BZ reaction
Alasdair Turner
Lecturer in Urban and Architectural Computing, University College London
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In this manner of unfolding the image arises from an algorithm that is so complex a viewer may get tangled up in it and not perceive the relationships between image, information, and infinite. The artwork’s surface appears independent of its underlying structure. As described by the eleventh-century literary theorist Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, aesthetic pleasure in this manner of unfolding results from unexpected unfolding, the revelation of hitherto unseen relationships.
The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction blooms and fascinates, moving from an initial cloud into a complex state of oscillation that functions, with its folds and scrolls, in a far from equilibrium state for an extended period. (This reaction has been extensively studied; Turner has written about adapting the BZ reaction from chemistry to code.) An inner order becomes apparent in spirals and tendrils, but still so complex that the structure may remain mysterious behind the emergent velvet of the image.
“In Baroque art the visible skin is the expression or unfoldment of a legible level of information. All being is surface, Leibniz and Deleuze propose, without duality: a fabric stretched to infinity. There is no meaning to dig for, for sense is simply the other side or the lining of that surface. … And yet the baroque characteristically conceals the fact that there is nothing underneath by making the surface overwhelmingly complex.” (p. 174)
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