The calculus of vision - finding anomalies in a chaotic pattern

​As always, I think about anomalies in a chaotic pattern - in the river as well as patterns of my behavior as well as that of the fish. (from a fishing blog)

Some years ago, I learned from my guide,(*) that the way to find fish in the Everglades was to look for the anomaly in the chaotic pattern – to do this I had to look through the surface pattern of the shallow water, complete with reflection, to the pattern of  the wave-brushed sand and underwater plants on the bottom, just a few feet below,  to see if I could spot something that didn’t belong. That would often be the redfish. Now cast to it, but cast to its head because if you cast to its tail you’ll spook it, which I did, although not always, at which time you get to see a cloud of mud billowing out in its own dynamic pattern, the pattern of turbulence in a fluid. 

I’ve taken this advice to the  rivers around here, from the small blue lines to the larger ones. Although, I can’t see the same things one can see in the transparent Floridian waters, I use the general principal.  I am  still looking for the areas of change in the dynamic hydraulic pattern, looking for variation, a slow spot beside fast water - a seam – because that indicates a place of slower water that the fish can hold in while the food passes by.

There is hydraulic geometry in the rivers, and any body of water, and one can develop an eye for finding the spots where things change – for that anomaly in the strange un-patterned pattern of the flow. (Misconfiguration of the configuration – it’s a fascinating ambiguity that is so very tangible – like the wake of a boat, always changing but seemingly always consistent and all but solid thought constantly changing to remain consistent over distance and through time - yeow - hold that thought.)

When you can see the river and the system in this way it becomes easier to understand where you should be casting to and how you want the fly to drift.  Funny if you think of the other definition of current it makes an odd kind of sense – it’s where things are right now.

When I began to look for birds – and I am a very amateur birder – I also found that the key was to look into the fractal pattern of the trees in the terrain and find the inconsistency, that shape in the chaotic pattern that did not fit in, and that glitch in the flow was often a bird, although sometimes it was a bunch of leaves or debris in a bush - but it was some thing different. 

I thinking now of calculus, where begin to isolate the concept of change as a quantity we can make concrete with a number.  As when we consider acceleration as a function of speed, we can only see change as somehow solid if we take movement with speed as a given state. In calculus, Acceleration is the first derivative of the equation, its instantaneous change. So is finding the anomaly in the turbulence. So are, I find, many ideas that hold my attention.

Often when we listen to music, we find the greatest insight where the musician or composer sets up an expectation by repetition and then takes our imagination elsewhere, somewhere just slightly beyond where we expected to go. When Billie Holiday, for instance, sings just slightly against the beat or when someone rearranges a familiar tune – what we are hearing is that derivative – that instantaneous change from our expectations.  

When we hear this derivative we hold the original in our imagination as a comparison so what we savor in the hearing of the is the difference – we hear the change.

And much as the derivative is instantaneous, it is removed from time, thus when we experience this – do we, in fact, gain some kind of new perspective – do we get, at least for a moment, unstuck in time? Because we hold the experience so much in the layers of remembered, imagined and instantons experience do we unlock ourselves from the regular beat of the clock?

---

​Of course,  this looking for what moves against the pattern is a good way to analyze anything visual – which is my business when it comes to painting – as an artist, we set up a chaotic pattern, one with dynamics but not regularity per see, and then mess with the viewer expectations.

In my images you see what you expect to see, the landscape or the flowers, however there are many other things going on that you need to both see and see beyond in order to recognize the image and that is what I, as the artist, am so very interested in.

​There is the time represented in the image, the snap shot of a view, as well as the time you get to look at the frozen moment, as well as the time the is embedded in the image that it took to make it.

A lot of visual art is about the experience of seeing - perceiving the world though our senses and then the processing - our brains are not so different from photoshop - but it's the program, the unique and personal program of the artist that we share. In this way art shapes the way culture looks at the world.

​And I am putting in my personal angle in the images I make - Sentience is amazing.
 
*Let me credit Ned Small @ Sightfish.com, is the guide with the advice on how to see fish as the anomaly in the chaotic pattern.  Thank you so much for so many ideas.