Jules is one of those category defying people who was extra hard for me to place. He has worked programming, art and research. Jules has an infectious personality and is very passionate about fractals. Jules is very involved in all sorts of cutting edge research using fractals in more than an artistic way, he works hand in hand with scientists who are using fractals to push boundaries in science and medicine. Jules developed the Julius Ruis Set and is one of the Founders of the International PostGenetic Society (IPGS).

Jules is also the inventor of a very intuitive educational tool, the Julius Ruis Set, which is a smart presentation of 400 Julia Sets, showing that the Mandelbrot Set is the parameter basin of all closed Julia Sets. Recently he also collaborated with Terry W. Gintz (one of the top fractal programers today) to creat Fractal Imaginator a program that incorperates Jules Ruis sets and a number of other formulas and imaging techniques into one program. You can learn much more about Jules Ruis on his web site http://www.fractal.org (link will take you out of fractal film.com).

It began with a prodigal son with a wayward mind.   Sporting significant math anxiety, he failed high school algebra.   Years later he plunged into those inky depths and dredged up beauty, a virtual universe, and a Yale PhD.   Retired now to a solitary mountaintop in rural Appalachia, Mo articulates, “Well, god damn.   Do that al-gee-bra and watch them checks roll in.”

Ken is a latecomer to the project but his role is completely unique, and his animations are less like many of the other fractal artists involved. Ken work mostly creating 3D planets and landscapes to an amazing degree of realism using fractal algorythms.

Scott is one of those people that you can not avoid reading about if you spend 5 minutes looking around the web for fractal websites. Scott has developed one of the most ambitious Fractal projects in the world. It is a massive distributed computing project devoted to evolving a type of fractal called a Flame Fractal. Scotts project (called Electric Sheep) has gone beyond merely computing beautiful images to create an evolving organic methodology.

From Scott's website:

"Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a visualist and programmer residing in San Francisco. He is the creator of the Fractal Flame algorithm, the Bomb visual-musical instrument, and the Electric Sheep distributed screen-saver. All of Draves' software artworks are released as open source and distributed for free on the internet. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. In 1997 Spot received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University for a thesis on metaprogramming for media processing. He projects live video for underground parties and at clubs, and self-publishes SPOTWORKS, a DVD of abstract animation synchronized with electronic music. His current project is Dreams in High Fidelity, a painting that evolves."

Scott's work has recieved numerous awards from a wide variety of foundations. You can read more about his work at his website and in the programmers section of these profiles.

http://scottdraves.com/ (link will take you out of fractal film.com)

Loren Carpenter received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Washington in 1974, and in 1976 went on to earn a Masters degree from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering under the direction of Professor Alan Shaw. Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Pixar, Loren is an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He is the author of numerous fundamental papers in computer image synthesis and display algorithms. He holds several patents both personally and through Pixar, and his technical awards include the third SIGGRAPH Technical Achievement Award in 1985, and an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 1992 recognizing the contributions of his RenderMan software to the film industry.

Loren was among the first Artists to join the project. I was initially, and still am very excited to be able to present Loren's work! Loren created the first publicly recognized Fractal animation in 1981 and has since had a very successful career in the computational arts. He currently is the Chief Science officer at Pixar Animation.

Loren is so important because he fills a very key role in the history of fractal animation and 3D rendering.

David Stueber was another very early and very vocal supporter of my project. His approach to fractals is very unique since he generates all of his fractals in a programming language which has been "dead" for several decades called LISP. LISP is a favorite programming language for people studying Artificial Intelligence but David uses his own custom LISP environment to amoung other things calculate some amazing Mandelbrot Zooms. You can read more about LISP on the information page I have set up(coming soon). He is one of the few artists who has undertaken the phenomenal task of computing a clip at full 1280X720 High Definition completely on his own (a 12 month computation)!

David and I have had many fanciful discussions about ideas that push the edge of modern technologies imaging capabilities. For instance at one point we were discussing calculating an image that if projected, as if in a movie theater, would be about 1/4 the size of the United States! Unfortuneately it would have taken some cleaver custom programing (no software today is designed to accept images of that size) and a bit more computational power than we had on hand (but not as much more as you might think). Anyway, because of our lively discussions David has always bee one of my favorite contributors, and I can't wait to see his Zoom in 1280X720 High definition projected in a theater!

