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history
It was 1996 when I first heard the workd "fractal". I was studing my last year of secondary education, and I met the very best teacher I never had: Angel. He is a clever guy, with strong personallity. He was philosophy teacher, but I must say he was able to teach something else that phylosophy. He teached me to be a good friend of Zaratustra, for example :) In between one of his explanations about Leibniz he used the term "fractal". It was a misterious world, so I decided to ask him about that world after the class finished (one of the usefull things I learned with him is that if you are not interested in anything and you don't have curiousity, then you are just dead). When I made the question "What does fractal mean?" I didn't know that something was going to change forever in my life. I spent all that year programing fractals. I had a very nice three page article called "El lenguaje de los fractales" (the language of fractals), written by "somebody" called Heinz-Otto Peitgen (years later I discovered who this guy was). With that simple article and my new second hand Intel 386 I tried during several weeks to draw those nice pictures on the article. It took to me lot of work to figure out how to convert the sentence "you get the Mandrelbot by iterating z->z˛+c for diferent values of C" into an image. I didn't know what "iterate" was; but very hopefully I had good maths teachers and I new what a complex number was. When I got that one working I calculated also the Barnsley fern explained on that article. Of course at that moment I didn't understand why the chaos game was densely covering the attractor of the IFS, but I understood some of the basic ideas about chaos theory. Since I didn't have internet at that time, I could not get more information thru the net, and the literature about fractals on the public library of San Sebastian was almost null. So I spent that year just inspecting the Mandelbrot set. Each picture took several hours to be computed in my 386 computer with that QBasic interpreter. Each day, especially in sumer, I played to select values for C more or less blindly and then go with my friend to the beach. If I was lucky, at nigth I could admire a new fractal image. None of those images survived in any of my backup CDs, but I still keep them in my mind very clearly. Next year, 1998, I started my high school studies. We learned the basics of C programming, so I could use my new second-hand 486 to create my fractals very quickly on real-mode DOS. I got some new articles to read from the internet on a cyber-pub, and I soon got my VGA 640x480 pallete based images. However, my interest on fractals decreased due to two facts: first, I discovered the demoscene, and second, my mathematics was not good enought to go deeper on the understanding of the real theory of fractals. Actually, I was quite decepted when I asked a mathematics teacher of the university for help and I got an stupid answer: "forget about that, you better study what you have to study know, and you will research later on". Of course I didn't follow such an advise. Anyway, second year of university was a bit more useful. I showed some realtime moving julia sets (those I used on the rare 64 kbyes demo) to of my teachers. Purificaciķn González was I nice teacher (even if I was expulsed from his class once). She understood what I had made, and she gave me tha name and e-mail address of somebody she knew about that was apparently working on fractals. His name was Javier Barrallo. The December 4th of 1999 I sent a mail to this Javier Barrallo. It was a good time to met him, since the last two years of university I learned some new mathematical tools that helped me to make some discoveries on the the Mandelbrot set. Actually I was able to give a close expresion for the shape of the main cardiod of the set, as well as for the period-2 bulb. I could not go further, so I had nice expectations for the new contact I was going to do. So I send the mail explaining my interest on fractals and my small discoveries. He answered very quickly with his telephone number. I called him that very same day, and he explained what he was doing with fractals. I must say I was quite nervous on the phone, and I didn't really catch most of the information. Anyway, we decided to met each other in the architecture school of San Sebastian, my natal city and where he worked (I was studing in Bilbao). I remember to go to meet him with a CD full of images and realtime demos. He showed my some pictures he was doing, and he achieved to atonish me. It was fantastic. He explained what the "orbit trap" algorithm was, a new tool that allowed to create the most beatifull fractals I ever had seen before. Then, I started to explain what "demoscene" was, but I discovered that he allready knew about it. He told me that he needed somebody to help him in several projects involving fractals, computer programing and demos, and art expositions. What could I say? I think I have been extremelly lucky on my life. Everything seems to happen by a very lucky random events. I was lucky first to change school when I was 17 and met Angel. With 18 I went to Bilbao to study and I met David, who had few realtime demos in his computer, so I met demoscene. Now, with 19, a new coincidence was going to happen. When I told Javier that I was studing in Bilbao, he gave me his address because he was living there (even if working in San Sebasetian), so we could speal more often. He asked me if I knew where the street "Luis Briņas" was, since his home was there. And of course I knew were Luis Bri was, my student appartment was just there! We explained he was living in front of the fireman offices, in the number 42. Well, I could see the firemen from the window of my room every morning because I was living also in the number 42! So, apparently the biggest expert on fractal rendering of Spain and me were living just in the same building separated by 30 seconds of elevator. You can understand that the next two years I spent some time doing fractal images and demos for some expositions. While I slowly continued with the mathematical understanding of dynamic systems on complex variable, I made many aesthetical work on fractal images mainly influenced by Javier. I collaborated with the interational group "The Frontier Between Art and Science", and I invented some new orbit trap algorithms, as the bitmap oribit trap that I used for the First National Contest on Fractal Images of Spain in 2002. And more importantly, thanks to the orbit traps I discovered the brownian motion (also known as Perlin noise) that made my interest move back to demoscene and to the more general concept of procedural creation of images and objects. After that period, I came back to the mathematics implied on fractal geometry and chaos game, but it was a bad time because I was close to finish the university, and computer graphics where becoming more and more important in my list of hobbies. |