Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Pollock's Intuitive Fractals
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) did not know he was painting fractals. As a kind of pat-
tern in nature, fractals were not yet well understood by the time of Pollock's death.
Although mathematical ideas leading to the notion of fractals can be traced back
to the 17th century, it was Benoit Mandelbrot who fi rst coined the term in 1975 and
who is credited with most of the Big Math (see Mandelbrot 1983).
In an article entitled “Fractal Expressionism,” published in
Physics World
in 1999,
Richard Taylor, Adam Micloich, and David Jonas were able to demonstrate that Pol-
lock's paintings accurately represented fractal patterns. The authors observed that
“experimental observations of the paintings of Jackson Pollock reveal that the artist
was exploring ideas in fractals and chaos before these topics entered the scientifi c
mainstream.” Pollock's motion around the canvas and his application of paint by
dripping were natural causes for the fractal nature of the work.
In 2008, Coddington et al. published a paper to demonstrate that “recent work
has shown that the mathematics of fractal geometry can be used to provide a quan-
titative signature for the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.” In other words, fake Pol-
lock paintings can be exposed as such by computing a measure of self-similarity
across scale.
It is remarkable to me that such patterns can be evinced in
made
as well
as
natural
phenomena. This tells us something about organic wholes, but
also about the human mind—both as creator and beholder.
An important thing to note about this analytical technique is that it re-
veals a major source of a play's aesthetic appeal; that is, it provides some
explanation of why a play
feels good
.
11
As Aristotle's analysis of the quali-
tative elements of structure (discussed in Chapter 2) suggests,
pattern
is a
powerful source of pleasure. Designers of human-computer interaction can
borrow concepts and techniques from drama (and nature) to visualize and
orchestrate the structural patterns of experience.
11. An interesting exercise in scientifi c (or artistic) visualization would be to create fi rst-person
versions of such graphs, so that one could experience them kinesthetically by “riding the
curves.” Would such abstractions
feel good
in and of themselves? If we represented them audi-
bly, would they sound like music? Or surf?
