![]() ![]() So Taylor ran experiments to gauge people’s physiological response to viewing images with similar fractal geometries. ![]() Could great works of art really be reduced to some nonlinear equations? Only a physicist would ask. ![]() Taylor was curious to know if the fractals in the Pollocks might explain why people were so drawn to them, as well as to things such as pulsating screensavers and stoner light shows at the planetarium. You can have fractals creating what looks like chaos. To understand fractal patterns at different scales, picture a trunk of a tree and a branch: they might contain the same angles as that same branch and a smaller branch, as well as the converging veins of the leaf on that branch. As he proved, fractal patterns were often found in nature’s roughness-in clouds, coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering of galaxies. “Pollock painted nature’s fractals 25 years ahead of their scientific discovery!” He published the finding in the journal Nature in 1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics.īenoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic. It was a little like discovering that your favorite aunt speaks a secret, ancient language. Using instruments designed to measure electrical currents, Taylor examined a series of Pollocks from the 1950s and found that the paintings were indeed fractal. “And when I looked at his paintings, I noticed that the paint splatters seemed to spread across his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices.” “The more I looked at fractal patterns, the more I was reminded of Pollock’s poured paintings,” he recounted in an essay. While at the Manchester School of Art, he built a rickety pendulum that splattered paint when the wind blew because he wanted to see how ‘nature’ painted and if it ended up looking like a Pollock (it did.) Then some years ago, he had a seminal insight while working on nanoelectronics. Through his meandering career trajectory, Taylor never lost his interest-obsession, really-in Pollock. The public affairs office of the university once actually Photoshopped it out of a publication. Long and curly, it resembles the distinctive locks of Sir Isaac Newton in his prime. He frequently paddles across Waldo Lake in Oregon when he’s searching for insights, and his hair is so famous it’s almost a distraction. He’s known as a bit of an eccentric around campus. In addition to his credentials as a physicist, he is a painter and photographer with an advanced art degree. Taylor describes himself as a type of thinker who jumps across disciplines to solve problems. If nature’s solar panels-trees and plants-are branched, why not manufactured panels? Now Taylor is using ‘bioinspiration’ to design a better solar panel. The patterns of the currents, like the branches in lungs and neurons, are fractal, which means they repeat at different scales. But in newer, tiny devices that might be only 100 times larger than an atom, the order of currents breaks down. When currents move through things such as televisions, the march of electrons is orderly. Taylor’s day job involves finding the most efficient ways to move electricity: in multiple tributaries like those found in river systems, or in lung bronchi or cortical neurons. This question didn’t always occupy his professional time. Now a physicist at the University of Oregon, Taylor thinks he has figured out what was so special about those Pollocks, and the answer has deep implications for human happiness. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. He was mesmerized, or perhaps a better word is Pollockized. When Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. ![]()
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