I First met Geoff in graduate school at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in the cutting edge imaging and Digital Arts program. Here Geoff has pioneered a mesh of computer programming, engineering, and fine arts. He has created award winning video images using self created special effects which continue to amaze me. Geoffrey Bell is a new media artist who combines emerging technologies with traditional media. His projects include multimedia theatrical productions, video installation and animation. His works are exhibited nationally and internationally, and have received numerous awards and fellowships, including the RTKL fellowship and funds from The Andy Warhol Foundation. His recent interests delve into the cognitive and perceptual effects of invented immersive technologies. He currently works in Baltimore.

Recently Geoff was featured on Eybeam:

Musical Chair: A Game for One , is an installation that is influenced by the artist's fascination with visual apparatuses from the 19th century. Toys such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope required the viewer to sit motionless while spinning a disc to form a coherent moving image. As the viewer/participant in Musical Chair: A Game For One moves within the installation, their reflection fractures until they ultimately find that they are playing a solitary game of Musical Chairs with six reproductions of their own image. When the viewer remains still, the repetitive images of the viewer gradually coalesce into a single image. Audio segments are also triggered and manipulated by the viewer’s movements to further enhance the experience. Like Joseph Kosuth’s that codify and extrapolate three different representations of the same subject, this piece forces the viewer to become both the viewer of the apparatus and the apparatus itself. Musical Chair: A Game For One is impossible to win and even more absurd to play. The inclination for the viewer to decode their self-generating system is hard to resist and multiple players only convolute the viewer’s own participation. The game essentially turns into a solipsistic game of playing with oneself.

You can check out more of Geoffs work in his Gallery or on his website:http://www.gmbell.com/ (link will take you out of fractal film.com).

Kerry Mitchell is an engineer, educator, and algorithmic artist living in Phoenix, Arizona. He got his start as an Aerospace engineer, doing his undergraduate work at Purdue, receiving his Masters from Stanford, and doing his doctoral work at Purdue. Interspersed with his studies were several years of aerodynamic and acoustic research at NASA. After leaving NASA, Kerry was the Staff Scientist at the Arizona Science Center, a professor of Mathematics and Science at the University of Advancing Technology, and is now a manager at the Maricopa Skill Center in Phoenix.

Kerry discovered fractals in the 1980s, and has since developed many new tools and techniques in the field of algorithmic art. He has been instrumental in the development of the Ultra Fractal program and in the blossoming of the user community, dministering the formula database, contributing new formulas, and teaching classes about fractal geometry and Ultra Fractal. Kerry's research into math and art has been presented at several international conferences, and his artwork has been shown in many galleries and museums and featured in several books, calendars, and CD covers.

Check out Kerry's web page at http://www.fractalus.com/kerry (link will take you out of fractal film.com)

Jock's knowledge of programing has enables him to explore and develop several new methods of making fractal art. One of his current passions is in three dimensional mechanical images blending fractal shapes with 3d modeling software. These are fundamentally different from the work other fractal artists are doing because they are straight lines instead of curved ones, yet still presenting in a logarithmic spiral. Jock develops his own software which he uses to search the vast 'fractal space' for interesting fractal patterns and shapes to use for these images.

Jock's most popular series is his animated fractals. Through a staggering amount of computer processing time, over the course of
months, he records every movement of an image as he directs it through the fractal parameter space, capturing every twist and turn from conception through its birth. He currently has a series of over forty animated images; some are set to his own fractal-generated compositions. Jock began making animations using Ultra Fractal and custom developed software long before UF had the built-in capability to do this, and at a time when fractal animation state of the art mostly consisted of mandelbrot zooms and palette cycling.

A recent addition to his ever-growing repertoire is the zoomable fractal. It's an interactive playground which allows the viewer to zoom through six levels in each quadrant of a given fractal image. Jock uses custom software to compute and create the parameter set of each zoomed location, and then creates the web pages that link all of the rendered images together.

Check out Jock's Web page at http://www.fractal-recursions.com/ (link will take you out of fractal film.com)

Jack (as I like to call him) Is really the first in a series of internet discoveries that led me to this project. I consider his work to be one of my key influences in this project, who knows had I not stumbled across his website back in the summer of 2005 you might not be reading this website today! Jack's aproach to fractals is near and dear to my heart since, as the son of someone with a doctorate in philosipy and theology, I tend to latch on to ideas and run them for all thier worth. From Talking with Jack I know that we have independantly come to the same conclusion: Fractals are much much more significant than a method of producing beautiful images and incapacitating thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. Fractals are and integral piece in humanities understanding of the universe that we inhabit and sare close ties with the very processes that determine the structure and course of reality.

Jack works by day as a scientist in a high-tech Chemistry Laboratory, by night (and weekend) he explores the world in much the same way that he explore a fractal, actively and agressively, pushing the boundaries of his own experience by sky diving, SCUBA diving, hiking and rock climbing.

