This actually reminded me of an article I read a while back about Fractals and Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-fractal-nature-of-guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-2/

Maybe fractals aren't just useless? They show up a lot in nature, so graphics that depict natural scenes might often use them.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg98en/the-beautiful-math-behind-hollywoods-first-computer-generated-sequence

I'd be interested to see if fractals could be a way of compression (by defining the image as the fundamental math property and building from there).