Looking Outwards 6: Randomness

Jackson Pollock’s works are always described as being “random”, generated from “randomness”, being completely devoid of any generative structure, pattern or system. Some compare his work to a child or a madman flinging paint onto a canvas, with no consideration of composition, light, color, or any of the fundamental elements of what the masses consider “a painting”.

However, that isn’t quite true. Jackson Pollock’s paintings have been heavily analyzed, even down to the atomic level, by art critics and scientists alike. However, both agree that there is a system hidden in his work: The apparent strokes and patterns in the paintings look the same, regardless of how close an observer looks at it. In other words, there is a design containing a repeating structure of patterns. This is not so much randomness as it is chaos.

People often lump the word “chaos” with the word “random”, but they are different concepts. Chaos is present in deterministic systems whose behavior, can in principle, be predicted. Large, complex systems have deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. A common metaphor for this is the Butterfly Effect; A butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a Hurricane in Texas through a cascade of events. Although the apparent cause of the hurricane in this metaphorical butterfly-hurricane system is “randomness”, there exists hints of underlying patterns, feedback loops, and self organization. The same hints of a mathematical system exist within Pollock’s work – The same system which nature uses to guide the growth of blood vessels, tree branches, and even galaxies.