Abstract
Fractals have been very successful in quantifying the visual complexity exhibited by many natural patterns, and have captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike. Our research has shown that the poured patterns of the American abstract painter Jackson Pollock are also fractal. This discovery raises an intriguing possibility – are the visual characteristics of fractals responsible for the long-term appeal of Pollock's work? To address this question, we have conducted 10 years of scientific investigation of human response to fractals and here we present, for the first time, a review of this research that examines the inter-relationship between the various results. The investigations include eye tracking, visual preference, skin conductance, and EEG measurement techniques. We discuss the artistic implications of the positive perceptual and physiological responses to fractal patterns.
Highlights
Poured Complexity The art world changed forever in 1945, the year that Jackson Pollock moved from downtown Manhattan to the countryside of Long Island, New York
The results show that the eye trajectories trace out fractal patterns with D values that are insensitive to the D value of the fractal pattern being observed: the saccade pattern is quantified by D = 1.4, even though the underlying pattern varied over a very large range from 1.11 to 1.89
We have further extended these findings by measuring visual preference for the same computer-generated fractals that were used in our eye-tracking experiments
Summary
Richard P.Taylor1*, Branka Spehar 2, PaulVan Donkelaar 3 and Caroline M. Pollock’s Fractals In 1999, we published an analysis of Pollock’s paintings that confirmed his poured patterns to be fractal (Taylor et al, 1999a) Building on this initial analysis, a number of groups have shown diverse fractal analysis techniques to be useful approaches to quantifying the visual complexity of Pollock’s poured patterns (Mureika et al, 2004, 2005; Mureika, 2005; Lee et al, 2006, 2007; Graham and Field, 2007, 2008; Redies, 2007; Redies et al, 2007; AlvarezRamirez et al, 2008a,b; Coddington et al, 2008; Irfan and Stork, 2009; Fairbanks et al, 2010). N(L) scales according to the power law relationship N(L) ∼ L−D, www.frontiersin.org
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