/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

I feel fractals are the closest thing a computer can reach to the kind of artistic 'soul' people will sometimes refer to in these discussions. Yes, it's still mainly a tool for an artist to make something of, but in this case the tool does most of the work and the artist mainly points it in a direction.
The machine is doing exactly what it is meant to do with little deceit: crunching numbers and displaying an output in the form of a pattern. The patterns it can pump out are potentially vast and beautiful, but it's still naked math.