Under the Influence

I got fascinated by the idea of making fractal-based artwork after the Shrewsbury Darwin Festival’s third Summer Symposium in 2007, Batteries Not Included (which was held in conjunction with the Computer Arts Society). A great weekend of inspiration and ideas, but I assumed that fractal art required too much science for me to ever manage it.

By that autumn, I’d joined Flickr and discovered helpful people who made fractal art themselves, introduced me to some of the many suprisingly simple programs available, and encouraged my early efforts. Several thousand pictures later, I’m still fascinated and still playing. Joining Flickr led to me getting involved firstly with the Shropshire Community Flickr Group and through that with the Shift Time blogging project. So now I am  taking more notice of the up-coming festival than I might otherwise have done.

And here’s my latest digital piece (not quite finished in this picture: the sea and shore are only sketched in), which seems to have more than a nod towards Theo Jansen’s amazing walking Strandbeests, which I’m eagerly awaiting as this year’s summer Darwin event approaches, and the strange forms of Clinton Chaloner’s Primordial Soup. One thing leads to another thing: interacting with what we already have in our heads: inspiring, blending, sparking fresh ideas and images which in turn inspire other ideas…. What will come out of  Shift Time over the course of the festival? And what will come out week, months, years later, as the ideas flow and meld and their descendants pass on from mind to mind and into words, pictures, sound, movements, textures, feelings, colours…? New thoughts and  fresh ways of looking at old ones? Big ideas, little dreams? Who knows? Let’s find out.

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