the smile of chaos
Marco Lucchesi - (published in the Virtual Museum of Brazilian Art in 1997)
MANIFESTOS: INDEX | ACTIVE PRESENCE | I WANT TO BE A MACHINE | MULTIVISION | THE SMILE OF CHAOS
The presence of fractals in recent years has only increased. Who doesn't remember the film Star Trek II? The landscape of the planet Genesis presents a fractal basis. The same is true of the moons of Endor and the Death Star in the well-known Return of the Jedi. It is perhaps one of the great moments in which science, culture, and art have found a point of convergence. Just leaf through the beautiful volume *The Beauty of Fractals*, by Heinz Peitgen and Peter Richter, and you will recognize the increasingly fluid limits of knowledge. In Brazil, Kollreuter and Roberto Moriconi associated the Mandelbrot dimension in their research. We can speak of an almost omnipresence of fractals in the thinking of the 80s and 90s. As important as the theory of relativity and quantum physics, the great hallmarks of the 20th century.
The first entirely computer-generated (CG) sequence in a film. ILM collaborated with Lucasfilm's computer graphics division to create the "Genesis Sequence," featuring a continuous shot of a planet being transformed into a habitable environment suitable for life. (1982)
On the left, a work by Roberto Moriconi: Volume Energetico – series: Bioformas – visual concert – in steel and light, 1992 (Photo: Luiz Garrido) next to it, Maestro Koellreutter and his score: a search for “a new way of listening, for a new kind of music” — (Photo: Cleo Velleda)
Fractal Objects, published in 1975, is an engaging, though often arduous, book. It is written in the first person and makes extensive use of imagery. The history of mathematics seems to "culminate" in Mandelbrot's discoveries, like Aristotle, the master of metaphysics, before the pre-Socratics. As if everything conspired – perfecting itself – for him. Forgotten authors are rediscovered, works never before compiled, others unknown. Mandelbrot became an archaeologist of mathematics. But despite this unconventional approach, which generated much discussion, the book prevailed. It became a classic. Its entire fascination depended on the analysis of chaos and its marvelous scope. Mandelbrot freely roams the craters of the Moon, the distribution of galaxies, the branching of the bronchi, and the coastline of England. Almost like the adventures of a Jules Verne on the seas of science. On the Island of "Complexia." Or rather, on Mandelbrot's Island.
Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, skillfully criticizes a tradition dating back to Euclid that so greatly influenced geometry: "To exalt the beauty of a woman, or of any other animal, they describe it in rhombuses, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometric terms." Even today we learn in school that it doesn't matter whether you draw a circle well or badly. If we have the radius and know that the area of the circle is equal to A = π . r², everything is resolved. We don't reason in terms of a circle, but of the Circle, of its idea. But, as Mandelbrot reminds us, clouds are not circles. The earth is not flat. Mountains are not squares. And the Idea is not in the world. Where chaos begins, classical science stops. A true Platonic dualism.
In Voltaire's Micromegas, we witness the geometric horror of the Saturnian inhabitant upon arriving on Earth: “Everything here seems to be in chaos: look at all these streams, there isn't one that runs in a straight line, these puddles are neither round, nor square, nor oval, nor of any regular shape.” Mandelbrot, however, replaces horror with astonishment. It was the end of deterministic, Laplacian predictability. The universe seemed to him – beyond and before Saturn – a multifractal. A web of self-similarity at different scales. This seemed to be the key, the order underlying the chaos. Mathematical or natural fractals not only have structure at all scales, but possess – within reasonable limits – the same structure at all scales. As we can observe on Mandelbrot Island, where all the Gacton Julia sets reside, on an infinitesimal scale, revealed by zooms.
Micromegas Voltaire's *The Tale of the Giants* is a satirical and philosophical work that narrates the journey of two giants, one from Sirius and the other from Saturn, in their quest to understand the world and humanity. Written by Voltaire, this provocative tale explores themes such as relativity, human vanity, and the pursuit of knowledge. A work that challenges conventional notions and invites reflection. (written in 1752).
Image from the exhibition “3D View” curated by scientists and artists from Brazil and France at the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences – MAST. The Poincaré Conjecture is an important conjecture about topology. It states that the sphere is the only closed space of dimension 3 where all paths can be shrunk to a single point. The conjecture was formulated by Poincaré around the turn of the 20th century. https://olhar3d.impa.br
In Mandelbrot's words: “To be more precise, Fractal Objects aimed not only to describe mountains, clouds, trees, and galaxy clusters, but also to describe them in a way that was perfect enough to allow the imitation of images of reality through formulas. Shortly afterward, however, in my English book, I realized (reading Poincaré) that the same techniques could also be applied to dynamics.” Gradually, the author became aware of the interdisciplinary aspect of his hypotheses. The web gained greater complexity. It also reached the body. For example, the exponential description of the ramifications of the bronchi did not hold up to a fractal vision. The same was true of the urinary collecting system. The bile duct in the liver. The rhythm of the heartbeat. The world became beautiful through this strange, complex network. It was no longer the sympathy of Paracelsus, the correspondence of a Ficino, the numbers of Pythagoras, the alphabet of Galileo, the god of thought, as Farias Brito said when commenting on Spinoza ("deus sive natura").
Fonte: Pascal Cotte / artnet News
Structure dwells within complexity. Beneath disorder, order. The bonds of the universe seem to fit together in scale. Beneath difference, identity. But, beyond this horizon, we know fully that the smile of Modigliani's Jeanne Hébuterne, or Matisse's Gypsy, holds the same poetry as the Mona Lisa. Everything will be regulated by the ghost of Euclid. A smile, nothing more.
Marco Americo Lucchesi He is an award-winning Brazilian poet, writer, novelist, essayist, translator, historian, and Esperantist, the seventh occupant of chair number 15 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (since 2011). He is also a full professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Lucchesi)
