denverabstract03.txt, cr 11 apr 2005 by rha on theon
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Authors:
Ralph Abraham, Frederick David Abraham, Scott Draves, Julien Clinton Sprott,
and Pablo Viotti

Title:
Aesthetics and Fractal Dimension of Electric Sheep

Abstract:
Physicist Julien Clinton Sprott demonstrated a correlation between aesthetic
judgments of fractal images and their fractal dimensions (1993). Scott Draves,
aka Spot, a computer scientist and artist, has created a multidimensional
space of two-dimensional colored fractal images called fractal flames, based
on chaotic attractors of two-dimensional iterated function systems, and an
algorithm that expands a flame into a brief animation called an electric
sheep. His website, electricsheep.org, serves electric sheep to a large
community of regular users, via the sheepserver, through a highly interactive
client, a screensaver, involving generation of new sheep by both server and
users. The users vote electronically for the sheep they like while the
screensaver is running. In this report we proceed from Sprott to Spot. Data
from Spot's website show significant correlations between aesthetic judgments
for flames and their fractal dimension, similar to reports by colleagues of
Sprott using his images. Presently, we are studying the variation of this
correlation and the favorite fractal dimensions with time, to determine if
there are similarities or differences in the evolution of aesthetic
preferences with respect to fractal dimension as Taylor has found in the
evolution of Pollock's art (2003). Details may be found at:
http://www.vismath.org/research/sheep.