Continuing with the variations. This time many of the dots are stretched along elongated sine waves, and everything is tilted about 30 degrees.

Normally I do not like the wall paper type of repetition. I think it is palatable here. It provides a pattern that is easily grasped.

More not-really-random dots. Variable sizes, and some are stretched.

The number of different sizes are limited. The stretching is limited to the orthogonal directions. The larger sized items are more rare.

Initially the image seems rather busy. The additions generate more interest than just same sized dots. By limiting the addition to just a few patterns, there is a competing simplicity.

I made several of these, with various feature rules. More or fewer sizes, more or fewer orientations. I like this one the best. I also find it depends on my mood. Sometimes I like the simpler ones, sometime the more chaotic ones.

Another random/not-random array of dots, similar to the previous post.

Consecutive dots, whether horizontal, vertical or diagonal seems to be the key ingredient. These lines are about the only thing that works. If I try to build, for instance, a section of a circle, or alternating dot/no-dot, it takes too much space and the image immediately jumps firmly to the not-random side of the ledger.

This one gets close to the random/not-random boundary.

There are several places with four or five consecutive dots. There is one place with seven dots on a diagonal. You would not expect this from a collection of random dots at this approximately 20% density.

That does not mean that there is a pattern. It is fun to try to discover a pattern. You start to see a pattern, and then it fades away.

As mentioned in Monochrome #1, many of these images arose from a now abandoned order and chaos series. As part of that series I asked what would happen if some dots were removed from a regular grid. What does the boundary between order and chaos look like. Or, in this case the boundary between random and not-random.

In this one you may notice symmetry from a flip across the lower left / upper right diagonal. The other diagonal teases at a similar mirror symmetry, but it is not there.

You may also see hyperbolic (Hyperbola) curves in the upper right and lower left quadrants. That is by design. So this one is not-random, although it is clearly closer to the random/not-random boundary than an obvious wall-paper type pattern of dots.

Lonely, Isolated.

This is Monochrome #3, with the fuzzy white dot either smaller or farther away.

I never tried using this as a template for finished art work. Maybe someday. There are some pieces where the main central figure is small. For example Bugs #6, and Bugs #12. But the surrounding space is not empty. The little figure is supported by the thin designs in the background. Bugs #9 has a mostly empty background, but the little bit of background design still supports, lifts up, and frames the small central figure.

It is not that I have a policy against creating art that evokes feelings of loneliness or isolation. Rather there is a compulsion to fill up the empty space, and as a result nothing is ever lonely.

Negative of yesterday's post Monochrome #5.

You might think this was inspired by a Soundgarden song (youtube). But it is nothing so deep. It is just a mechanical transformation of the previous piece.

Warm, Protective.

Yesterday, I was investigating putting the bright spot slightly off-center, Monochrome #4. At the time, I did not think about possible differences due to the direction of the offset. I mentioned that in passing, and was going to leave it there. But leaving it as a passing comment seemed incomplete. So I had to go back and create today's picture.

This one is basically yesterday's post mirrored across the horizontal center line.

The image suggests a sun in the sky, which probably accounts for my initial reaction.

Mischievous, Roguish. A child that will not stay still for a photograph.

Again, this is an experiment. What do I feel, first impressions, when I see this? Why? How does this translate to more complex pieces?

The image is trying to move the focus off center. The single fuzzy white dot is shifted down and to the right compared to Monochrome 3. Same clean shape, but it not, as if it refuses to be, where you expect it. Staying in the center is too expected, too symmetric.

When I am working on something and notice that main point of interest is in the center, I immediately feel compelled to change that; I cannot consciously do the normal or expected thing. So I shift the view slightly. The viewer experiences a subconscious search and then discovery to find the central feature. Just a playful tease.

Most of the time I shift the main feature to the right and down. I do not know why I favor that direction. I am not sure what different directions mean. Perhaps a shift lower is something that is grounded. Whereas a shift up suggests rising or falling.

Friendly, Confident, Bold. Although sometimes Menacing, Invasive. The latter when it reminds me of a Dalek's lens.

I have many pictures of these fuzzy white dots on my hard drive. I have grown quite fond of them. I created them more as an experiment than as finished work. I see them as an abstraction or template for art. (Abstraction in the general and original artistic sense.)

I led with some possible emotional reactions to this image. Now a technical examination. The viewer's attention is drawn to the center. The focal point is the exact center of the canvas. Focus or interest wanders towards the edges, then snaps back to the center.

Center focus is the default when I am creating much more complex pieces. If I am thinking about things other than the viewer's center of focus, it inevitably ends up at the center of the canvas. The feature I find most interesting is placed dead center, smaller supporting features surround and support it, fading out to the edges. Most things are designed this way. It is not creative, it is just the default.

