Faux Fractals

Projects > Faux Fractals

2005

Faux FractalI was walking through the computer labs at my local art school when I saw somebody very... carefully... working... with... Photoshop. Mat Bushell is an artist, and his project idea involved making Photoshop do the same thing over and over again. 12,600 times to be precise.

Normally this is the sort of thing that you would use Photoshop Actions for, but it turns out that even Photoshop Actions start to fail when your numbers get this high. In the end I wrote a custom AppleScript that would drive Photoshop. The script would also shut down and restart the program occasionally (to clear the cache files) and could recover gracefully if the computer crashed. When we finally ran the program on the fastest computer we could get our hands on (a rack-mounted Macintosh XServe) it took nearly a month of computing (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) to produce the final four-foot image.