Abstract
Fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike [Mandelbrot]. With ever widening appeal, they have been referred to both as “fingerprints of nature” [Taylor et al 1999] and “the new aesthetics” [Richards]. Recently, we showed that the drip patterns of the American abstract painter Jackson Pollock are fractal [Taylor et al 1999]. In this paper, we describe visual perception tests that investigate whether fractal images generated by mathematical, natural and human processes possess a shared aesthetic quality based on visual complexity.
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Taylor, R.P., Spehar, B., Clifford, C.W.G., Newell, B.R. (2008). The Visual Complexity of Pollock’s Dripped Fractals. In: Minai, A.A., Bar-Yam, Y. (eds) Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IV. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73849-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73849-7_20
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