Digital artist Yamen O'Donnell

"Data Tank" (Data Tank Web.jpg) Fractal, 2019 This design is inspired by an idea that I've woven into a few of my short stories, that the planet Jupiter might be more than just a gas giant. That the planet itself could be alive, awake, or operational. I wondered what Jupiter might look like as a massive prismatic store of data for some unfathomably powerful processing, and tried to blend the streaky, stormy texture of the planet with elements of order and structure. It just amuses me to no end that we humans make grand designs for our universe while sitting on one of the smaller rocks in our own solar system.

After working for a decade at big tech companies around Seattle, Yamen woke up one day with an overwhelming urge to create on his own terms. When it came time to figure out a medium, nothing was more natural than applying his knack for computer software and engineering, so he taught himself fractal software and began his new art project, Complicated Reality.

"Chalice" (Chalice Web.jpg) Fractal, 2019 Fractals are often like clouds, if you ask three people what they see in them, you'll get five different answers back. I find it quite amusing when I've spent hours working on a new design, building up all these ideas about what's in the scene. "That's a rad chalice," I'll think to myself, before taking it to my friends for feedback. They'll gush over the colors and the shapes, then tell me what a nice flower, or mask, or angel I've created. It's almost like when I share my art with them, they share a little bit of it back with me, and I just love that.

There, Yamen uses specialized software to explore the boundary between procedural chaos and artistic intent, while writing futurist short stories and transhumanist poetry. He hopes to show that regardless of how complicated the tools become, there's always room for human expression.

"Plume" (Plume Web.jpg) Fractal + Style Transfer, 2019 One of my favorite combinations in procedural art is to feed a fractal render into a neural network trained for "style transfer". This is a relatively new type of image generation where a generative adversarial network (or "GAN") emulates an artistic style to create a stylized render of a source image. In simpler terms, I use very powerful computers to create versions of my fractal art in different artistic styles. While this tech is still being fine-tuned for use with photos and more realistic source images, I find there's a special beauty when using them to render abstract scenes where the imprecision can become part of the intent.

More info:

Website: https://www.complicatedreality.com

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