Fabric of Reality
Most people, if ever I say to them that I make ‘fractal’ paintings, picture psychedelic/sacred geometry murals or mathematically mind-boggling computer graphics.
So I get some confused faces when people then actually see my stuff! They can "sort of/kind of" see some fractals in there but not really, and it's because of the stark illustrative and diagrammatical images we usually associate with fractal art or scared (deeper) geometry.
That type of art belongs to the world of fractal mathematics, where everything but the most fundamental way of describing a pattern is stripped away (or refined). It's a world that deals with a purist study of fractal patterning, isolated from the chaos of the real world, and don't get me wrong that’s brilliant in it's own right, but it’s not how we experience fractals day to day. They permeate all places in the universe at all scales and across all of time, which is pretty fucking epic when you think about it!
We see them in clouds, in trees, cracks and rivers, in veins, petals, and tornados, lightning, nebulas, mountains and bubbles...you get the idea!
They are our way of describing patterns in the fabric of reality itself. In a nutshell a fractal is:
1. ‘a never-ending pattern’ (eternal)
2. 'infinitely complex’ (infinite)
3.‘self-similar’ (...)
So Eternal, Infinite... and then Self Similar? Well that means that at any scale, the pattern looks the same.
"one last time, these, are small... those, are far away..."
We can streamline this even further, and say fractals are patterns and structures without scale. If they look the same at all scales, then clearly size has nothing to do with why they are these particular shapes. We know how lightning branches like a tree, which branches like a river, which branches like our veins, and we know this because we see it everywhere.
-Why these particular shapes and not others?
-What can fractal shapes tell us about the structure of reality?
It can be a head-scratcher to understand how it's even possible for identical shapes to form at both the tiniest and most massive scales, but it gets extra-funky when you notice also that this isn't just scales in space, it's scales in time.
It's actually pretty easy to visualise this, the next time you’re walking past a tree remind yourself that those branches grew into their shape through time (very slowly) as well as in space. Yes they were probably misshapen by the weather and other forces, but the branching is unmistakeable. Now imagine a flash of lightning! In a fraction of a second charged ions have ignited the air, and as they've travelled they've branched out in just the same way. I want you to hold the immensity of these two different time scales, a split second vs 1000 years, just sit with that for moment...
...think next of a canyon forged by water over millions of years, during which countless generations of trees flash by faster than... well, lightning!
For branching to occur at all scales of time it stands to reason that whatever causes those shapes isn't influenced by time, so probably exists outside of time, right? Branches be branching any speed they want!
To be without scale in either time or space these structures must exist beyond the 'lower' 4 dimensions, are they evidence of the influence of higher dimensions?
Perhaps they tell us something about the nature of the 5th dimension, where all things exist at once... but then different timelines are thought to branch out, endlessly diverging into multiple multiverses, so there's fractal patterns there too.
Perhaps they are the literal structure of the 10th dimension, where all possibilities in all universes across all times can and do exist, always!
Personally, I like to imagine them as having something to do with whatever binds all the dimensions together, an interdimensional scaffolding if you like.
The next time you're out in nature (or even just standing by a tree), remember that blueprints to the deeper dimensions are all around you, and inside you!
If you're inspired to read further, I recommend taking a look at these 3 books, I'm not an affiliate I'm just sharing books that I enjoyed reading in the past. On that note all the links to external sites here are to non-spammy normal interesting sites or search results related to the stuff I'm describing. I don't run any affiliation to external content in my blogs, I just like to provide some references and extra material for anyone who might enjoy it.
Thanks for sticking with me, I'd love to hear your thoughts just drop me a message on the connect page. Next time, I'll dive into some of the more practical (but less obvious) ways that I explore fractals in my work.
Until then!
