©2016 G.K.AUSTIN 40 x 60-inch Chromaluxe print on white aluminum.
I bumped into a TED talk featuring Max Tegmark "evangelizing" the idea that Consciousness is a mathematical pattern. Therein he succinctly defines what a "soul" or the "life force" in every living thing could be and I was electrified. Ultimately this became the sole inspiration for my art which I have recently coined as "Fractalism."
Max Tegmark definitely has "street cred" when making audacious statements about math, consciousness, or the universe: He is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The scientific director at the Foundational Questions Institute. A co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, an organization Elon Musk has endorsed with a large donation to investigate the existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. His first book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality was received well by critics and was a subsequent bestseller. It is in that book he "doubled down" on his statement regarding consciousness and boldly stated the fabric of the universe itself is math...
It was on! — Experiment time...
What if I take these "patterns of the universe" (they are called 'fractals' - see my artist statement for definition) mash them up digitally & mix them together like a "DJ" and see what they render? To my surprise, familiar and wonderful things were created: Jellyfish, butterflies, lily pads, seashells, braided hair, ocean waves, on and on. I began to collage these patterns wit one another into new vistas and ideas.
One could argue It was all serendipity and that I was simply looking at "clouds" and imagining them as "ice cream castles in the air" as Joni Mitchell would put it. My response is to cite Rene Magritte's painting The Treachery Of Images (This Is Not A Pipe) and let the viewer decide what they see or imagine.