Square by Still from pixtur on Vimeo.Have you ever wondered what it would be like to transcend space and time and enter into an alternate reality that zooms in and out of the algorithms that make up your conscious reality? Well, maybe not. But on the off chance that you have, German artist, Pixtur, recently released a real-time animation, Square, that may offer you something pretty close.Set to an electronic dub track with a beat keeps pushing the animation forward, the video starts off with a zoomed out shot of a snowy, colorful sky. It then pans right to reveal a group of skyscrapers. As the song picks up, the buildings suddenly start to fall away and by the time the song “drops,” the cityscape has become completely disjointed and hardly identifiable. We are thrown in and out of different images and landscapes and within less than a minute it becomes hard to tell if it’s still taking place outside in the snow, if it has thrown us inside one of the skyscrapers, or if it now exists in some twisted variation of both.Pixtur created this effect by slightly skewing the way he programmed and coded his animation. Rather than using polygons, the two dimensional figures which are typically used to create three dimensional real-time videos, Pixtur makes algorithmic use of fractals, or mathematical sets that, if closely examined, are complex structures made up of infinite variations of themselves. Since the early 80s, fractals have been used in generative art to create complex and often groundbreaking works. But as Pixtur makes clear in his new animation, the use of fractals in generative art is definitely still evolving. In fact, this video makes me wonder if creators have only begun to scratch the surface of the untapped potential of fractals in art.Fractal Flood II (2012)Fractal Coast (2012)Internal Structures II (2012)Reaching Out II (2012)Deconstruction (2012)Dissolving Structures (2012)
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