Tuesday, February 15, 2011

on patterns


Aspies are often described as pattern-seeking, but i have a different take on this. I think i have a taste for textures, & to me a pattern is first & foremost a texture. (The absence of texture i sometimes--but not always--find repugnant.) The more intricately textured something is, the more i delight in it.

Now, to me there is not an unbridgeable gulf between more-orderly textures (called patterns, e.g. everything from basic checks to repeating "wallpaper" surfaces) & less-orderly, such as nature produces in great abundance. (This includes prime numbers, BTW.) What matters to me is the density of information. I like grotesques, the baroque in art, crunchy food, rough or ornate clothing. I even enjoy uneven ground--looking at it, & walking (or climbing) across it. Which does not feel different from reading a richly-varied narrative. For, textures are full of incidents.

Nothing has pleased me more in the march of cybernetics than the invention of fractals. At last the banality of simplistic human design has succumbed to its absolute origins in an order beyond our finite understanding; & from that time, our artificial worlds have become increasingly habitable for those like me who cannot abide plainness & empty space.


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