You Are a Fractal Pattern - Creativity, Beauty and Diversity (And Lego)

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art. For artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. He worked a construction job, followed the rules and lived by the maxim, be a good guy. His life took an unexpected turn when he accidentally found the piece of resistance, which unexpectedly designated him as the prophesied special. An evil President Business’s office, which is located at the very top of the Octane office tower. Emmett’s face is plastered on all of the monitors as robots try to find him. President Business says one of his robot minions. We’re trying to locate the fugitive, but his face is so generic it matches every other face in our database. That is, of course, at least for those who’ve seen it, from the gloriously funny and cutting the observant Lego movie. It’s one of my favourite ever movie quotes. On the surface, it alludes to the fact that all the little Lego humans basically have the same face. But you don’t have to scratch too deeply below the surface to find a deeper message about the tyranny of conformity and the latent cultural fascism inherent in the consumption obsessed late stage neoliberal Western capitalist society. Or maybe it’s just a joke about Lego figures. I’ll let you decide. However, to me the fascism stuff aside, because that’s a little bit close to the bone right now, the whole premise of the Lego movie says something about the nature of culture that’s integral to the understanding of art and how to make it without losing your sanity or self-respect. I want to talk about quality. To talk about quality, I also need to talk about beauty, utility and craftsmanship. Bear with me, caller. Things are going to get deep again. I was running around my little corner of Scotland a few weeks ago looking at all the winter barren trees around me and pondering their chaotic fractal quality and that of nature itself. What do I mean by fractal? Imagine one of those trees. Its branches split into smaller branches, which split again into even smaller twigs. Each branch, each twig looks a little bit like the whole tree, just smaller. That’s the fractal. Fractals are shapes that repeat themselves at different scales. You see them in nature all the time. In the branching patterns of trees and rivers, the swirling shapes of clouds and snowflakes and even in the coastline of a country since, if you zoom in close enough, the smaller inlets and bays look like the larger coastline itself. They’re created by simple rules which repeat over and over, leading to incredibly complex and beautiful patterns. These natural fractals are not only beautiful but also efficient, allowing organisms to maximise space and resources, like how a fern’s leaves are arranged to capture the sunlight effectively. Once you understand what fractals are, you’ll start to see them everywhere. The study of fractals in the mathematical realm is pretty hardcore and strays pretty quickly into something resembling the mystical and arcane, but at its simplest it points towards the fact that order and indeed beauty can emerge from highly complex and apparently disordered systems. One starling, on its own, is not particularly remarkable, apart from the wild array of noises that they make, but a whole bunch of them flocking, a murmuration, creates a beguiling, constantly changing, undulating, ethereal dance in the sky. No one knows exactly how they do this, but it likely boils down to thousands of minute decisions made by each bird, creating a complex system that surges and diminishes with the fluctuating environment and individual whim. Beauty and order emerges from complexity. Fractals turn up in art all the time. Google the Mandelbrot set and you’ll see one of the most common examples. It’s a pretty hefty subject I’m not going to go into today. What I want to talk about is the transition from chaos and complexity to form and beauty and what it says about the nature of that slippery term quality. You see, beauty is an emergence from complexity. We can see this within the manifold forms of nature where no two things are precisely the same. We can observe this in the fact that a group of things that are common and to all intents and purposes exactly the same aren’t usually considered beautiful, no matter how well configured or constructed they are. They are mundane. If instead of sand our beaches were covered in cut diamonds, an individual diamond would barely be worth a second look, although a visit to the beach on a sunny day would be quite an experience. Nature gives us a staggering floral display every spring yet few people take the time to acknowledge a single flower no matter how beguiling. Indeed I think most people don’t notice those blossoms at all. Folks that live in the Alps rarely stop to appreciate the view. It’s always there. Look at it tomorrow. I’m not saying these things are robbed of their quality via familiarity but simply that the weight of those values is context dependent. I doubt that this will come as a surprise to anyone but it does highlight a valuable point to our particular quest. Value arises not from a single thing’s inherent quality but from context and in particular from novelty. So we have some age-old platitudes. