Principles of Nature: towards a new visual language
Wayne Roberts © 2003
Scale Structures
A key principle of this document is that Nature is full of interconnecting
scale structures. This will be clarified and elaborated in subsequent
chapters and subsections, but first the terminology needs to be defined.
The term scale structure is applied here in the broadest sense
of a 'musical' scale: relative dimensions and relations among
parts that together form logical wholes.
Definition
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...ordering divisions, combinations, ratios,
or operations, applying to fields of elements, or events. Scale structures
may apply horizontally across a range of parameters of any generic
quality or quantity; and/or may apply vertically spanning hierrarchies
or dimensions; or may apply complexly and variously as syntactical
organisation (frequently reflecting the emergent, self-organising
behaviour of complex systems). They will often exhibit the phenomenon
of ‘resonance’ and recursion. Some are fractals, or may
have fractal-like properties. They organise, and are organised. They
determine, and are determined.
W. Roberts2, 1996 |
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To qualify as a scale structure in this document, the structure or principle
(which may be abstract or 'ideal' as in geometry) must be applicable in
more than one situation: it must tend to the generic rather than the specific;
it must concern relative values rather than so-called absolute values.
In this there is no room for absolute pitch, absolute measurement, etc.
Every entity can only be defined in terms of some other entity or entities.
This follows from the profound interconnectedness of the universe.
The meaning, understanding, and relevance of scale structures will become
apparent as we look at the precedents for scale structures and their ubiquitous
occurrence in nature, mathematics, music, science, history, language,
and finally, their potentially enormous application in the visual arts
and ‘thinking’.
Visual art which syntactically links its apparently haphazard external
forms to the rhyme and measure of various covert scale structures will
result in visual works of enormous diversity which combine logic and intuition
in concord with the physiology of the mind. Progress in this direction
is likely to coincide with the development of new paradigms for thinking
across the disciplines.
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This haphazard arrangement of forms may be
the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental relationship will
finally be able to be expressed in mathematical form, but in terms
irregular rather than regular.
W. Kandinsky3, 1911 |
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