Flowers fascinate me without end. Like life itself, the variety and combination of colors and shapes of flowers defy description. And they flourish in the most unusual places. This gallery is my go at flowers, near-photographic flowers, flowers with computer-modified genes, fairy-flowers, funny flowers made from non-flower materials, flowers from other universes, and fantasy flower arrays.

Art, music and comments by Vince Giuliano

An offer from my colleague Jeff Holcomb got me into making these flowers. Jeff asked if I would be a beta tester for a new program he was developing called Liquib. Jeff develops software for artists and he is the creator of one of my favorite programs for geometric image transformation called Kaleider. Knowing Jeff's skill and creativity, I agreed. Liquib is a program that makes the picture surface behave like a liquid. At first, I could not figure out what the program was particularly good for. Then I discovered I could use Liquib to make fantasy flowers out of real flowers. And also that Liquib can be used to make fantasy flowers out of images that are not flowers to start with. I made some suggestions for improving Liquib and Jeff proceeded to implement them. It took about a week for me to got hooked on using the program. I went on to make more than 100 fantasy flower images, combining use of Liquib with other programs. Some of the best are in this gallery.

I have always been impressed with the impressive scientific names given to plants and flowers in serious botanical gardens - names mostly in Latin. I wanted my flowers to have official names too. So I borrowed, adapted or invented a bunch of formal flower names for this purpose. If you are into real scientific nomenclature for flowers, please forgive me for the license I have taken.

Flowers are about intense colors, but color experiences are personal and unverifiable. My experience of red may be the same as your experience of blue, but there is no way for either you or I to know this. However, artists have long known that colors can be represented in a color wheel. Red, yellow and blue are primary colors, orange is a mixture of red and yellow, green is a mixture of yellow and blue, purple is a mixture of blue and red. Spin the color wheel a third of the way around and red becomes blue, blue becomes yellow, and yellow becomes red, etc. The computer can actually do this with any image, rotate the color wheel giving you the experience of every possible color balance for the starting colors in that image. Watching this happen can be a fascinating and mind-bending experience in itself. I therefore show each image both in static form as I have made it and in a constantly shifting color representation.

After making the images,inventing scientific names for the flowers and putting this gallery together, one important thing was still missing - sound. The images did not want to remain mute. They wanted their voices before they would be happy on-line. This posed a problem for me - finding 46 appropriate 40-60 second music segments that would not bring the copyright police rapping at my door. After wrestling with the problem for a few days, I buckled down to composing my own soundscape music segments - including the music you are listening to right now. This has been a slow task. As you can observe here, the process is still underway.

Please see Important tips for viewing the images with sound and shifting color . If Java is not working on your computer you will not be able to see the color-shifting images. When you are ready to go on to the next image, simply click the back button on your browser untill this screen comes on again.

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