Picture Benoit Mandelbrot giving a talk about fractals to a rapt audience of math and computer people in 1982, when computer graphics as we know them had advanced enough to show not only a plot of the Mandelbrot set, but a variety of applications of fractal mathematics to simulated landscapes — prompting an aside about printing technology, specifically about printing detailed images in a glossy magazine, Omni, on presses set up for printing Penthouse. He said he’d told them to print fractal images as if the page was all text, no photos, and given specific settings to get the best printing on paper possible for those images. Ignored. The images in the magazine came out smeary-looking: the vaseline look not being the best for showing details of images that at the time took a lot of work to generate.
You’d think in 2023 the situation would be better on-screen, at least, and it can be, but not on social media. Facebook doesn’t know about images that aren’t photos, and heavily compresses those the better to send an endless number for scrolling. The fractal-processed images here are blurred before being shown at any size, there.
And Mandelbrot was right: when what makes an image what it is is in the edge details, it’s just not the same without them. it’s consistently disappointing, so I don’t even try anymore on Facebook.
That’s a real part of the why behind this blog: I’ve got priorities that don’t align with theirs, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
Even so, I’m dipping my toes back into printing these images where I don’t have control over the process, at https://sean-richardson.smugmug.com/A-Miscellany/
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