Click here for a larger image
I have always loved the warm light of incandescence and the cold blue of moonlight. In "Night" I attempted to capture the delicate balance between these two temperatures of color. "Night" was also designed in reaction to a frustration I had with the terrain model used in "Nimbus," "Late Afternoon" and "Lethe" -- there is a spike of rock that sticks up in the middle of the bay. This spike is an artifact of the random process which created the terrain. I could have simply removed it, but this would have violated the algorithmic purity of my creative process. Thus I chose to make it the center of attention by placing a light source directly above it. The UFO was added simply to give this light source a raison d'etre.
Click here for a larger image
Again, I was interested in maximizing temperature contrast, in this case between the incandescent light source and the moonlight. This led me to this rendering, where the more realistic color of "Night I" are exaggerated for artistic effect. Note that I had also created a more detailed moon model by this time.
Click here for a larger image
Once I felt I had gained control of both temperature contrast and (at least some) reproduction media, I returned to "Night" and backed off the color a bit, while simultaneously bringing the moon down to a more ... realistic size.
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.
Click here for a larger image
SIGGRAPH '89 (I belive it was) had a "call for teapots"-- they wanted images of the famous Newell teapot. I rose to the challenge with this image; Craig Kolb with the fractal teapots seen below (which has some tens of thousands of ever-smaller teapots in a fractal arrangement).
Please pardon us for these little bits of shameless CG inside humor! ;-)
Click here for a larger image