Destiny of Fate's BIO

I now have thousands of cross stitch pattern .PDFs, Spooky .MP3s, VJ Loops, Jigsaw Puzzles for Windows 95-latest PCs (and Apple iPads, iPhones, M1, M2 PCs with emulation software). More uses of my fractals are in development.

I love discovering the beauty of fractals in all their forms. It's been awhile since I detailed how I got into fractals. Please bear with me as I try to remember it all. I got started exploring fractals on a friend's top of the line 386 SX PC. We'd wait hours for a single 640x480 pixel render to complete. John's computer didn't have a co-processor (aka Floating Point Unit or FPU). With the help of my friends who were Value Added Resellers (VARS) I was able to teach myself the ins and outs of computers. On my 24th birthday my mom and grandmother chipped in to get me my first 100% fully IBM compatible PC - An AMD 100 MHz DX4 in a full server tower with 12 expansion slots, 10 drive bays (about half were full height 5.25 inch in size), dual power supply for the computer and the monitor. I used that PC for 13 years making about 10,000 fractals. When it came time to make an upgrade I went for a 200 MHz model. Again spending years making about 10,000 new fractals. After the addition of my 3rd AMD PC running at 500 MHz I was finally able to make about 30,000 new fractals in a year. I was now exploring fractals as deep zoom animations as well as creating renders up to 20,480 x 20,480 pixels! I was using it to make short videos for local musicians as background visuals for live electronica shows. It was around this time that I partnered with Michael Thomas Roe to make music videos for both ours art shows. I bought some royalty free music from other Atlanta-based musicians to sell alongside the fractal DVDs I was sending to Amazon for publication on demand. I made about 13 DVDs until Amazon pulled the plug. They wanted to stream everything to be more like a cross between YouTube and Vimeo.

By 2007 I'd already had some art shows at DeKalb College Central and Newton campus for a few months, I had the entire Ferst Center at Georgia Tech for a couple of months, I had already ran a live demonstration for elementary students allowing them to make their own fractal art, I'd run commissioned themed shows for smaller sci-fi conventions too, I was allowed to run my fractal background visuals for the DragonCon Drum Circle 2007, I'd been asked to create a custom Trippy themed fractal background animation for a local band who was playing at GayLaxicon 2007. For that gig I curated 12,037 out of about 80,000 of my fractals to meet specific criteria. It was by this time I had discovered the amazing stereographic optical illusions created by wearing ChromaDepth 3D glasses. No need to purposely color code images like the old days of Red/Blue 3D glasses.

By 2008 I'd been asked to present my fractals to Roswell elementary & high school students. So I partnered with local musician Darren Nelson. He used the principles of creating fractal art to make abstract music for the presentation that we shared with the students. We were there the whole day. After about 30 minutes of HD deep zooms we'd take turns fielding question by the students and faculty. Then those students would be ushered out only to be replaced by another auditorium full of fresh new faces. The HD deep zooms revealed many 3D aspects to them that always got applause & requests to see certain portions of he animations over again. Over the years since running that show I still get young adults who recognize me as "the fractal guy" from the various art shows I've been privileged to host. They always have something cool to say about how they loved seeing them.

Both DeKalb College and the Ferst Center asked me to stay an extra month or two by popular demand. After my presentation for the students of the Roswell schools I got a call asking me to create a 30 minute introduction for the 2008 Roswell CABYs. An awards ceremony. None of the computers were fast enough to create a new HD deep zoom by the deadline. So I added a new 2 GHz AMD PC to the lineup. In a few months I'd made more fractals with it than I had on any of the other computers combined! But still there wasn't enough time to complete a 30 minute animation. Fortunately the folks at the Roswell CABYs understood. I was allowed to run the 10 minutes of animation on a loop. At the CABYs people were milling around and trying to find their seats while others were awestruck at the animation running on the projection screen. For those who finally did take their seats I'd see their jaws drop as they looked up at the big movie projection screen. Many of them gasped. They'd reach for their program guides to see what they were looking at. I had a great time watching people's reactions to our work.

After that I continued to explore other styles of fractal animation and deep zooms. At the time of their creation seamless looping animations that played for at least 10 seconds were all the rage as VJ Loops & background visuals. So I set about to making all the popular video resolutions on the most popular VJ Sites. I made animations for single to multiple video display arrays for personal computers, video walls, etc. Each video resolution had 1,200 "Standard" and another 1,200 "3D" 10 second seamless loops. Each video resolution took about 3 months to create and render before I could move on to the next higher one. By the time I had amassed 16,800 VJ loops the industry had moved on from what I was making to something entirely different. I'd missed my chance. Then I discovered Patreon. I uploaded about half of them to both of my Patreons to allow anyone royalty-free personal use of them. One low monthly subscription. For previews I uploaded them to YouTube as well. YouTube compresses the snot out of everything and doesn't support the native video resolutions I'd originally uploaded to it. I had little to fear about someone downloading them from YouTube. It serves its purpose as a preview of what is on my Patreons.

Some people ask me "What is a fractal?"

There are a number of ways to answer this. The technical description can be found here:

https://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

But the easiest answer goes like this:

"Fractals are like clouds. Each person sees something different when looking at the same one. What do you see?"

Here are some more definitions of what fractals are and how to make them:

Here are some definitions

1) A shape that can be repeatedly subdivided into parts, each of which is a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar and independent of scale.

