The application of graphicity to create patterns
from the complexities of nature is an activity of modern scientists
where it is one of the key approaches to a comprehensive theory of
living systems and our place in the universe. Comprehension
of the environment actually lies in the synthesis of two very
different approaches, the study of substance (or structure) and the
study of form (or pattern). In the study of structure we
measure and weigh things. Patterns however cannot be measured
or weighted; they must be mapped. To understand pattern we
must map a configuration of relationships. In other words,
structure involves quantities, while pattern involves
qualities. Drawing something is an act of
comprehension. However, regarding life itself, there is more
to it than the shapes of individuals and the submicrosopic
arrangements of atoms and molecules. This living essence is
something non-material and irreducible – a pattern of
organisation. Its most important property is that it is a network-
pattern. That is to say, whenever we encounter what are
living- organisms, parts of organisms, or communities of organisms-
we can observe that the components are arranged in a network
fashion. At the highest levels, predator/prey chains and food
webs are good ecological examples.
A network means that information flows in all
directions. In particular, an influence or message may travel along
a cyclical path, which then becomes a feedback loop. For
instance, a community by maintaining an active network of
communication will learn from its mistakes because the consequences
of a mistake will spread through the network and return to the
source along feedback loops. Thus the community can correct
its mistakes, regulate itself, and organise itself.
Recognition of the importance of pattern in
science only came in the 1920s. The most important outcome of
the initial research into networks was that the brain was seen as
complex of cells that communicate with each other as patterns of
intertwined webs nesting within larger webs. The brain is a
networked community of cells with the capacity of
self-organisation, and this is how virtual images of environment
are produced and modified through perception. This
fundamental networking ability probably resides in the ability of
enzymes to set up complex networks that form closed loops. A
mental picture of how such a catalytic network of fifteen enzymes
could catalyse each other’s formation, and link up to produce
a molecular pattern, was created by the molecular biologist
Eigen.
Eigen called his mind maps
‘hypercycles’. His depiction of a hypercycle is a
personal creation that has the balance of lines and an enclosed
form characteristic of art. Important to the present context
is that, although a scientist produced the diagram, it exemplifies
the process of artistic creativity. It came into existence to
stand for an entity that is too complex to be visualised. The
diagram is a meaningful scientific abstraction that follows a major
precept of modern art which states that details are confusing and
it is only by selection and emphasis that an artist can get to the
real meaning of things.
It was in the first decades of the
20th century art began to be taught from the point of
view of the mental images of perception. That is to say, reality
creates a state of mind that becomes a painting when the person
communicates the idea by arranging the right things in the right
place within two-dimensions. It is well documented how this
teaching liberated the mind of one student of the time, Georgia
O’Keeffe, from the tyranny of having to produce
representations of landscapes that did not encapsulate her mental
perception of them. It released her dissatisfied intellect
into the realm of non- representational art to paint
‘something I know’. She invented a personal
visual vocabulary, which quickly placed her at the forefront of
American modernism.
O’Keeffe and her modernist contemporaries
were essentially investigating patterns in nature to discover how
drawing could be used to communicate self. She was
encapsulating in shapes and colours a rich array of human emotions
and mental associations suggested by material objects. Eigen
and other neural scientists of the 1970s were trying to discover
how scientific ideas about an ‘unseeable’ network of
proteins could be communicated as drawings. Inevitably,
science has to use ‘artistic methods’ to depict the
patterns it discovers. Graphicity actually evolved for this
very purpose of comprehending how we can control our social
evolution. The depiction of supercycles is obviously useful
knowledge. Scientific diagrams are part of a universal
language, underpinned by a precise terminology and an agreed set of
international symbols, although the scientists who are at the
cutting edge of neural networks are a relatively small subculture
of understanding. This may be contrasted with the subculture
grouped around the makers and critics of non-representational works
of art. For example, Georgia O’Keeffe’s picture
‘Black Diagonal’, one of a series of abstract
charcoals, utilises her own personal non-verbal language of symbols
to represent a particular state of mind. In this sense it is
not a visual aid for viewers to understand her mental
discovery. She put it this way:
“There are people who have made me see
shapes…I have painted portraits that to me are almost
photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings,
they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the
world as abstractions-no one seeing what they
are”.
Whether it is representational or abstract, each
observer is left to translate a picture according to his or her own
mindset, whether it is representational or abstract. The
first person to comment on O’ Keeffe’s abstract
charcoal drawings, William Murrell Fisher, was struck by their
transcendence and found evidence in them of
“consciousness…that one’s self is other than
oneself, is something larger, something almost tangibly universal,
since it is en rapport with a wholeness in which one’s
separateness is, for the time, lost”. He characterised
the works as “mystical and musical”. It is
inevitable that this initial idiosyncratic response set the traits
in O’ Keeffe’s work that have been of continuing
interest to reviewers ever since. This long-running dialogue
is largely confined to a relatively small community of museum
curators and art commentators. It is also an indication of
the powerful role of non- representational art in maintaining
sub-cultures of understanding that consist of people whose job it
is to write about such matters, and who develop a mental allegiance
to, and often a commercial interest in, particular artists.