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Familiarity breeds contempt. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. In capitalism value is specifically bound to a combination of utility and scarcity. Anything that has any desirability at all can have its value skyrocket should it become scarce. Water feels abundant insipid and mundane but would be the most valuable beautiful and desirable thing imaginable to someone stranded in the desert. Scarcity and novelty are two sides of the same coin. Novelty describes something that is new and new things are necessarily scarce at least when they first emerge. Most new things stay scarce and scarcity reaches its zenith when something is unique. There is only one Lady Gaga, Guernica and Turin Shroud. To be pedantic every item above atomic level is unique. Every Big Mac is distinct regardless of the maker’s desire for uniformity. Every blade of grass is a one-off but I’m sitting here looking at my lawn and it seems like a uniform mass to me. But these things are similar enough that they may as well be the same in all but the most specific circumstances. Maybe your Big Mac is cold. Maybe one of those blades of grass is a one in a million genetic mutation that will make it grow up blue. But in every normal and practical sense they are interchangeable. Novelty and scarcity are the very foundations of art. Without these two concepts art could not exist. Most people seem to be under the illusion that a. art necessitates beauty and b. that art exists in exclusion of or somehow transcends material value. The first is self-evident the untrue, back to beauty being in the eye of the beholder. The second is naive and arguably self-negating. It has been argued through the ages by the likes of Plato and Emmanuel Kant for example that quality is inherent in an object. That some objects are more perfect than others. Maybe from a metaphysical perspective that could be argued which indeed Kant did. But from my perspective I consider it a dubious assertion but that’s kind of beside the point. In all practical senses it’s complete nonsense. Take the Bugatti Veyron. It’s a car apparently. My eldest son who likes his cars despite having yet to learn how to drive assures me that it’s like the best car ever bruh. I googled it. It seemed like a decent piece of care but I know sod all about cars. But even to my ignorant eyes I can see that it exudes elegance and is clearly well built and likely goes like shiz of a shovel. Maybe everyone else would agree too. Let’s imagine that’s true. But now imagine you are stranded in the remotest reach of the Scottish Highlands or amid the migrating sand dunes of the Gobi Desert or caught in a blizzard in Antarctica and you stumbled across this marvellous Bugatti. I doubt you’d spend much time marvelling at its subtle streamlined elegance and wondering at the exquisite engineering. Such a situation, regardless of how well crafted and constructed it is, is almost of no use whatsoever. If you can get into it it might be a useful temporary shelter. It may contain some useful objects or sustenance. But even if it’s fully functional it’s unlikely to move an inch. A jeep or a Land Rover might be of some use in such a situation but that speedy sports machine will not seem at all beautiful or valuable. It might well seem like a sick joke. But if that same automobile was sitting outside its owner’s 10 million pound Chelsea townhouse and someone set fire to it, as much as I’d have relatively little sympathy for the owner, the act would still feel like one of desecration. As I say, beauty, quality and utility are all context dependent. The flip side however is not as clear cut. If someone pens a poorly conceived ham fist in derivative short story that has poor grammar and riddled with malapropisms and typos, few people would agree that it’s a master work. Some stuff is just self-evidently bad. There’s just no escaping it. A chair that collapses when you sit on it is a bad chair. A jammed donut that tastes like cheese is a bad jammed donut. But if I took a random page from James Joyce’s Ulysses, held by many a literary scholar as a work of genius, perhaps the work of genius, and showed it to a random selection of your average randoms on the street, they would likely consider it incoherent, poorly crafted nonsense. In case you don’t believe me, here’s an example. Jugged hair. First catch your hair. Chinese eating eggs 50 years old, blue and green again. Dinner of 30 courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That Archduke Leopold, was it no yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats, then the others copied to be in the fashion. Milli-2 rock, oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. As a quick aside, I’d like to credit OpenAI’s Speech to Text tool for that delightful reading. The reason I