Fractals/First Project/Ideas/Yay Art/Science

Fractals/First Project/Ideas/Yay Art/Science

When I think about fractals, I think about an experience I had this summer while I was living in Zion National Park. I was lounging in the Virgin River, which ran straight through our neighborhood on its way to carving the incredible Zion Canyon. We came to the river often, just to dip our feet or our whole selves, seeking solace from the unrelenting summer heat. The light was changing, and brilliant colors reflected from the orange of the rock formations on the crystalline blue of the river, as my fingers played upon the surface of the water distorting the reflections. I turned my hand over, and the light caught the inside of my wrist in a way that made me really look at my veins as they appeared below my taut skin. As I stared at the veins pumping blood through my body, I looked around myself at the river I was sitting in. And thought about veins. And how things at the most micro and macro level were veined, connected. Elements and atoms string together like veins. Life ran through me in veins. Rivers are the veins of the earth. Galaxies run like veins through galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters stream in veins through the universe.

This idea of parallel structures, of fractals do not only exist within one single organism—the way that cauliflower is made up of lots of little cauliflowers—but in the way that everything is constructed. There are similarities in the micro and macro and middle level of things that is nothing short of poetic, and inspires nothing less than a reverence for connection at every level of life and existence.

So I’ve been looking at everything as a fractal, trying to dissect at some menial level what it means to be a part of a whole. What parallel structures conglomerate to make me? What greater wholes am I a single part of? In particular I keep coming back to ideas of fractals in the human figure. Perhaps that’s where my intersection-of-art-and-science connection comes in—a scientific idea of fractals applied to the brain of someone who has studied figure drawing since I first started taking drawing seriously. Everything is anthropomorphic, some theorize that we cannot look at anything without seeing ourselves. So what does it mean to be a human fractal? To me, it is in the way that those small parts of ourselves make sense in the greater whole. I’m constantly drawing everything I see—I can’t look at a face without reconciling its position in face, mentally adjusting a pencil to calculate an angle and a shadow and a highlight here—no, here. And I realize as I visualize the world that way how much familiarity I have with the smaller parts of people. How someone’s hands can indicate something of their face, how an earlobe has a similar curve to someone’s smile. And, also, how closeups of our bodies seem without scale—a crease in a knuckle could as easily be a vulva, a fat roll, a knee. There’s an indistinguishableness to the human body in its similarity to itself. It’s a fractal, and we ourselves are fractals.

Now to figure out how to make a piece with that. I’m thinking something that utilizes those indistinguishable could-be-big-could-be-small parts of a human figure, and rendering them in a multistream video to be a fractal.