The Drawing Board

In a strange twist of events after beginning research on fractal geometry and in the middle of reading The Fractal Geometry of Nature, I found out today that the person who is responsible for giving me so much clarity in the exploration of my inclination toward art making has died. Tonight I am about to start a new project that was inspired by Mandelbrot’s thoughts on coastlines and I thought it only appropriate to quote him and the New York Times article on his death.

“Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.” ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html

To me, Mandelbrot was a mathematical poet and came closer than anyone to blurring the hard drawn line between nature and technology.

Recently I have been having some anxieties about the direction my thesis project is going. More directly, I think I am moving further and further away from the photographic as I explore certain themes that I find interesting. These themes range from ideas in mapping, information and mathematics. However, I did find a quote from Christiane Paul’s book Digital Art that gives me some comfort.

“Art by means of computer technologies is more comparable with other technologically mediated art forms such as film, video and photography, where the individuality and voice of an artist does not manifest itself in a direct physical intervention.”

My program emphasizes that it is focused on “lens based arts”. Maybe technological arts will suit it better?

Saturday night musings:

“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of the map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though the shreds are still discernible in the deserts–the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)–as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that proceeds the territory–precession of simulacra– that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.” – Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Reasoning by analogy is of considerable importance to science; indeed in as far as it is the principle of induction it may well for the basis for all physical and psychophysical sciences. Discoveries frequently start with metaphors. The light of thinking could hardly fall in a new direction and illuminate dark corners were it not reflected by spaces already illuminated. Only that which reminds us of something else makes an impression, although and precisely because it differs from it. To understand is to remember, at least in part.

Many similes and metaphors have been used in the attempt to understand mental abilities or functions. Here, in the as yet imperfect state of science, metaphors are absolutely necessary: before we know we have to start by imagining something……….

There is nothing finished in the brain, no real images; instead, we see only virtual, potential images waiting for a sign to be transformed into actuality. How this transformation into reality is really achieved is a matter of speculation. The greatest mystery of brain mechanics has to do with dynamics, not statics. We are in need of a comparative term that will allow us to see not only how an object receives and stores an imprint, but also how this imprint at any given time is reactivated and produces new vibrations within the object.” – Gramophone, Film, Typewriter