When I first heard about ‘fractal’ art, I did not have a clue what it could be so I thought I’ll investigate this further and was quickly to find out that Mr mathematics has its role to play here.

Before carrying on, it might be best to get out of the way a few terms definitions which shall shed some light on this form of art

Fractal: Rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduce-size copy of the whole. So what is ‘fractal art’ then? Fractal art according to Wikipedia is created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, music, or other media. You will have understood by now that we are talking here about digital art and that means ‘fractal-generating’ software are used in this instance.

While you may question whether this is really art, after all you just need to set up a few parameters and push the button, it can certainly produce great visual results and can be inspirational for other artists so on that basis I back up this form of art.

Jock Cooper has been a keen fractal artist and even wrote a boook about it – Fractal recursions (this link will take you to the Amazon website)

You will find below a series of Jock Cooper’s artwork

Also visit his website for more pictures, ART-PIE recommends the ‘Mechanical gallery’.

ART-PIE