got it to do this rather than myself is because I literally couldn’t figure out how to say this. For all my moaning about Gen AI, I think it did a really good job. I should note also that the Speech to Text tool doesn’t seem to have an Irish speaker, or anything but American for that matter, so this accent had to suffice. So back to the main topic. Even supposedly defective things can be worthy. If the aforementioned collapsing chair was actually a beautifully crafted antique Chippendale chair that had seen a bit too much wear and tear, you’d just get it fixed and head off to the Antiques Roadshow rather than the dump. Some early edition records and books with misprints are worth considerably more than their non-defective counterparts. Banks’s Girl with the Balloon artwork, which shredded itself after being sold for just over a million quid, was later sold for 15 times that amount. A thing doesn’t have to change at all to transition from bad to good and vice versa. John Carpenter’s gloriously grotesque 1982 Alien movie The Thing was shredded by the critics and largely ignored by the punters when in 1982 it hit the cinemas in opposition to Spielberg’s somewhat more family-friendly alien yarn ET. These days the thing is considered among the best ever made in both the sci-fi and horror genres and beloved by many folks who lightly formed over the cute glowing fingered extraterrestrial back in 1982. Any forgery of an artistic masterwork, no matter how well crafted and similar to the original, is still a forgery and therefore largely worthless. If that forgery was initially believed to be an original and then revealed as fake its value would immediately plummet. Indeed in some countries selling it would be considered illegal and therefore would actually be worthless. But is it not still a thing of beauty? Just the passage of time can change something from desirable to detestable. During the Reformation objectively beautiful religious artworks were destroyed for being decadent and therefore blasphemous. Up until the latter half of the 19th century it was still all the rage for straight men to wear pink and slather their face in makeup. People used to actually think that Michael Bolton was a hella hot dude who made bitch in music. Remember when prawn cocktails were the height of culinary chic? Remember when perms were a thing? Times change, perceptions change, tastes change. What was good then isn’t necessarily good now. I should point out that I’ve never sported a perm or was into Michael Bolton. I don’t like prawns, I always loved John Carpenter’s The Thing and I never liked E.T. I’ll let you decide what that says about me as a person but I think it’s a pretty decent track record for a socially inept nerd. We also have the age-old debate that goes something like… Person one, Nickelback the Canadian rock band sucks. Person two, they can’t possibly suck since they sold like 14 squillion records. If they were crap then no one would have bought their stuff. Person one, popularity doesn’t equate to quality. Remember perms? Person two. So you’re saying that all those millions of people were wrong but they didn’t really like that song that goes this is how you remind me? I bet you’ve got some Nickelback on your Spotify playlists. Person one mumbles inaudibly and looks sheepish etc. Both sides of this argument are valid. domains clash. Nickelback fans probably don’t think much of Bach or Radiohead. We also have the concept of guilty pleasures and ironic fandom for stuff that’s so bad that it’s good. Ed Woods, now classic, Plan Nine from Out of Space is a great example of this earthra. The point is that there’s an audience for almost anything. We have the phrase happy as a pig and shit for a reason. You might feel compelled to hurl a big fat so what in my direction but you’d be surprised how many budding artists get tripped up by this and how many art enthusiasts get their knickers in the twist because of it. This is because better physics aside for most people the concepts of beauty and desirability are interchangeable and since desirability is closely tied with novelty, scarcity and monetary or societal value the idea of platonic ideals becomes somewhat moot. Just like some people can’t seem to grasp the fact that because they don’t like something that doesn’t mean that that thing is of intrinsic low quality, some creators can’t differentiate their own self-critical nature from their suppositions about the criticisms they expect from the folks that see their work. Back to where I started with this. Beauty can’t meaningfully exist where there is only uniformity. Beauty and therefore desirability is a product of variance and therefore complexity. Put simply if your work looks the same as everyone else’s then it’s unlikely to get noticed or appreciated but if it deviates too much within your creative realm it might be noticed for the wrong reasons which brings us back to context. That same work may be highly desirable in a different context. Back to Bugatti in the desert and so we can bring this back to fractals but