Welcome to another edition of The F Word. On this edition, i have an interview with esintu. Please enjoy my interview with her.

can you please introduce yourself?

I'm Esin. I was born and raised in Istanbul but I currently live in Montreal, studying psychology and neuroscience.


What is the first thing that makes you attracted to Fractal Art?

I like scale variance and self-repetition, but in all mediums, not just fractal art. I'm not sure if that's a preference that developed after being involved with fractal art or the reason why I started in the first place.


What kind of fractal that you like the most,and Why?

I'm known to like 'abstract' fractals (in order to save time and space, see fracstract.deviantart.com/art/… for a thorough explanation of what I mean by that). That's actually funny because I didn't even 'get', let alone like, abstract art before I started working with fractals. I used to be more into surrealism and dada (I still like those). In fractal art, you don't really get the figurative connection to the real world that can then be manipulated the way surrealist and dada movements do. Fractals are basically all abstract in the classic sense. Being exposed to enough fractal art naturally helped me develop a new scheme to evaluate meaning and expression in an abstract way. Ultimately, I like fractal art that focuses less on the technical excellence and ornamentation and more on the expression of a meaning or feeling. I find that this is true of 'abstract' fractal art more often than of other kinds.



Who is your biggest influence in creating fractal and art in general?

Regarding meaning and content, I could safely say that it's an internal inspiration that stems from curiosity. I feel like my musical, literary and cultural memory and background influences a lot of the content of my art.
Visually and aesthetically, for medium-specific influences, I need to give FarDareisMai, IDeviant zzzzra and Beesknees67 a nod.


what does your art means to you?

I've always enjoyed art as a viewer, and having a venue of artistic expression that is not limited by my pathetic lack of manual motor skills with a pencil or a brush, is priceless. I like to consider myself a fractal photographer, rather than a painter that uses fractals as my paint & brush. I don't design or elaborately build my art, but I zoom around mathematical imagery to find quirky and interesting bits and pieces, give them appropriate lighting and present them from my point of view. Fractals are another world for me that I can take my camera and venture off to.


Can you please tell us about your creative process?

It's actually extremely spontaneous. I rarely ever plan something and set out to make something specific. Most I start with is perhaps an overall mood I want to go for, and even then I can end up with something on the exact opposite end of the spectrum from whatever I had in mind. All my works sort of take lives of their own as they develop. I almost always have some music playing in the background, sometimes shuffled and sometimes set to a specific genre, artist, album or song. These songs often end up naming my art.

Sometimes I will start tweaking an unfinished work, and sometimes I will just start playing from scratch. Either way, I discover what all the parameters of the formulas and coloring algorithms do and just experiment with different values. I like formulas with a lot of parameters that gives me a lot of options to play around with. Once I get a form that's original, interesting and that basically tells me something, I start working on the textures and colours. I then may or may not start tweaking the forms and zooming around the fractal again. I also do a lot of experimentation with colours after the render in GIMP or Photoshop.


how did you see the future of fractal art?

I'm not really at peace with the term "fractal art", I feel like fractals are just another medium for digital art. That is to say, I don't think fractal art is to have a life of its own and head somewhere completely different from the rest of digital art mediums, or other abstract art. The fact that an image was composed with fractals and not scripts and brushes in Photoshop is a technical and largely irrelevant detail when one is looking at the final image.

The fractal community is a pretty tightly-knit one, and it tends to be relatively closed to interactions with and influences from other relevant fields such as abstract traditional art, digital art and photography. The art from these communities are what fractal art needs to measure up to and stand next to in order to gain recognition from the public. Most conversations we tend to have among ourselves are of technical nature, and not about the ultimate artistic value of our works when stripped from the fact that they were rendered in a fractal program. I think interacting with artists from other mediums should give all of us a better idea of where fractal art stands among other mediums. I personally think fractals are a great medium to create abstract art, but we really should shift from just considering the merit of a work within the fractal art community to comparing it with other mediums mentioned above.

ps. I suppose 3D fractals stand somewhere else. For future direction, actual 3D fractals (i.e. sculptures) may be something to look into. But I really don't have much to say about that since I never really got into the 3D area myself.


Do you enjoy creating any other types of art?

I'm also into analog and digital photography, and I'm trying to teach myself vectors lately. If we wander off the visual arts, I also play the drums and percussions.


If there were a single person you would give credit to for getting you started on your current path of Fractal, who would it be?

I think I have to say zzzzra here, as he was the first UF artist I saw and loved. I remember being stunned with his SFBM abstracts and downloading UF after that. His influence wasn't very active (as in we never really interacted at all, and he had already given himself a break when I started using UF actively), but nonetheless, that's what initially got me going, and I still look up to his UF works from years ago.

Anything else you'd like to say?

Here's a shout-out to #Aposhack folks, everyone who inspired me, and anyone who has enjoyed my art over the years. I don't think they would be reading this, but nonetheless, I feel like I also need to give a nod to the OrbitTrap duo. Much fun and frustration was had with their hating on dA and the BMFAC, but I found the rest of their blog quite useful, thought-provoking and inspiring. It didn't feel right not mentioning them at all in an interview about fractal art.