Benoit Mandelbrot - Fractal Art Contest 2007 ???

[Nahee_Enterprises]

There's quite a heated discussion of the contest going on over at the Orbit Trap blog:
    http://orbittrap.blogspot.com/
....I encourage you to read....

Yes, definitely an interesting set of issues and concerns being brought up in those discussions (but nothing new).

One issue I find the most peculiar is where Damien tries to explain why the "rules" were set up the way they are:

   "The sponsors require this as a hedge against
    insufficient quality being submitted."

Which is rather strange, since the rules were in place long before they ever got a sponsor signed up.

I'm obviously quite biased, having been involved with Ultra Fractal and the fractal art contest from the beginning.

And I too was involved with such things in the beginning, and for a few years there after.  But I recall that you did not start using UF in the beginning.  In fact, it was not until almost this exact day back in 1998 that you stated:

    "....it took a little gentle cojoling from Damien to dig into UltraFractal...."

And that was when UF ver. 2.0-Beta-6 was being used.  I had started using UF back when it was version 1 (around a year and half before people were being "cajoled" into using UF).

[Nahee_Enterprises]

I had a look at the page of winning entries, and there were some great ones, but nothing
particularly novel in my opinion.  How many times can you re-colour Julia sets and flame fractals
before it starts to get a bit stale?  I guess this is more a criticism of the state of fractal art...

There were some interesting XenoDream.com entries submitted to the contest, which helped relieve the consistency of similar type fractals.

For those new to fractal imagery, I guess everything looks great.  But for some of us that have been around awhile, we tend to look for anything new and different, especially if it is not the same old tired spiral images.

[lycium]

There were some interesting XenoDream.com entries submitted to the contest, which helped relieve the consistency of similar type fractals.

on a slightly tangential note, i found the first (to me) truly excellent xd fractal yesterday: http://love1008.deviantart.com/art/3dFractal-Watergrass-50256771


i do feel there is a solid basis for saying the competition is an "ultrafractal spirals" one, but on the other hand some new things do get selected. last year someone i know through the demoscene had their (self-programmed) work selected for the final, which kind of restored my faith in that approach to a competition like this.

however all this bickering, talking about it being "amateurish" (tim said it best i think: "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. ROTFLMAO."), is certainly uncalled for and disrespectful to a large number of skilled artists.

[David Makin]

Just to point out that both "Theme Park #2" and one of my other entries "Wild Flowers" distinctly lack spirals and are both non-standard fractals being created using escape-time IFS - each being produced from 2 Julia transforms, I know that's not completely different from a normal Julia but I've seen very few folks trying this method Granted Theme Park #2 does have features vaguely reminiscent of Newton fractals.

[lycium]

great, now they're trying to blame the readership for the recent poopiness (can't think of a better adjective) of their blog:

I guess the whole thing can best be summed up this way:

We invited the Fractal Community to speak for themselves and they didn't want to. We spoke for them and they told us to shut up.

pffft, speaking for the fractal community, talk about delusions of grandeur... they speak more than enough for themselves, leave us out of it