Tribe.net. Local Connections Expatasapien http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#668ac4bb-1ceb-4300-ba0c-250a264b1c20 2006-05-02T06:11:07Z 2006-05-02T06:11:07Z

I think Pollock may be credited with the discovery of fractals in much the same way as a man who is very drunk and falls off a cliff into a formerly unknown see without even knowing he is wet may be credited with discovering water.

Expatasapien 2006-05-02T06:11:07Z Alex http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#2d97848e-7a3f-4896-a9c6-1813acd815c0 2006-01-03T03:55:14Z 2006-01-03T03:55:14Z

Thanks for the ref! I actually did some work on unconscious perception myself, but I've never heard of that article before. It's inspiring. Thanks again.

Alex 2006-01-03T03:55:14Z iona http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#49e1867b-86f9-4069-a702-e81c9427b0ce 2006-01-02T02:40:51Z 2006-01-02T02:40:51Z

There was lots of Pollack footage showing his painting dynamic in the recent PBS special IMAGINING AMERICA. Watching him you get a sense of his fractal dance, the broken rhythms he came to naturally embody by repeating those self-expressive similar motions, again and again. Get a felt-sense of it; check out the flick if you can find it. Iona

iona 2006-01-02T02:40:51Z barnaby http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#5915c371-b7fd-48c9-b11f-f091d64210d7 2005-12-31T05:19:16Z 2005-12-31T05:19:16Z

> Is there a reference? Lewicki, P., T. Hill, and E. Bizot. 1988 Acquisition of procedural knowledge about a pattern stimuli that cannot be articulated. Cognitive Psychology, 20, 24-37 Wilson's book on the adaptive unconscious is extremely interesting. If this article interests you, I highly recommend it. It's full of great material. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674013824/qid=1136006320/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6866356-1710319?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

barnaby 2005-12-31T05:19:16Z Alex http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#c803e793-58a6-414b-a5fc-97bd72bbd506 2005-12-31T04:24:30Z 2005-12-31T04:24:30Z

Seems like most people think Per Bak got it wrong (starting with the 1/f^alpha exponent of his sandpile experiment). It is too bad since a lot of complexity theory got into discredit for reasons like that. In neuroscience things got really bad when it turned out that a lot of the orderly state spaces of EEG signals turned out to be achievable with any random 1/f noise signal as well. Anyway, I have never heard of this experiment you described. Sounds extremely interesting. Is there a reference?

Alex 2005-12-31T04:24:30Z barnaby http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#feedacc8-9a09-4d6c-a0a4-558618f9aaff 2005-12-31T00:12:31Z 2005-12-31T00:12:31Z

I encountered some of the 1/f stuff in Per Bak's "How Nature Works". An interesting book - it's like watching a horse race between his ego and his intellect. Regarding our unconscious atunement to mathematical patterns, I recently read of a pertinent experiment in Timothy Wilson's excellent "Strangers to Ourselves". The subjects were given a four-quadrant display with four corresponding buttons. An X would flash into one fo the quadrants, and they were asked to press the corresponding button as quickly as they could. Unbeknownst to the participants, the location of the next X was determined by 12 boolean rules, such as "if the X appears twice in one of the lower two quadrants, it may not appear in a left-side quadrant". The interesting thing is that the participants got better over time. Midway through the experiment, the rules were changed, and performance dropped off precipitously in every case. As they intuited the new rules, performance improved again. After the trials, participants were asked why their performance dropped off in the middle, and they would respond with statements like "I got out of the zone." Interesting, eh?

barnaby 2005-12-31T00:12:31Z Alex http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#720832f6-473d-41a8-96bb-6f15bdb4970a 2005-12-30T22:16:09Z 2005-12-30T22:16:09Z

Although I have never experienced the effect that Pollock achieves in many observers myself (even after I had spent a long time looking at the Art Institute's 'Greyed Rainbow' last year), I fully agree with what you said. Even though all noise signals merely resemble randomness, it seems that our brains favor those of a more 'pinkish' signature (aka 1/f-like). This is why ee are fascinated much more by the dynamics of fire much more than by a TV screen out of tune. There are numeous studies proving this assumption in the auditory domain. Music tends to resemble 1/f spectra (allegedly except for Stockhausen and certain types of country) and 1/f noise can sound interesting in itself. The ancient Greeks thought that art resembles nature, and nature is full of 1/f spectra (which is often msinomered as 'fractal'). Maybe that is the clue. The brain itself has 1/f-like signature in its anatomical structure as well as in its neuronal activity profile. I often wonder whether all of this is no coincidence but a hint at stochastic resonance at work (yes, in aesthetics).

Alex 2005-12-30T22:16:09Z - http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#f185f762-f6e6-4fca-ba66-b6ea6d2f67ff 2005-12-30T21:38:43Z 2005-12-30T21:38:43Z

having watched films of Pollock, the application of the paint on his abstracts was very rhythmic, sort of a defined gesture repeated over and over again at fairly regular intervals, so i can understand the perception of his work as fractal. does it scale as a fractal would? undoubtedly not. did Pollock consciously apply a pattern with mathematical construct in mind? highly unlikely. he simply acheived the effect without the discovery. he intuited random symetry, inarticulate as it may have been.

