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applegrove

(118,024 posts)
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 09:24 PM Jan 2017

The psychology behind why the never-ending patterns in nature soothe your soul

Florence Williams, Aeon at Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-fractals-soothe-your-soul-2017-1

"SNIP............

But why is the mid-range of D (remember, that’s the ratio of large to small patterns) so magical and so highly preferred among most people? Taylor and Hägerhäll have an interesting theory, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a romantic yearning for Arcadia. In addition to lungs, capillaries and neurons, another human system is branched into fractals: the visual system as expressed by the movement of the eye’s retina.

When Taylor used an eye-tracking machine to measure precisely where people’s pupils were focusing on projected images (of Pollock paintings, for example, but also other things), he saw that the pupils used a search pattern that was itself fractal. The eyes first scanned the big elements in the scene and then made micro passes in smaller versions of the big scans, and it does this in a mid-range D.

Interestingly, if you draw a line over the tracks that animals make to forage for food, for example albatrosses surveying the ocean, you also see this fractal pattern of search trajectories. It’s simply an efficient search strategy, said Taylor.

‘Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals,’ said Taylor. ‘The stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.’


.............SNIP

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The psychology behind why the never-ending patterns in nature soothe your soul (Original Post) applegrove Jan 2017 OP
Neat shenmue Jan 2017 #1
Always wondered why I like Pollock flamingdem Jan 2017 #2
Pollock looks like noise to me. Where's the repeating fractal patterns? Buckeye_Democrat Jan 2017 #3
I would like to see those studies debunking him but I'M NOT GOOD applegrove Jan 2017 #4
I like fractals. Buckeye_Democrat Jan 2017 #5
I edited my post to add too. We are more alike in our views I think. applegrove Jan 2017 #6
We're all unique in our preferences. Buckeye_Democrat Jan 2017 #7
The CIA secretly promoted artists like Pollock as unwitting weapons in the Cold War bananas Jan 2017 #8

flamingdem

(39,304 posts)
2. Always wondered why I like Pollock
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 10:19 PM
Jan 2017

I mean really ... paint thrown on canvas? But I can look at them for hourse

Buckeye_Democrat

(14,848 posts)
3. Pollock looks like noise to me. Where's the repeating fractal patterns?
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 10:24 PM
Jan 2017
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2009/01/facts-on-pollocks-fractals.html
About ten years ago physicist Richard Taylor created quite a stir in the mathematics and art world when he claimed Pollock’s works contained unique mathematical patterns in his brush strokes. Taylor said that these mathematical patterns were fractal, and so unique one could actually identify whether any given work of art was a genuine Pollack based on these patterns. Fractals are extraordinary complex geometric patterns where shapes and configurations infinitely repeat themselves.

However a new soon to be published paper dispels this idea of using fractals to identify and date a Pollack work. Physicists Lawrence Krauss, Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur of Case Western Reserve tested several of Pollock's most famous paintings against ones commissioned by local artists to see if the fractal identification would hold up.

It didn't. Not even close. Several of Pollock's most famous paintings failed the test, while other paintings created in 2007 by local artists showed up as the real thing. This work builds on a previous study in 2006 where Jones-Smith and Mathur showed the fractal patterns Taylor found were far too small to usefully identify a painting. The two were able to recreate these "Pollock fractals" by drawing crude freehand stars.

These new study shows pretty conclusively that Taylor's method for identifying works by Jackson Pollock using fractals is complete bunk. At the same time it also serves as a good word of caution about seeing things that may not be there. Fractal geometry in nature is a very trendy research subject right now. The idea that life can be broken down to numeric equations is exciting both in the sciences and pop culture. It was even the inspiration for Darren Aronofsky's mathematics-thriller Pi. At the same time, it's easy to go overboard. Mathematics explains so much about the physical world around us, but there are limits as to what it can predict. Fractals are a cutting edge field of research with applications across many of the sciences, but one has to be careful that each application is backed by hard evidence.

Or to quote the wizened old mathematics professor in the movie Pi, "[W]hen you abandon scientific rigor, you're no longer a mathematician, you're a numerologist!"

applegrove

(118,024 posts)
4. I would like to see those studies debunking him but I'M NOT GOOD
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 10:39 PM
Jan 2017

ENOUGH AT MATH. Fractals do really fit. Fractals do really relax. I have theories myself on them. Fractals are magic: ever seen a flock of birds take off in one direction and suddenly the birds on one side change direction? For a full two seconds the whole flock together look like a giant bird, with separate soaring wings, that is changing directions. Really freeky cool.

Edited to add:
I think his point that fractals are something in between is apt. Pollock too was just doing representation of fractals using his movement. Painting is art. It is play with form as the anthropologists call art. So pollock is playing. He's imitating. Did he know he was actually representing anything? And he was also bipolar which may have led to different states (with no value placed on which state would result in more accurate fractals created). Plus there was no meaning to his fractals. It was form without the meaning. Whereas fractals in nature have form and meaning.

Buckeye_Democrat

(14,848 posts)
5. I like fractals.
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 10:44 PM
Jan 2017

I just don't see them in Pollock's paintings compared to nature.

The picture of the broccoli in the Business Insider link was pleasant for me.

Edited: Sorry... I assumed the broccoli was coral at first.

Buckeye_Democrat

(14,848 posts)
7. We're all unique in our preferences.
Thu Jan 26, 2017, 10:59 PM
Jan 2017

Pollock never appealed to me, but he obviously appeals to many others.

bananas

(27,509 posts)
8. The CIA secretly promoted artists like Pollock as unwitting weapons in the Cold War
Fri Jan 27, 2017, 05:07 AM
Jan 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders Saturday 21 October 1995

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

<snip>


http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia

Was modern art a weapon of the CIA?

The Abstract Expressionists emerged from obscurity in the late 1940s to establish New York as the centre of the art world – but some say they became pawns of US spies in the Cold War. Alastair Sooke investigates.

By Alastair Sooke
4 October 2016

<snip>

David Anfam is more circumspect. He says it is “a well-documented fact” that the CIA co-opted Abstract Expressionism in their propaganda war against Russia. “Even The New American Painting (exhibition) had some CIA funding behind it,” he says. According to Anfam, it is easy to see why the CIA wished to promote Abstract Expressionism. “It’s a very shrewd and cynical strategy,” he explains, “because it showed that you could do whatever you liked in America.” By the ‘50s, Abstract Expressionism was bound up with the concept of individual freedom: its canvases were understood as expressions of the subjective inner lives of the artists who painted them.

As a result, the movement was a useful foil to Russia’s official Soviet Realist style, which championed representative painting. “America was the land of the free, whereas Russia was locked up, culturally speaking,” Anfam says, characterising the perception that the CIA wished to foster during the Cold War.

<snip>


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