JF Ptak Science Books Rapid Post
Thinking about the “evolution” of music, I came to the 1940's and 1950's , and then to Jackson Pollock, and then to thinking about how his artwork evolved, and then, about how it might have truly evolved in a classic sense, like an evolutionary period. None of this made much sense to me until I started thinking about the representation of Pollock fractally–and then things started to get interesting. Could this work come about, again, as a result of the evolution of fractals?
Obviously the Pollock drips aren’t self-same, not easily observably, anyway–but what about statistically, especially under magnification?
It turns out that someone has taken a look at this: Richard P. Taylor, et al, in “The Construction of Jackson Pollock’s Fractal Drip Paintings”1This team concludes that–after analyzing paintings and films of Pollock painting them–“the painting process that...Pollock used a remarkably systematic method capable of generating intricate patterns that exhibit fractal scaling criteria”.
I've never been comfortable with mid-century modern, but I must say that this Ollock/fractal business is interesting to think about, though I'm not sure it has anything to do with art.
Notes:
1. Found in: Johnson, Colin G. Romero Cardalda, Juan Jesus. “Introduction: Genetic Algorithms in Visual Art and Music–a Supplement”, Leonardo, Volume 35, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 175-184 (Article)
Here’s another interesting book: The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music by Juan Romero and Penousal Machado (Editors)bSpringer - Natural Computing Series Hardcover: 458 pag
The introduction to the Johnson ‘02 Leonardo article: “Leonardo has a long tradition of publishing work at the mutual frontier of art and science. We are pleased to present in the pages of Leonardo a special project that
demonstrates the application of ideas from science (evolutionary biology), technology (computing) and art (both visual art and music). The topic of this special section is the application of genetic algorithms and related heuristics to visual art and music. These texts were first presented at the Genetic Algorithms in Visual Art and Music workshop at the 2000 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Las Vegas [1]. The texts will be published in two installments in Leonardo?the first installment here and the second set of papers in Vol. 35, No. 4 (August 2002). Genetic algorithms, invented by John Holland in the 1970s [2], are part of a heuristic method that abstracts the processes found in biological evolution and simulates them on a computer. However, instead of being used to simulate real biology, genetic algorithms are used to solve problems in many non-biological domains. A typical use of genetic algorithms is in optimization, where we want to search some virtual space for the individual (in this case, either an image or a piece of sound/music) that scores highest in some selected measure. The genetic algorithm first generates a random set of individuals drawn from the set of possible individuals that could exist (this set is known as the search space). In the context of an artistic system...”
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