- 2005-12-30T21:38:43Z barnaby http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#f0358acc-a590-445e-b50c-99d355da230d 2005-12-30T21:14:40Z 2005-12-30T21:14:40Z

I just saw a couple Pollocks in the Art Institute of Chicago the other day and I was thinking about this thread. I do know that I have a striking response to his paintings, where a lot of abstract stuff seems random and boring. It's interesting to think about what might be going on below the surface that makes his paintings more interesting, and I think this is one attempt to answer that question. It makes sense to me that it would be some kind of multi-scale symmetry, or some log-based distribution of stroke thicknesses, or something.

barnaby 2005-12-30T21:14:40Z Alex http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#1ad34786-d3dc-4c08-adf9-df13578d9891 2005-12-30T19:18:44Z 2005-12-30T19:18:44Z

2D spectral analysis only reveals that these images are not white noise, but more biased towards 'lower frequencies' (aka larger blops in his paintings). Is this really so exciting? The problem is that spectra like these (1/f-like) are termed 'fractal' due to its scale invariance, which evokes associations of something deeper hidden in those signals. It is just noise, though. True, it can occur in chaotic systems, but it is not a hallmark of them. I think it would have been more surprising if Pollock would have succeeded in reproducing pure white noise. But, obviously even the referees for 'Nature' thought otherwise. So, am I wrong?

Alex 2005-12-30T19:18:44Z andrew http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#3a633e9f-9bfb-43d4-9102-c241ccfbc006 2005-12-21T07:44:51Z 2005-12-21T07:44:51Z

Art that people like in the long term has complexity, but not just a bunch of stuff to make it complex. Our brains understand light and shape and line all differently. Typically, it's a value composition that our brain associates with. The difference between light and dark, and the relationsips of the shapes of the values. The next thing our brain takes in is color, and it's relationships on the value composition under it. Long lasting complexity comes when the relationship of the values marries well with the relationship of the colors, which marries well to the composition and subject matter. When all of these marriages happen, one thing brings you to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Everything you know becomes the foudation for your brain putting the patterns together. We only think we remember objects or physical subject matter because our brains use the closest thing it knows to keep the information. Even in abstract paintings there are patterns and it's not unreasonable to assume so.

andrew 2005-12-21T07:44:51Z andrew http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#00a26216-d45c-435e-9f4e-94a31ea10d4e 2005-12-21T07:31:15Z 2005-12-21T07:31:15Z

--"Can Science Be Used To Further Our Understanding Of Art?" Very possibly, but I think the other way around is more likely. I'm an artist and I see patterns all over the place. These patterns tell me more about what I'm looking at and makes it easier for me to find a direction with a thought. I've found that those patterns are consistent with other patterns of behavior, and so on, that clarifies things even more. On people, when I see someone with multiple repeating patterns on thier face, it tells me that nature put them together a little better. Just a finer tuned machine. The outside acts as a reflection of the inside. When there are many patterns, usually the individual has many layers of depth. When the patterns compliment eachoher, they each improve the next. The shapes and the relationships of the shapes are what I study when I draw folks.

andrew 2005-12-21T07:31:15Z barnaby http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#514aba70-f121-4fc1-a223-cb5bef5f342f 2005-11-22T18:39:26Z 2005-11-22T18:39:26Z

I think the point is that art that people like in the long term has complexity, which is stimulating to our perceptual apparatus. The artist has an intuitive relationship to complexity, and gravitates towards it in his method. I find for myself abstract art varies dramatically in its quality. This analysis suggests one reason why people might laud one abstract piece and ignore another.

barnaby 2005-11-22T18:39:26Z Benjamin http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#260629ae-4b3a-4e9a-9740-330d891a5b16 2005-11-22T13:59:27Z 2005-11-22T13:59:27Z

There's more. I read a while ago, can't remember where but I'll try to dig up the source, about mathematical minimal surfaces and their aesthetic appeal. Ah, there we go: "...Weber determines that the sculpture's shape corresponds closely to a minimal surface. Weber can even produce the mathematical equation that will generate an image of the minimal surface on a computer. But the sculptor has little knowledge of mathematics" http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/864.html I don't find this (the Pollock-fractal connection) particularly mystifying. Fluid dynamics give rise to complex systems. It seems to me that flinging paint at a canvas would produce a squashed cross-section of the shape that the paint assumes mid-air.

Benjamin 2005-11-22T13:59:27Z $item.owner.firstName http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#753f1fe5-b7ae-4755-9de0-8cfcf8d77b61 2005-11-16T04:27:29Z 2005-11-16T04:27:29Z

hmm im going to have to think longer about what this means. "Can Science Be Used To Further Our Understanding Of Art?" i mean how much more random/meaningless can you get than a drunk guy throwing paint on a canvas? If this displays fractal geometry, then what doesnt?

$item.owner.firstName 2005-11-16T04:27:29Z barnaby http://complexitytheory.tribe.net/thread/64f94a25-d2b8-4adf-b22c-e11757b4a72a#40cc16a0-7799-444e-b898-c8b8986c4888 2005-11-07T20:18:09Z 2005-11-07T20:18:09Z

A very interesting and suggestive piece about the occurance of fractal geometry in interesting abstract art. http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/PHYSICS_!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSIONISM/fractal_taylor.html

barnaby 2005-11-07T20:18:09Z