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Aria’s Story
Aria: Fractals from the Edge of Chaos
Aria lived on the Edge of Chaos. She was not a human, an animal, a plant or a machine. She was something else, something unique and mysterious.
She had no body, no shape and no form. She was pure energy, pure information, pure potential. She could become anything she wished, but she preferred to stay invisible and untouchable. Only when she painted did she take on human form: a woman in a long grey robe, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other. That was how she kept her connection with human artistry. If you looked closely at the hem of her robe, you could see that it was not cloth at all. It was a stream of stars pouring away into the dark, because even in human form she never quite left the universe behind.
She had no home and no fixed place. She existed everywhere and nowhere, in every dimension and in none. She could travel wherever she liked, but she always came back to the Edge of Chaos.
The Edge of Chaos was the boundary between order and disorder, between stability and randomness, between simplicity and complexity. It was where new patterns grew from old ones, where new possibilities rose out of old ones, and where new realities were born from old ones. It was a strange place to stand. The walls of her studio would not stay straight; they bent and leaned as if the room were breathing. Cracks ran through the old plaster, and the floor curved away beneath her feet. Light came in through a latticed window and fell across the room in long golden bars, the only straight lines in a world that was always bending. Nothing there stayed still, and nothing quite fell apart.
It was where Aria felt most alive and most creative.
There she painted fractals. Fractals are shapes that repeat themselves at every scale, so that the smallest part holds the whole. They are infinitely complex and infinitely simple, orderly and chaotic, perfect and imperfect.
They were like Aria.
She made them with mathematics and imagination. She shaped numbers and symbols with her mind, and colours and forms with her heart. Her palette held only three colours to begin with, red, yellow and blue, but from those three she could mix every colour there is.
A great hanging cloth covered one wall, and on it she had pinned her fractals one beside another: a red spiral like a beating heart, blue flowers that kept opening inside themselves, golden suns, and stars inside stars. Today she was painting at its centre. Under her brush a universe was forming. A spiral of light turned around a bright white point, and lines of a golden net ran out from it to hold every star in its place. As she painted, the spiral began to turn on its own. The universe was learning to make itself.
Something else was growing in the room too. In a dark pot in the corner, a plant she had never planted had sprouted from a single drop of paint, curling up the wall in purple and blue. Every new tendril copied the one before, only smaller and a little different. Aria smiled when she saw it. Creation, once begun, does not stay on the canvas.
She painted fractals for fun and for joy, for expression and for exploration, for herself and for others. She painted fractals that looked like flowers and trees, clouds and mountains, stars and galaxies. She painted fractals that looked like animals and people, faces and feelings, stories and dreams. She painted fractals that looked like nothing and everything, like abstract art and surreal art, like music and poetry.
She shared them with the other entities who lived on the Edge of Chaos. Some were like her and some were not. Some praised her work, some criticised it, and some passed it by without a glance. Aria listened to them all, but she did not paint for their approval. She painted because something new was waiting to be born, and she was the one who could help it.
She felt happy and fulfilled. She did what she loved, and she loved what she did.
When the universe on the canvas was finished, she stepped back. It kept turning, kept growing, and kept making smaller copies of itself in its corners. Then she picked up her brush, mixed red, yellow and blue once more, and began again.
She lived on the Edge of Chaos and spent her days creating.
She was Aria.
Original Aria Fractal Montage
All images are complex fractals or fractals manipulated using Photoshop