Check out the ultimate fractal video project http://www.fractal-animation.net/ufvp.html (link will take you out of fractal film.com).

Before I ever knew of Thorsten through fractals I was familiar with many of his films from during my undergraduate studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where I first saw his films at the Black maria Film festival, a world wide traveling film festival that was and is organized by my Professor John Columbus. I was very happy to discover, while researching for this film, that Thorsten had worked with fractals. His film Gestalt is probably one of the first films ever to extensively explore animated hypercomplex fractals, and has been shown at multiple film festivals and at SIGHRAPH.

After highschool and community service in an institution for the mentally ill he went to marburg to study art, music and media at phillips universität. one year later he changed to the städelschule in frankfurt in order to study film with prof. peter kubelka. there he started working with 16mm film. shortly after his studies at the städelschule he made 'blutrausch / bloodlust' which not only got him a lot of attention but also the ann arbor filmcoop award. since 2001 thorsten fleisch is a member of the board of artistic directors of the international experimental cinema exposition. he received several grants among them a grant from the filmbüro nw and a grant from the museum of contemporary cinema. for 'gestalt' he received an honorary mention at the prix ars electronica the number one festival for computer related art. he now lives and works in berlin where he is also involved in organizing parties with the kachelklub.

I highly recomend visiting his site and exposing yourself to ssome top notch experimental film! http://www.fleischfilm.com/html/news.htm (link will take you out of fractal film.com).

Eric just finished a feature length film entitled Biocursion composed entirely of fractals. It has been a project 8 years in the making! I have only been following the progress of Biocursion for about 6 months but I can tell you that I already am very excited about sitting down with it and a bowl of popcorn. As the Senior animator at Computer Visions (a computer animation company) Eric has resources that are beyond what most fractal srtists have at home. At one point I believe he had up to 8 workstations rendering 24 hours a day! I will write a little more about the film once I get a copy and have a chance to watch it, but for those of you who have had thier interest sparked you can find out more information about Biocursion at it's website:

Vicky Brago-Mitchell (born September 30, 1946, in Yakima, Washington) is an American digital artist and photographer. In 1970, Brago-Mitchell obtained a bachelor's degree in Spanish language and literature from Stanford University. She moved to Japan, where she worked as a photographer and translator. In 1976 she returned to the US, attending graduate school in Romance Languages and Linguistics at UCLA and California State University, Fullerton, then working as a teacher. Brago-Mitchell's credits as a photographer include all the pictures for a Japanese-language gardening book of plants cultivated in Japan, published by Shobunsha, Tokyo, 1975. In 1992 she married American composer John Mitchell.

Since then Vicky has been exploring fractals and digital art. She created a popular fractal animation "blue" accompanied by her husband John's music and has numerous still images floating around the web

Terry is a prolific programmer! When you visit his web page you are practically assulted by literally a dozen or so full featured fractal programs for both Windows and Macintosh OS X. Terry's programs span from Linear fractal programs producing celtic like designs to 2-d mandlebrot formulas to Hyper complex 3-d Quaternoins.

If you are really interested in getting deep into generating fractals, with control of nearly every aspect of the process then I would definately recomend Terry's programs. The nice thing is that I found Terry's OS X package to be relatively easy to use, really the only problem was having so many options that it took time to start discovering which combinations produced the best results. I couldn't possibly give a rundown of every single program here I recomend you follow the link to the mystic fractal website below if you are interested in reading more.

There is not much way to better describe electric sheep than this excert from the electric sheep website, except maybe downloading the software and watching the sheep evolve. I was very excited when Scott gave me the OK to use some of Electric Sheep's new high definition sheep.

"Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.
All the software is open source and users may participate in the network freely and anonymously. Anyone can download and install it. When their computer is idle and goes to sleep, the sheep animations appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new sheep and sharing its results with all other users.

Each sheep is about 4 seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are specified by a genetic code, a long string of numbers. If a user sees a sheep they like, they may press the up arrow key to vote for it. Sheep that receive more votes live longer and are more likely to reproduce. These votes form a fitness function for the esthetic evolution of the flock. Users can also download software to manually design genomes and post them to the server where they join the flock.

I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force. The proliferation of powerful computers with high-bandwidth network connections forms the substrate of an expanding universe. The electric sheep and we their shepherds are colonizing this new frontier."

Electric Sheep has recieved widespread recognition over the last several years. I highly recomending downloading the program and doing your part in determining this unique digital species' fate.

