Algorithmic worlds

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2009-11-26 Hiroshi Senju

2009-11-25 Flash back - 1999

2009-11-22 Gigapixel image

2009-11-21 Hand-made fractals

2009-11-20 Leonardo Solaas

2009-11-18 Zoomable mandalas

2009-11-17 The Anonima group

2009-11-15 Dan Wills' fractal art

2009-11-14 The Exlibris Museum

2009-11-11 (Lack of) zoomable images

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November 11th 2009

(Lack of) zoomable images

First, here is a wonderful zoomable picture of the Milky Way, zoomable photographs from the Spitzer telescope, and slightly less impressive zoomable images of the sun. (The zooming applets used are awful, though, only Openzoom rules imho.)

I must say I'm quite disappointed that so few fractal artists display their images in a zoomable form. When I discovered Zoomify and Openzoom at the beginning of this year, I thought it would be a little revolution in the fractal art world. But for some reason it wasn't the case, far from it (though it was for me). To my knowledge, Janet Preslar had two images in zoomable form, and someone else (I don't remember who) posted a few relatively low resolution zoomable images to the UF list. And that's it. This total lack of enthusiam cannot be due to a practical difficulty. Anybody with basic html knowledge can use Openzoom and Zoomify; there are even two websites which allow you to upload a large image and then display it automatically as a zoomable picture. There are cheap and reliable hosting services offering large amounts of disk space (even "unlimited" space in the case of my provider, what means at least more than the 24 GB of data currently hosted on my account). It is true that the gigapixel images require a bit more care because of their size, and the number of files involves once they have been sliced by Zoomify, but no such problem appears with, say, 5000 x 5000 pixel images; what already allows to show a lot. Moreover, I got a lot of positive comments about how much zoomable images enhance the viewing experience, yet to my knowledge none of the people who commented tried their hand at it. Maybe they just don't care about displaying the fractal structure of their works... what is a bit paradoxal if they call themselves "fractal" artists. I really cannot explain it.

I found that displaying my works in a zoomable form deeply modified the way I create them. As they now have to be interesting at all magnifications, they naturally became more fractal (see for instance this blog post). I'm sure that if other artists started displaying systematically their images in this form, their style would drift as well toward the fractal side.

[Update]: There have been interesting comments about this on my deviantart post.