up on this after two days. This is another in the series of stacking metamorphs by way of extending and freeing a holon to get a total of 4 stackable metamorphs.

 

Darkest Night

This is the last thing you see before it attaches itself to your face.

 

Inspired by encouragement from Fluid Dynamicist and all around awesome guy Mark Stock I’ve decided to submit an entry into SIGGRAPH. I am planning a series of simple very high resolution 3d fractals totally devoid of color to focus on the details. If not SIGGRAPH I’ve been planning on doing something like this for years anyways. Maybe Ill give a test run at a gallery here in Portland.

These images are all variations of the same seed image - I plan to connect them all and show my artistic process of mutation and permutation which works on the of continual refinement of and honing in on the concept which is ever changing. This particular batch focuses on the Z-axis depth of the main shape (holon) that is repeating through out the structure. By adjusting this I am able to bring out specific form through all the pieces. Anyways enough geeky jibber jabber here are the images

 

 

If theres less than 15 images here this post is incomplete and Ill be updating it!! Stay Tuned

Cyriak has a new video up called moo. The recipe calls for a handful of cows, psychedelics by the shovelful, a smattering of fractals and alien intervention.

 

Here are a few of his other works including the Begging Frankie Vallie video remix

 

And his megamix of animations

 

Dont forget to visit his site!

I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer them with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This one owes a special thanks to Richard Schenk for the inspiration provided in his Xenoship XEP with the simple but elegant one holon .boxed constructor and Wyrl metamorph. This is the second of a series of these things as I have a project in mind for them. My favorite so far.

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer them with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This one owes a special thanks to Richard Schenk for the inspiration provided in his Xenoship XEP with the simple but elegant one holon .boxed constructor and Wyrl metamorph. This transparent animation reminds me of something my friend Xavi would draw. This is the first of a series of these things as I have a project in mind for them. I’ll post on the blog

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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Ever since I was a little kid Ive been fascinated with Moiré patterns and the resulting Twilight Zone effect that occurs when you have two similar patterns overlaid with slight differences. You see this in fences, screens, and fine sheer fabrics. I’ve been playing with creating this effect from scratch in After Effects for a little while now and decided to share my findings.
The first is the most recent utilizing some new After Effects FX - Mainly Turbulence Displace, Its almost like it was made for this sort of thing. This is not a seamless loop, sorry.

Download the movie file here

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The second is the same set up as the first with different settings this one is decidedly more crazy and spastic

Download the movie file here

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This last video is the first one I created tweaking at least 7 different parameters at once - its a little fuzzy but there are moments, especially the end.

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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I’ve been spending some time exploring the animation feature of Xenodream so I decided I would create seamless video loops at the same time and offer them with a Creative Commons License for my VJ and video friends.

This loop is the classic Z Plane at 4% transparency getting all crumpled up with the Styro metamorph at various settings. Much credit due to Panny Brawley for sharing her blooming shell XEP awhile ago which is at heart the inspiration for this animation. I still haven’t suceeded in matching the beauty of Blooming Shell however =)

Download the movie file here

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This mean you can use, remix and create derivative works of this as long as its not for commercial purposes (this includes as elements of designs in which you are charging a design fee).

You must link back to this page any place your use of it appears, this is part of the license and if you fail to do so that is violation of the license agreement.

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