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Lethe: the river of oblivion across which lies Hades. Legend has it that a draught from this river causes a soul to lose all memory of his or her former life, before passing over into the underworld of the dead. This vision came from recurring dreams of the end of the world I had when I was a child.
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Early efforts at printing "Lethe", as on the cover of the January 1989 edition of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, had disastrous results in the reproduction of color. Therefore I decided to "max out" the colors, as seen in "Lethe I" above, in the hope that something of the colors I intended would come through. Some details have been added: A better moon model, and a cloud beneath the moon.
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I was never all that happy with the gaudiness of "Lethe II", so I endeavored to reproduce the by-then-lost original colors. This is the result. In some ways, the original rendering still captures the nightmare quality best.
In 1990 Mandelbrot, Pulitzer Prize winning composer Charles Wuorinen, Richard Voss and I put together a performance piece we called "New York Notes," after Wuorinen's fractal musical composition of the same name. It premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in April, 1990, with reprise performances at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, in April 1991. Part of the performance was a slide show consisting of hundreds of fractal images. This was projected on a screen above a chamber orchestra which performed the musical score, live.
I rendered this sequence of images for a specific passage of the music. Someday I hope that someone will find time to in-between these keyframes, and make an animation from this sequence.
Caveat: You may need to be in be in a darkened room to view these images properly.