The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking, edited by Nina Samuel
A BGC Focus Gallery Publication
Nina Samuel, editor
Over the past few decades, the "pictorial turn" in the natural sciences, prompted by the computer's capacity to produce visual representations, has generated considerable theoretical interest. Poised between their materiality and the abstract level they are meant to convey, scientific images are always intersections of form and meaning. Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), one of the best-known producers of digital images in scientific and industrial research, was particularly curious about the ways in which the materiality of scientific representation was able to influence the development of the ideas and abstractions the images embodied.
Using images and objects found in Mandelbrot's office, this book questions the relationship between the visual and scientific reasoning in fractal geometry and chaos theory, among the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the past century. These unpublished materials offer new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas. Work by Adrien Douady and Otto Rössler provides historical depth to the analysis.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Susan Weber
Introduction
Nina Samuel
The Visibility of Islands: On Imagination, Seduction, and Materiality
Nina Samuel
Found Images I: Islands of Discovery: Sequentiality, Scribbles, and the Waste of Thought Process
Nina Samuel
Pictures of a Higher Order
Matthias Bruhn
Found Images II: Order, Disorder, Beauty
Alan Norton with Nina Samuel
Seeing Order in Disorder
Margarete Pratschke
Found Images III: Images of Reality
Nina Samuel
The Fractal View: Nature in Mandelbrot's Geometry
Jan von Brevern
Found Images IV: Pictures of Chance
Nina Samuel
Chains of Chance: A Convolluted History of Pattern Recognition
Wladimir Velminski
Found Images V: Scaling as Pictorial Strategy: Scale Ambivalence and Openness to Interpretation
Nina Samuel
Scalebound Bauhaus
Juliet Koss
The Eye is Not Specialized!
Benoit Mandelbrot Talks with Nina Samuel
Bibliography
Index
Photographic Credits
Contributors
Jan von Brevern
Postdoctoral Researcher in the art history department at the Free University in Berlin
Matthias Bruhn
Coordinator of the master's program in World Heritage Studies at Cottbus Technical University
Juliet Koss
Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at Scripps College
Nina Samuel
Curator at the Berlin contemporary art gallery Kurt im Hirsch
Wladimir Velminski
Historian of Art and Science
Other Details
ISBN
9780300186437
Dimensions
8.8 x 6.4 x 0.7 in.
Page count
176 pages, 160 illustrations
Publication date
September 2012
Binding
Paperback cover with flaps
