Fractal Time

Fractals have been on my mind a lot lately. My interest in them was in part rekindled by following Rudy Rucker’s blog, reading his A Writers Toolkit, and two of his recent novels Postsingular, and Hylozoic, all of which I heartily recommend. The real fractal bomb dropped into my consciousness when I had the following dream:

I am at a convention/workshop that Gregg Braden is teaching. The subject of the workshop is the “Fractal Nature of Time”. I talk to the SF author Rudy Rucker who is also there about the mandelbulb of time. The mandelbulb is a three dimensional version of the Mandelbrot set.

I wonder around the space. There are teapots. Mounted on a column are analog keyboard and tape machines. The music making machines are there because they have something to do with electronic music enabling the perception of fractal time. There is also a buzz about the year 2012 in the air. Wondering around is a guy from my parent’s church who has switched from a Christian set of beliefs to a New Age set of beliefs. He is flaky. So are a lot of the other people at this conference outside Mr. Rucker, including Gregg Braden.

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After having this dream I proceed to research the fractal nature of time. Gregg Braden has an ill-researched book by the same name, which I do not recommend. In it he slips into a solipsistic garble of various theories put forth by other people much more intelligibly. The real money was to be found in an illuminating research paper by Susie Vrobel and published by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research. (a pdf from the Institute for Fractal Research is available here.) One of the more interesting aspects of her theory is that a fractal nature of time would presuppose precognition. It is some pretty heavy philosophical stuff and I won’t pretend to have digested it all, but I’m working on it. Nor am I a math wiz by any means, but the paper is written in a clear manner and merges the mathematical implications into the field of humanities. I am especially intrigued by her thought experiment involving the “Newtonian metric of time as a special case of fractal time metrics” and the fractal clock.

In the meantime I had another dream, on December 27th 2009. Fractal Holography:

I have an iPod touch. It has a built in holographic projector. I am going to do some fractal paintings in front of Sitwell’s Coffee shop on Ludlow Ave. This digital painting performance is similar to busking. I can adjust the size of the canvas to paint self-generative fractals.

This fragment is part of a much longer dream narrative that I won’t go all the way into here, but it was certainly fascinating. All of this has inspired me to make some artwork involving these concepts. I used the above dream image of painting fractal holograms in a short story I have just finished the first draft of. It is a Christmas story so I won’t be releasing it until the next holiday season. I have also begun work on a sculpture made out of a window frame with six panes. Each pane will have various images on it and different things will be viewable from both sides (hence its attribution as a sculpture). I have also acquired some fractal music software that I have been having immense fun playing with.

Googling “Fractal Holography” also turned me onto the work of the multimedia artist Eduardo Kac who has been an innovator in the fields of digital poetry, holographic poetry, and bio-poetry. His work is cutting edge and very inspiring. The world of fractals certainly provides a rich vein of ever evolving exploration.

I most interested in applying what I learn about fractal time to the fields of conscious dreaming, magick, and art. Of course for me these areas are very recursive.