For this image the colors in Monochrome #1 are reversed. Are these fuzzy black dots, or holes? They pop in and out like an optical illusion. The intent is not to create an optical illusion. Rather the intent is to explore the emotional response compared to the black on white version.

I do not mean an obvious emotion like you might experience with a painting or photograph of a child with a puppy. Rather something more like meditation. If you try to remove your expectations and quiet the inner narrative, what do you feel? Personally, what I find is not symmetric as might be expected with the mechanical color flip would suggest.

I was planning a series on the somewhat cliche subject of order and chaos. The thesis being that the most interesting art is on the border between the two, while either extreme is uninteresting. A blank canvas is the most extreme example of order.

What is an example of boring order that is a small step above an empty canvas? To find that I decided to remove all color, and all sharp contrasting edges and transitions. Perhaps the simplest 2D geometric figure is the circle. So, fuzzy circles must be the answer.

Well, it turns out that even fuzzy black and white circles are interesting. Perhaps it is the simplicity itself that makes it interesting. Perhaps it is the irony of setting out do create something uninteresting that makes it interesting. It is surprising and fascinating. It gives me motivation to put the order and chaos project on the back-burner, and to set aside the brightly colored and twisty fractals for a short time to explore the world of fuzzy white dots.

Nerdtalk: a = 2, center = (-1.55, 0.33). Formula information can be found in earlier post Bugs_#14. cos() is used instead of sin(), but the results are similar.

Solipsism: Yep, still talking to myself. Unique non-bot page hits have dropped back down to between five and ten a day. No one is leaving comments. I kept up the one-post-a-day pace for over 100 posts, but I have slowed down in the last two weeks. I am going to take a break for a little while. No not for a decade like last time, just for a few weeks.

I still have ten or so finished images to post in the bugs series, I will get those posted, slowly, not daily. I also need to generate a gallery page for the series. So the blog will not be entirely quiet.

It is not that I am burnt out, just the opposite actually. I have been working on my program. Not in the art algorithm / generative aspects, but more in the fundamentals. There are always bugs to fix, and tests to write to keep the bugs out. The fun part is that I am adding a layer to help with organizing my recipes/formulas. The program now (well soon) will track and categorize images/recipes by those that have been published, are queued to be published, need little tweaks before sharing, ideas for a new series, etc. I will be able to select formulas, palettes and similar things by clicking a representative image, rather than remembering the name.

I want to make changes to the site as well. Wordpress has been great for getting me started again. Back in the day, the site was all static html files. That was a really energy drain when I wanted to post something new. But Wordpress has its own kind of energy / productivity drag. The Wordpress web interface dashboard is great for non-programmers. But it quickly becomes too much clicking and form-filling-in for me. The default gallery sucks. There are numerous third party plug-in galleries, but none do want I want. You get the idea, I will stop whining about why I want to make changes.

I envision a day when a button in my art program will automatically generate the image at multiple resolutions (thumb, mobile, gallery, full), ftp them to the web site, give them reasonable and trackable automatic names, add to a gallery page, and generate html for a notes and comments page.

So, the bottom line is, my posts will slow down while I am working on these background tasks.

Picture Post. Minimal nerd talk.

a = 1.3, viewport center = -0.4156 + 1.0436i. Formula information at Bugs #14.

Picture Post. Minimal nerd talk.

a = 1.3, viewport center = -0.0981 + 1.239i. Formula information at Bugs #14.

For the next few days, I am going to post images from the bug formula without the nerd talk.

a = 1.5, center at -0.153+2.163i

Here is a look at the vertical spoke rising above the origin. Msets and Tricorns alternate here as well. The picture back in Bugs #18 show a mini-tricorn. The text describes an infinite grid of points covering the whole plane where the iteration of 0 falls into a 2-cycle. The hot spots in this picture are some of the points on that grid.

Zoom out by another factor of two. The two shapes alternate over the entire horizontal axis at a spacing of $ a*\pi$.

Recall the formula, $ bugR(x+yi) = a*sin(x/a) + yi$, and whatever you may remember about the sin() function. bugR() is periodic with period $ 2*a*\pi$. bugR(z) = 0 for all $ z = a*n*\pi$, n an integer. For the even multiples, $ bugR(z+2n*a\pi) \approx z$ and for old multiples, $ bugR(z+(2n+1)*a\pi) \approx -\overline{z}$. While these observations do not constitute a full proof, it does strongly suggest why the two shapes alternate along the real axis.

This one has the same zoom factor as the previous, the center has been moved to $ a*\pi/2$. As with the bugI images, m-sets and tricorns alternate, this time along the real (horizontal) access. Compare with Bugs #10.

Zoom out by another factor of 2.