2) A fractal is a geometric object which is rough or irregular on all scales of length, and so which appears to be 'broken up' in a radical way. Some of the best examples can be divided into parts, each of which is similar to the original object. Fractals are said to possess infinite detail, and they may actually have a self-similar structure that occurs at different levels of magnification.

3) A term coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975 to refer to items with fractional dimensions as opposed to the integer dimensions such as 1, 2 and 3 associated with length, area and volume. Often used to refer to a structure bearing statistically similar details over a wide range of scales. Fractals describe shapes that are "self-similar" -- that is, shapes that look the same at different magnifications. To create a fractal, you start with a simple shape and duplicate it successively according to a set of fixed rules. Oddly enough, such a simple formula for creating shapes can produce very complex structures, some of which have a striking resemblance to objects that appear in the real world.

4) Fractals share holographic properties.

5) A geometric shape or pattern that is self-similar and has fractional dimensions. Natural phenomena such as the formation of snowflakes, clouds, mountain ranges, and landscapes involve patterns. Their pictorial representations are fractals and are usually generated by computers. They are repeated at every scale and so cannot be represented by classical geometry. Fractals have statistical self-similarity at all resolutions and is generated by an infinitely recursive process. An algorithm, or shape, characterized by self-similarity and produced by recursive sub-division; more generally the branch of mathematics named and explored by Benoit Mandelbrot.

6) Fractals are like clouds. When looking at the same cloud some will see flowers, while others may see bunnies, or Viking warlords frolicking in the snow. Each person sees something different. What do you see?

Examples of fractal properties

From Quantum Theory Made Easy – part one:

Quantum physics

"....shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated 'basic building blocks', but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way."

Chaos theory

“The fractal geometry of chaos theory offers a curious picture of wholeness, rather than sheer disorder or perfectly crafted design -- something between symmetry and anarchy: broken symmetry. These fractals are like the fragments of a shattered hologram. If a hologram should be broken into pieces, an approximation of the whole picture could still be seen in each of its many shards. Woolley suggests that the universe is like the many fragments of a shattered hologram, and scientists can discover secrets of the whole "enfolded" universe by examining these fractured crystals that are "unfolded" and consequently accessible to our investigation. Holography, like fractal geometry, is of great practical value in the compressing and decompressing of digital data and images.

Let's take a moment to regroup. There should be some sense of non-local connection emerging here entangling Dali's illusions, fractals, spirals, holograms, compaction's dimensions, encoding, symmetry, asymmetry, broken symmetry, stereograms, and all those ideas yet to materialize. Chaos puts our fragmented world back together as a crystal of broken symmetries with many facets -- as fractals. We must come to appreciate the mystery of the diamond mind, which attains its true beauty only when it is broken by the hand of an artist. These swirling images of the whole raise us to dizzying heights, but the wholeness we experience is not the limitless expanse of the universe, but a passageway through creation in which we also have a hand to play.

From Fractals In Nature:

Most mathematics that we study in school is old knowledge. Around 300 B.C. a mathematician by the name of Euclid organized the geometry we have been studying this year in class. You can thank him for all the beautiful postulate and theorems that we now have in our math toolboxes. Much of fractal geometry, however, is new knowledge. Fractal geometry and chaos theory are providing us with a new way to describe the world. Many objects in nature aren't formed of Euclid’s squares or triangles, but of more complicated geometric figures. Many natural objects - ferns, clouds, seashells - are shaped like fractals. Fractal geometry is a new language used to describe, model and analyze complex forms found in nature. Chaos science uses this new fractal geometry.

How it all works

The basic technique of these fractals can actually be explained without resorting to confusing mathematical equations and jargon. It's rather simple, really.

First, give every point on the screen a unique number. Now take that number and stick it into a formula; you'll get a result from the formula. Take that result and stick it back into the formula. Keep doing this and watch what happens to the numbers you get. Color each point based on what happens.

That's it. Really—that's it. Now, with most formulas it probably won't do much of interest, but with the formulas used in fractal creation, some interesting things happen. Sometimes the numbers you get by feeding the results of a formula back into the formula (iterating) explode into enormous numbers, that just keep getting bigger and bigger. Those points get colored one way. Other times, the numbers "home in" on a number, getting closer and closer to it. They get colored a different way.

The interesting thing—and the reason fractals work at all—is that sometimes, just a tiny little change in the number you start with can completely change what happens as you keep iterating the number. And the boundary between numbers that explode and numbers that home in is complicated and twisted—it's the shape of the fractal.

The enormous task at hand

Calculating fractals this way involves a lot of work. A small fractal image—perhaps only 640x480—contains over 300,000 points. Each of those points may require running a number through the fractal formula more than 1,000 times. This means the formula has to be computed more than three hundred million times. And that's a mild example. Extreme images (such as poster-size fractals) can involve more than one trillion calculations. Fortunately for the impatient among us, modern computers are fast enough to do the job in a few minutes. Large fractals might take hours or days, but exploring fractals has never been easier.

Not quite so similar

Many fractal types get wildly different as you zoom in. They're still self-similar, but they're not rigidly self-similar. This is what makes fractal exploration so intriguing. The features you see as you zoom are always changing—teasing you with a little bit of familiarity, and tantalizing you with new and unexpected twists. With just a single fractal shape, you can explore forever and never see everything it has to offer. The further you zoom, the more likely you are seeing something that nobody has ever seen before. And with modern computers, it's very easy to zoom and zoom and zoom. With just a few clicks you can have zoomed so far that the original fractal image is larger than the sun.

How many fractals do I have? Well if you were to look at only one per day you'd need more than 746 years to see them all.