Tech Notes

The original OpenGL program was crafted to simulate a population controlled by finite state machines, using stickmen and stickwomen with simple animations to visually represent the unfolding dynamics of the population. Later, the program was changed to experiment with the idea of digital chronophotography, or a way to capture in one frame the essence of each particular simulated run.

Custom software was developed to calculate the Lyapunov exponent of a chaotic dynamical system over a range of its four parameters. The raw data from this 4-dimensional parameter space was fed to another program to generate thousands of individual images, where X and Y represent two of the four coefficients. Every single pixel in these images gets its value from the calculation of the Lyapunov exponent of the strange attractor generated by the four coefficients it represents.

I first generate my strange attractor artwork with a custom program written using C++, OpenGL, and GLUT. The basic algorithm I use for generating the attractors is set forth in Clifford Pickover’s Chaos in Wonderland; the equations I use are iterated functions that plot between a hundred thousand and a few billion pixels, depending on the final size of the artwork. I colorize the attractors by with gradient mapping in Photoshop (the initial renders are 16 bit grayscale images).