Is Consciousness Fractal? - Issue 47: Consciousness
▻http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fractal
In one way, Jackson Pollock’s mathematics was ahead of its time. When the reclusive artist poured paint from cans onto vast canvases laid out across the floor of his barn in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he created splatters of paint that seemed completely random. Some interpretations saw them as a statement about the futility of World War II, others as a commentary on art as experience rather than representation. As Pollock refined his technique over the years, critics became increasingly receptive to his work, launching him into the public eye. “We have a deliberate disorder of hypothetical hidden orders,” one critic wrote, “or ‘multiple labyrinths.’ ” In 1999, Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, expressed the “hidden orders” of Pollock’s work in a very different way. (...)