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Photo
By Tom Angel
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RANDOM
PATTERNER Fractal artist Ken Keller stands next
to his 44x56" piece "Fractal
Nebula," currently on display at Moxie's in
downtown Chico. Using an Epson 10,000 printer,
Keller can suggest fine nuances in his works,
almost rivaling the intricacies laid down by
more traditional painters.
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Fractal
Art: Exploring the Boundary between
Creation and Discovery
Ken Keller
Moxie's Café & Gallery
Through Tuesday, March 4 |
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Swirls of water, or lightning-edged clouds or ragged
stars, seem to repeat their colorful patterns, an occasional
bubble or odd sphere popping out of the jagged maelstroms as
they recur over and over, both down endlessly into a
microcosm and far up infinitely into a macrocosm.
Welcome to the art of fractals.
Artist Ken Keller first became interested in fractals
roughly 10 years ago, when he happened onto a Web site
displaying several of the colorful, repeating pieces. Since
then, he has been running fractal printing programs through
a computer, altering the repeating equations by mere
fractions, producing through the most up-to-date printers
available many diverse, colorful and wonderfully intricate
images. His current show at Moxie's, Fractal Art:
Exploring the Boundary between Creation and Discovery,
presents many of his latest works, from large pieces that
seem hand painted to small gray tone works that seem almost
like strange black-and-white photos of subatomic patterns or
perhaps even alternate realities.
"I started in '94," Keller explains at Moxie's,
during the show's opening reception. A photographer
initially, Keller did not, however, come by chaotic systems
and Mandelbrot sets as many of us did--by reading James
Gleick's fascinating book, Chaos: Making a New Science.
"I was turned on to it by exploring the
Internet," he admits. "And I came to it from a
purely visual aspect. I was a commercial photographer. I've
had many black-and-white photography shows, and I'm inclined
that way. But this really caught my attention.
"And also," Keller continues, "I'm very
scientifically curious. You know, these things that the
scientists are coming up with, which turn out
philosophical."
The implications of recursive structures, I suggest.
"Yeah, but when I started," Keller says,
"it was because of the visual possibilities. It just
truly is infinite."
From his initial exposure, Keller began to get more into
computer programs and the latest technology that would allow
him to create his own fractal pieces. Unlike other fractal
artists whose works he has viewed online, however, Keller is
more inclined to let the random patterns run their courses.
"There are fractal artists who use other programs to
manipulate colors and put other things in," he says.
"One of the things that I've tried to do from the
beginning is to just use the program [as is]. I've put this
restriction on myself. The final product I might tweak here
and there. But 90 percent of them I don't."
Keller draws an analogy with a traditional painter.
"A real artist, a painter, let's say, will use his
paint with a different brush or brush stroke for an effect.
The fine nuances that a painter can do, like pull it back a
little bit, let it blend in here ... this can be done
mathematically with computers. We're using math here. So,
let's change this variable. Let's figure the colors in this
way. Instead of your hand, it's just numbers."
That makes me think about the philosophies of the
Pythagoreans, those ancient followers of Greek mathematician
Pythagoras, who suggested that the entire universe and all
its workings could be reduced to numbers.
"I just love that," Keller says,
enthusiastically. "Fractals--you can zoom into them
forever.
"And it applies to the basic situation we're
in," he continues, "in this world and this
existence. [Scientists] are really just now looking into
chaotic and nonlinear dynamics. As we look out with the
Hubble [space telescope], we're seeing structures in
galaxies. And we're finding that these structures are
fractal shapes.
"And in my stuff I hope people will somehow get
that," Keller states. "Even if they don't want to
think about the math."