this time at a cultural level. Look at cultures as a whole and you’ll see a complex belange but one that has a distinctive recognizable shape. Zoom in and you’ll find a bunch of subcultures with the same properties. It’s this uniformity within complexity within uniformity that allows creativity and beauty to emerge. It provides a facility for both conformity and scarcity to exist comfortably together. This is how society, creativity and progress works. Different domains with different ideas of quality intersect and intertwine. New cultures emerge, old ones are subsumed or integrated and others are diminished only to be resurrected years later. Beauty can only emerge where there is diversity. Yes there is always variance within a largely uniform cultural population but by limiting expoundaries you limit the opportunities for novelty and therefore both beauty and creativity to emerge. It’s why creativity, the arts, beauty, honor and grace are the enemies of fascism. Control can only exist where there is conformity. The mediocre can only stand out when they are the first among drones, someone superficially unequal among equals. I didn’t mean to get political here again but it’s kind of hard not to given the subject and the state of the world right now. I’m also deliberately steering clear of the fact that these arguments hugely overlap with the emergence of novelty and nature in the process of evolution by natural selection which is both a product and a driver of the fractal complexity and nature I mentioned earlier. It’s not that I don’t consider it relevant, it’s intrinsically linked but if I go down that particular rabbit hole I’ll likely never emerge. So back to more directly practical matters. From the perspective of the creator this can become so befuddling as to stop us dead in our tracks. It’s all just so bloody complicated. As a creator how do you navigate this multi-dimensional cultural plate of noodles? Simple you don’t or at least stop trying to. I hate to say this but the only way to stand out, the only way to create true novelty is to just be yourself. If you struggle to either get noticed or get any love in your current cultural context then maybe try and find a different one. Struggling to make your mark where you are is only likely to lead to disappointment. This episode has taken me a while to write. When I read back over it I’m not at all satisfied that I’ve put my point across or that my point is even coherent. I’m tackling some mind bending and incredibly nuanced issues here and have almost certainly flubbed it. This all makes some sort of sense in my head but it’s brutally hard to articulate and I also rarely eat my own dog food on this. Not only can I not really talk the talk, my walking the walk is more of a drunken clumsy stumble. That said I rarely fail to stand out, it’s just that I haven’t found my audience, my culture yet. I’m sure it exists but I don’t know where. I have no idea whether I’ll ever find it. In my current state is a little lonely bewildering and demoralizing but what I will say is that my work is me. It’s identifiably mine for better or for worse. I do what makes me happy because I can and that’s the best I can wish for for any of you because you are the complexity. You are the fractal pattern among a billion fractal patterns. You are the fractal complexity from where true beauty can emerge. You are a wave in the societal tide that can create and destroy with equal force regardless of where you fit in. Culture exists because of you and would be different without you. This process which is essential for culture, society and indeed life to exist at all demands complexity, novelty, nuance and bloody nose non-conformity. So much depends on this. Your mental health, the functioning of society, the experience of pleasure, the freedom of imagination and the struggle against tyrants. Which brings us back to Emmet, president, business and the Lego movie. You’ll find all these themes within. Emmet tries and fails to fit into a culture that demands conformity only to discover his lack of ability to conform is exactly what makes him special. He proves that anyone can make a difference. The real world kid’s dad learns from his son that there is room for both creativity and conformity and messing stuff up is fun. Also everything is awesome. Well said computer generated Lego people. Fight the power. So after all this talk about complexity and fractals it seems appropriate to point you towards my other podcast, Creative Squares. Episode two of which is about this very subject. Me and Mark have a wide-ranging discussion about fractals, self-similarity and recursion in art. It’s no coincidence that this subject bled into this week’s episode so go search for that wherever you get your podcast. To lead us out now let us hear some words again from James Joyce taken from Ulysses that seem to make some sort of sense in this context read again by Chat GPT. See you all again soon. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom. Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.