Kid Scientist uses D&D To Advance Understanding of Human Brain

I think Art is anything that expresses a fundamental concept - the mind of its creator (or the image they wished to portray) is certainly a form of Art - consider the mystique of The Mona Lisa, or the unease created by a well produced Film Noir. Similarly, I view things like mathematics - especially physics - as Art because they connect fundamental aspects of the universe in a language we can appreciate and understand.

 

Mathematics as you describe it, is not art because a thousand people perfectly aiming for the same goal will wind up with the same truth. It's a craft, pure and simple. That said, I won't claim that as a tool, it can't be used to create art. But it is not intrinsically artistic. My tax return is not art simply because I used math to complete it. (On the other hand, Mitt Romney's might be lol. I don't know because I haven't actually seen it).

 

Fractals are mathematics expressed as art. And some of them are stunningly beautiful.

 

But it's the fractal itself that is art, math was simply the tool used to make it. Math is the paint brush, and not the painting.

 

A rose by any other name....

 

A tax return isn't particularly Art by virtue of the fact that it doesn't convey anything more than what it is, in much the same was as I doubt you could consider "" Art.

Regarding fractals: The Mandelbrot set is the set of values of c in the complex plane for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial zn+1 = zn2 + c remains bounded.

This is formally mathematically defined - in fact, it is purely algebraic in many respects; I could define areas in set notation that would define parts of the mandelbrot set - for example, for a polynomial z -> z+c: {c∈ℂ | (lim n-> ∞) z^n<2} c lies within the mandelbrot set. Not pretty?

How about the geometrical interpretation of it.

Similarly, we could define a julia set, ending with the following geometrical form:

 

The math is the tool. You used the tool to create a picture. I don't see how this contradicts what I said.

 

Haldurson, to you it is not art. Fine. We get it. But I do not care what brush is used. If it looks like art then it is. To me fractals are art. Does your decision negate mine or is art merely subjective?

 

Actually, he sort of is right and you are just mistaken in thinking otherwise. The fractals are art, and he is not denying that. Maths is not an art but just a tool used to create said art, and it is the "brush" that you "don't care about".

Of course, Haldurson was the first one to make a mistaken assumption that the other person (namely, you) meant something different when he corrected your words that "fractals are mathematics expressed as art", because that statement can be tantamount to saying that "fractals are an artistic expression created using maths", it just doesn't appear like that to some people at some times (though I say that he was likely tired due to the incoming holiday and didn't really mean to start a fight with you).

 

Wow, I went away for the weekend and I see some interesting points made.

For me it boils down to this:

* One can watch with an artist's eye, and see art in many things: maybe art is a state of mind.
* When creating with the art state of mind the created thing is art.
* Art can become non-art and vice versa depending on the eyes and thoughts and state of mind you observe it with.
* Art evokes something in me, changes me internally somehow (emotions for example), and I consciously let it happen.
* The world is filled with subjects having a subjective view about stuff that they place in relation to other stuff. So relative subjectiveness is a huge (and maybe the only) part of all we experience.

EDIT: and about the fractals? Why are they art? They are simply a geometrical pattern flowing from formulae.
Apparently they invite some people to switch to the art state of mind?

 

I am conceding that fractals MAY be art, if the person created them wanted to communicate something that he thought was beautiful or evoked emotion. Mostly, they don't do anything for me, other than (on rare occasions) look pretty. But I'll concede that they may evoke emotions for other people, so I'm willing to call them art. From an intellectual standpoint, I think they can be fascinating, how a specific algorithm can result in something which is aesthetically pleasing.

Way back when I was first starting as a professional programmer, in my spare time, I'd write programs just for fun, anything that struck my fancy, from games to trying to come up with an extremely efficient way to generate prime numbers, or calculate huge numbers (look up Heinlein's 'number of the beast', from his novel of the same name -- I calculated it once using a mainframe computer -- got me into trouble too -- just a little). Friends and I would actually compete informally doing stuff like that.

Anyway, there was this article in Scientific American about some guy who was creating patterns for carpets and wallpaper based on some algorithm. I decided first to write a program to replicate some of those designs, and then I started playing around with the equations, and came up with all sorts of variations. These weren't fractals, just equations and algorithms that could be used to generate recursive designs that I thought were pretty. I stopped doing stuff like that, though, after a co-worker posted that and other stuff I had written to a bulletin board without my permission (he was the bosses son, btw).

BTW, none of what I did, did I consider art -- it was all an intellectual exercise, something to keep my mind sharp. And it did make me a better programmer. And it was certainly more fun than the work stuff. (Goals you set for yourself are always more fun than those set by your employer).

 

Well, the fundamental disagreement here is that I consider the representation of the complexity through geometry to still be maths, while you consider it to be a non-maths approach that uses maths to create it.

 

It's not presented through geometry, it's presented graphically through the computer screen into your eyes.

 

Semantics. 'Nuff said.

 

It's not semantics -- Geometry is just a subcategory of math. You can do geometry without making pretty pictures, selecting colors, etc. The beauty doesn't come out of the geometry, it comes out of the person who creates the computer program's algorithms, APPLYING geometry to create a picture. It's the choices that the programmer makes that creates the beauty, or lack thereof. Example, Geometry does not determine what colors go into that fractal design, the specific formula used to generate it, the algorthm for determining the color of the pixels, or what scale it is drawn to, if it's a linear or non-linear scale, and so on. The math/geometry only gives you numbers, the programmer decides how to plot them graphically.

Furthermore, I guarantee that had you had MY Jr. High school Geometry teacher, not only would you believe that Geometry was not art, you'd probably be convinced that it actually was a kind of torture invented by the Spanish Inquisition. (School board could not convince the old Devil (which he may well have been) to retire. I think he finally got enough complaints my year that they finally forced him out. (I'm not even sure he was my worst teacher ever -- but he certainly was the meanest S.O.B. I've ever met -- I'd seen students leave his classroom in tears, no joke.)

 

The point is, they mean the same thing you do, Haldurson, only they don't necessarily know how to explain it (you do know, and I do know, and some other people know, but trying to explain it to those who are not good friends with maths tends to yield no results) . Just go along with it instead of trying to make them hate you for explaining the very same thing over and over again, because we really don't want to fight with you.

 

Well, geometry and algebra are equivalent in (almost?) any way.

In some ways it kind of draws back to the "how abstract is art allowed to get?" and the number of abstractions you place between you and the art. Semantically (and moving into the absurd) you could argue the painting isn't art, because the hand of natural selection has guided the painters preferences.