Fractal Scaling and the Aesthetics of Trees | Hacker News Reader

Fractal Scaling and the Aesthetics of Trees

arxiv.org

83 pointsLuc13 comments

Just looked at the pictures and captions, captivating. Worth for the last painting alone.

Most people aren't aware that Mondriaan was an established painter who started out with realistic paintings and only gradually became more abstract. "De Grijze Boom" is a very nice snapshot of this aesthetic transition.

Staring at one of his paintings of rectangles at Musée des Beaux-Arts in Paris was when I felt like I for the first time understood abstract art.

Oh yeah, there's something really different about actual paintings compared to photographs of them. Especially with abstract art you often have to see them in real life to "get them".

I remember reading an article about an instructor who was leading a class on generative art, and one of the students was trying to recreate Mondriaan-style artworks on the computer. But when they looked deeply into his art, they realized just how painterly his art was, even the "lines and boxes" pieces, in a way that was really difficult to replicate on a computer.

The images and captions made me read the article.

Fantastic. Thought provoking.

Reminds me of https://www.nature.com/articles/news020926-8 "The 500-year-old Ryoanji Temple garden in Kyoto contains five outcroppings of rocks and moss on a rectangle of raked gravel. Using symmetry calculations the researchers have discovered that the objects imply an image of a tree in the empty space between them that we detect, without being aware of doing so1."

Full article: https://www.nature.com/articles/419359a

Brought to you by the part of my brain which remembers irrelevant nature articles some 20 years later.

classic paywall for publicly funded research

Reading the comments here, I can’t help but think that the insights of and math behind many of these examples are on the order of those websites that claim everything has a Fibonacci spiral in it, when it really doesn’t

Related: Perceptual and physiological responses to Jackson Pollock’s fractals

Comparing human responses to visual stimuli of fractal dimension similar to Jackson Pollock's works. Notably, the fractal dimension is remarkably similar to that of forest landscapes.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2011.0006...

Not mentioned: do amateur paintings by others with the same techniques as Pollock produce features with a similar fractal dimension? My question is intended as a proxy for investigating how much of Pollock's quality is integral to the method regardless of artist skill.

I often feel like if we could discover the deepest rules governing these kinds of behaviors in nature, it would give us a stronger basis for deriving a "theory of everything" than trying to reconcile classical vs. quantum physics.

It might not be rules. It might be something deep and squishy like "intelligence" or "aesthetics".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com