Emergence
emergence.maxcooper.net
emergence.maxcooper.net
It's exciting to see the increasing emergence of this idea (see what I did there) in modern science & industry, such as in MIT's Mediated Matter lab[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence [1] http://matter.media.mit.edu/tools
I really hope Max will release the entire thing on DVD, I would buy it in a heartbeat for all my friends. He has a few shows coming up in Europe, if you guys are nearby you won't regret it.
He has the first third of the show up on his Facebook page (it was broadcast live and Facebook keeps the videos). Sadly I can't find how to share the URL.
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This is gorgeous. It's the thing of thing I want to shove in people's faces when I see unimaginative things like the umpteenth golden ratio overlay on nature or a basic and extremely pixellated rendering of the julia fractal.
I agree that the golden ration nonsense is worthless.
Maybe I'd be more impressed to see the process, but every time I watch one of those videos of someone making fractal art, it's just them tinkering with settings on some fractal rendering engine they bought online.
Of course, this all just shows my standard for good fractal art (and good art in general) is orthogonal to "using a powerful rendering engine."
I agree with this for sure. Conceptual and aesthetic beauty are different. In terms of aesthetic beauty, these are some examples of the kind of things that were shown to us (at least when I was growing up) as examples of how "mathematics can be beautiful":
http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/miscellaneous/mandel/mandel.html / http://www.intmath.com/numbers/math-of-beauty.php
At best half-hearted attempts that neither show conceptual beauty, and definitely not aesthetic beauty. Especially that fractal page, ugh. Since then, people have gotten much better about this sort of stuff, e.g. with fractals, look at how much more imaginative and aesthetically beautiful these are, and yet still generated:
http://www.ams.org/mathimagery/thumbnails.php?album=13 / http://www.fractalartcontests.com/2007/winners.php
I'm reading Goedel-Escher-Bach right now, and that's full of brilliant examples of both aesthetically and conceptually beautiful things, and ties far-flung concepts together.
Anyway, what does "mathematically gibberish" even mean? Most of these videos are (if I'm understanding correctly) in essence generative processes, resulting in some interesting and (subjectively speaking) beautiful behavior. I don't know if you could truly call them "mathematically gibberish" as much as perhaps just argue that there isn't an exceedingly simple set of equations that give you complex and lifelike behavior. But that's great - I think it's OK to consider the idea that perhaps the processes that govern nature around us just aren't very simple and conceptually pure. That a set of equations that generates fractals is interesting, but it's even more interesting how romanesco broccoli gets its fractal-like look WITHOUT having an overarching global process enforcing a set of equation-rules. That our models of certain processes that we find "beautiful" are just abstractions on top of the actual messy way the system works (e.g. how we found that newton's laws are sort of the emergent result of how the lower layer of physics works). Anyway, these are just my opinions :-)
edit: Of course there are fields studying all this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems
For example, to imply that the "dimensionality" video says anything interesting about dimensionality or even anything substantial about the torus is ludicrous.