Digital Esoterism
Contents
This page relates to a form of "Esoterism"
practiced through digital tools in the digital age, i first joked
about this concept in response to a question in a video of one of
my procedural graphics
intro.
Goal of this page isn't much esoteric though, more like a
sketchy showcase of artistic explorations and quick doodles that don't fit
in my other activities. Some stuff are created by code sometimes
composited with FOSS
tools such as GIMP, i tend to prefer
tiny code and
tools operations (symmetry transformations etc.) that require
little effort to reproduce as code.
Inspiration came from things i engage with, music, books,
games and so on... no inherent meaning behind these works (also
count for all my works, by the way !), some may still carry very
loose symbolic associations (e.g. the snail
etc.) with a blend of personal history, most of this can be seen as
a form of symbolic play.
Some of my IFS
fractals or intros
may also fall into this category.
The Orz Snail
This started with tiny
algorithms to turn
very simple typography to cursive writings, also have a version
with a HAKMEM 149 version of epicycle,
i replaced the "O" by a HAKMEM 149 spiral, it looked
like a snail by accident and this was quite cool... the underline
was added as a decoration, a small rotation was then applied to
enforce an idea of movement, a snail "passing by".
The low effort addition of an inverted pentagram which was
produced with yet another tiny
algorithm, this is again loosely related to the concept of
"passing by" (and slowing down; turning back) and as a way to fill
the empty space produced by the rotation.
As an Owl:
Transformation of the snail by duplicating the original bitmap
and applying a reflection
which looks like a stylized face or an Owl.
Composition:
Fun compo made around snails (with trail adjustments), the
Decagram
that looks like a chaos star was made
by duplicating the pentagram and applying a reflection with
XOR
blending (also called "difference"), the background is a recycled
IFS fractal (too bare to release as is), the image is reflected in
the lower part as some sort of water surface by applying a light
perspective transformation with the combination of a "shift" and
"slur" filter. (GIMP)
The water surface trick is a favorite, it is cheap but produce
nice results, the "shift" operation is just some rows of pixels
that is shifted by random amount and the "slur" operation randomly
slide pixels downward, this was used in the past to add water
surface to some of my IFS
images, see also this. (simple
distort also works)
Pentagram was removed from the reflection, probably some
leftover.
Background IFS fractal in full form with the central figure
shadow / hole looking like a Frog / Octopus or Phage :
"Flag":
Spiral come from a procedural
graphics intro.
HAKMEM 149 triskel
Simple triskel with the
HAKMEM 149 algorithm, the spiral is duplicated three times with an
offset, shading based on iterations. Inspiration came from the use
of the Triskel on a Brigitte
Fontaine
Genre Humain album. (1995)
HAKMEM 149 compo
Combination of multiple tiny algorithms to form a composition,
tentacles are produced by a variant of the HAKMEM 149 algorithm (which
started with the triskel experiment), tentacles are duplicated with
symmetry, the background is gibberish and is produced by a 6-bit
tiny binary font algorithm, the tombstone is actually "Orz" as gray
coded binary font, this method was also used in Agrippa
Vanities as a Dotsies
signature. It loosely relate to combination and
balance in the Anthropocene.
Originally animated with random rotation of the pentagram,
giggling tentacles and gibberish produced in real-time.
Sator square
Word
square (Sator square) with
extruded 3x3 font letters, a bit rubbish as is so made an animated
variant with HAKMEM 149 background sparks / noise and flattened
chroma letters in one of my jam video.
SQRT + HAKMEM 149 mandala
"Mandala"
started from a glitchy
SQRT circle (see below) carved out with a HAKMEM
149 based fractal, edge detection was then applied with some
low effort symbols added.
Pentagram + fire compo
Polar
fire
effect with two imbricated pentagram with a circle border
looking like chains (varying size circles), inspiration mainly came
from metal music.
AI stylized drawings
Used to badly draw stuff some years ago as a short interest,
here is some drawn sketches (~2010) of my own stylized by Chat GPT
4o (mid 2025), not a huge proponent of AI (see this)
but i fiddle with it from time to time with my own stuff, this
technology has some interesting things going on... field progress
is also incredible. Most of the original inspiration here were from
some demos pixel art, may add credits if i stumble upon them again.
Prompt is always "can you make this image better ?"
sketch inspired by pixel art in an Amiga ? demo
(don't remember which !)
a pretty cool one (except the bird),
unexpectedly creative with the background blend (originally
unintended)
another pretty good one although it was a
lance
noisy doodle one so a bit hit
and miss i guess but still nice
AI stylized IFS
Some of my IFS "refined" by Chat GPT 4o. (mid 2025) Output is a bit hit and miss as it tend to smooth things out and forget small details, some are still incredible given the raw noisy input, most of this is one shot, i like that it doesn't introduce much "training materials" in these at first glance, most structural elements are kept as is and refined from a bit of "everything". Source image can be found on my IFS page. Background images are public domain, they are not generated by AI. (perhaps slightly modified though) Iterating on the produced images could be interesting.
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