Here are links to downloads of electric sheep for various operating systems:

Redhat Linux i386 binary

Debian Linux

Gentoo Linux

Free BSD

MS Windows binary installer

OS X DMG

Although I am not a programmer I very much support the open source community and believe that making computer code openly available to the programing community is a noble venture. Xaos is one of the most unique fractal zooming programs out there. Because of the large amounts of time involved in rendering fractals most fractal zoomers are static, and you view one image at a time. Xoas, through some very clever estimation techniques, allows the end user to zoom in real time into the depths of a fractal!

If you have never experienced this I highly recomend that you try it. There is a sense of adventure and exploration that is greatly augmented by actually seein ght e scenery evolve. Open source programs can often be trying for users without any programming experience. Fortuneately Several ambitious Xaos users have made pre compiled ports to Linux windows and Mac OS X opperating sections. This basically means that it is ready to go:) I highly recomend that you download a copy of this program it is amazing!

Terry W Gintz and Jules Ruis have launched a new fractal software program for navigating and creating Mandelbrot Sets, Julia sets and Julius Ruis sets. The program is based on scientific research, done in The Netherlands at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The Fractal Imaginator (Fi) has been developed for Science, Technology, Art and Design.

The Fractal Imaginator is an innovative new program for generating fractal images. Based on Fractal Zplot, parts of this program have been in continuous development since several years. New additions to Imaginator are drawn from Jules Ruis' program "Fractal Awareness" algorithms. Fractal Imaginator currently supports Julius Ruis sets of Julia basins, orbit-traps, level sets, Newton's method, and Phoenix curves, as well as the standard Mandelbrot and "warped" Mandelbrot sets.

3D fractal types include quaternion, hypercomplex, cubic Mandelbrots, cquat and octonions. The Julius Ruis set is a smart presentation of 400 Julia sets, showing that the Mandelbrot set is the parameter basin of all closed Julia sets. This program is one of the many good programs listed at Mystic Fractal.

I first started listening to Ocean's Exposition the summer before I moved down to Baltimore for graduate school at UMBC. From the first show I heard them play I was addicted to thier unique enchanting souund. The core members of the band are as follows:

Tim Conley- Electric & Acoustic Guitar
Jon Thompson- Tenor & Soprano Saxophone
Jason Fraticelli- Upright Bass
Joe Falcey- Drums & Percussion

They often have guests of guest musicians sit in for one of the core members. I spent that summer going o every live preformance that I could and was happy when they laid some of thier infectious music down and released thier first and so far only CD.

Tim Conoley-

Jon Thompson-

Jason Fraticelli

Joe Falcey-

Chad was definately one of the most intriguing people I met at UMBC. Although he is probably more than cappable of making significant contributions to this film as a visual artist I sought his help as a sound artist, something he actively pursued at UMBC. Chad's ideas and projects always seemed to have that strong sense of indviduality and presence that sets exceptional art aside from the rest. Although Chad does not want to admit it to me yet I believe that his methods are closely related to some of the Fractals and Chaos Theory that I plan to explore in this film. Chad however is much more capable of describing his unique style, here is an exert from his website:

"I like to surprise. When I lived in rural Japan a few years ago, I was almost always a little lost; I very often experienced a sort of delicious disorientation that brought me back to myself and made me mindful of even the most mundane details of everyday life. The video rental shop not far from where I lived bore the inexplicable motto Bulldog give a stimulus and room to heart—initially familiar, but then almost immediately very, very strange. This is the feeling I strive to incorporate into a practice of art. My intention is not to shock, but to unsettle—to quietly open up a space where even the objects that have slipped into the unseen through their very familiarity may become a little suspect.

My approach is suburban, provisional, and recursive. I grew up in small-town Oklahoma amidst oil fields, wheat fields, dry cleaners, and bicycle shops. I have lived most of my life in subdivisions; I am familiar with the grid.

I value processes that rely on chance, chaos, and the willful misuse of technology. Raw chance is seldom useful to me, but I find chance within constraints, or chance coupled with intuition a powerful creative engine. Technological tools under-driven, overdriven, or applied out of context have the potential to be artistically generative in ways never imagined by those who only use them as intended. In discussing Nam Jun Paik’s 1965 Magnet TV, Jon Ippolito frames artistic misuse as that which '…exploits a technology’s hidden potential in an intelligent and revelatory way.' Not confined to high technology, I am also drawn to found objects and leftovers, artifacts from other cultures, and the anomalous output from broken processes. I believe play is essential. Play that repurposes technology, especially a technology made invisible by its very ubiquity, is a vivid inspiration to me."

Chad's Website http://www.chadeby.org/ (link will take you out of fractal film.com)