Benoit Mandelbrot, one of the first to conceive of the all-encompassing nature of Chaos theory, was an outsider in his discipline. Which discipline was that? He was an outsider in every field people tried to fit him. He was of what he called the rare nomads-by-choice who are in the end the ones called, in retrospect, pioneers.
I run into some people sometimes who can appreciate the awe that a tyro must inevitably feel when comfronted with the surreal implications of Chaos and its incredible omnipresence. Like Professor Dosch of Heidelberg whom I met last year. When I began to quote Mandelbrot, he nodded and nodded; of course I am by no means the first to be romanced by the poetry so latent in seeing patterns in everything, which is not really a bad description of the beginnings of Chaos; subjective as it may sound, I cannot put out of my mind the sneaking suspicion that maybe even this is not the end. Before Chaos, Newtonian mechanics and Euclidian geometry were the limits to imagination. Now these ideas are slowly becoming obsolete; they no longer define what is allowed, or even what is understood.
Who knows what inspiration is; the borders between art and art hold infinite possibilities. What you think, what you compose, what you see, what you hear are all initial conditions.
I discovered today yet another astonishing example of what the human mind can do. The Strange Attractor that this post is supposed to be about is not what a Physics man would imagine. I'm a student of Literature, after all. Surely I can use poetic license enough to use the words like what they meant before Chaos. I was strangely attracted to one man's work. In computing terms it is not, perhaps, the most intricate of piece of programming, but it is art in a strange way, like the fantastic landscapes of Lorenz's weatherless diagrams.
It's all here, in case you miss the link at the bottom:
This man, Lauri Gröhn, has created the software which I was so sure must exist, it is too small a world for there to be no one else like me who wished to hear the music that was so visible in the multicoloured generated fractals. Generative Art. It's the ultimate in synaesthetic technology, really. What the mind does by accident, this program does by design. It starts with a picture and ends with music.
It does come to mind that if a computer can do this, what use am I? but even for a musician, curiosity and amazement should surely overpower any misgivings. Generative Art is not compu-spew. Far from it. Gröhn says that the difficult part is to find a picture that will sound good.
This making music from a picture is like "inspiration" taken very very literally. I was influenced by Dali and Magritte is now I wrote Dali and Magritte. It's as close as we've got to the mind reading machine that I always thought was the end of all technology, the apex of scientific progress after which anything else would just be redundant.
Which way does it work, though? Does the music sound like we would like the picture to sound? Or is what we hear at the end what we allow ourselves to associate with the picture till we see it as its musical counterpart?
It sounds like an exaggeration even to me, all this praise. But Synaesthesia has long fascinated me, and to find this serendipitously was like learning, for the first time, that radioactive decay turns one element into another. The elemental is as fluid as anything else.
READ ALL ABOUT Lauri Gröhn's PROJECT HERE
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