Attractor Explorations

Alluvial Fan – Nathan Selikoff

Nathan Selikoff explores Chaotic Attractor Space using his own custom built software written using C++, OpenGL, and GLUT. Whilst images of dynamical systems are commonly encountered on the web – trophies of mathematical conjecture, it’s always good to see Strange Attractors approached from an artistic perspective.

‘The algorithm for generating the basic attractors was set forth in Clifford Pickover’s Chaos in Wonderland; the equations used are iterated functions that plot between a hundred thousand and a few million pixels. Attractors are colorized by mapping pixel density in the range [0-1] to a user-defined colour gradient.’

Incidentally, Clifford Pickover’s, Chaos in Wonderland, describes creatures on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede who visualize beautiful chaotic attractors in their dreams!

Nathan’s ‘Aesthetic Explorations’ was originally spotted at Jer Thorpe’s Blprnt

Tom Carden, recently alerts us to a set of subtle and exquisitely coloured computational smoke renderings by Clive Tooth. At times the geometry of the smoke appears as if it has been captured in a very small but precise tornado – subtle spirals of fine particles appear as fine shell-like objects. On request Clive has outlined the process and algorithms used to produce such shapes.

Ty Lettau has visualised some of the well know species of attractor space at Soundofdesign in Flash. Lorenz, Duffin, Rossler and Poincare are all visualised iteratively, in a clean and effective interface, so you can see how they build in space-time.