In Praise of Chaos...

This could be a sort of metaphorical portrait of my dining room table. Or my bedroom. Or my cubicle at work. So maybe I am just a clutter junky. I find myself drawn inexorably to the irregular, the unsymmetric, the disorderly, the "ugly" side of algorithmic art.

I remember corresponding with someone, perhaps Carol Walske, about chaos and fractal art and how so much of the fractal art one sees seems to attempt to eliminate the chaotic, to neaten it up, confine it to order. Like the artist is afraid of chaos.

I have been either actively or philosophically involved in fractals for almost 20 years now, and a biologist of sorts for most of my life. I have been entranced with the higher order that looks like chaos -- the "empty" field that is ecologically much more stable than the plowed and planted field next to it. It partakes of a higher order...one that is not as easily apparent to the casual observer as the straight rows planted with a single species. But the order is there, to be sensed if not completely understood.

Let's hear if for chaos!