Scottish Gallery of Modern Art Wins Gulbenkian Prize
Charles Jencks
Landform Ueda, 2002.
http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=10380
". . .Speaking about his design, Jencks has said: "I am trying to create a new language of landscape. If you look at the way nature organizes itself, it has inherent principles of movement. I wanted to design something that reflected these natural forces but heightened them. The shapes have been partly inspired by two so-called 'strange attractors', one of them called the Ueda Attractor, named after the Japanese scientist that discovered it. These 'attractors' (weather systems, for example) create a series of self-similar curves that overlap but never repeat, and are attracted to a certain point or 'basin'. I think the landform will create a gateway to the area and identify the gallery from the road as a special place - the locus of contemporary art in Scotland."
The Landform Ueda is part of a continuing scheme to develop the grounds around the Gallery of Modern Art and Dean Gallery as a park for outdoor sculpture. Works by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ian Hamilton Finlay and George Rickey have recently been joined by newly acquired sculptures by the American Dan Graham and British artist Rachel Whiteread. The sweeping, gently rising paths of the Landform Ueda give elevated views across the grounds and create new vantage-points for viewing the sculptures, as well as the famously handsome Edinburgh skyline. "
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This kind of implied movement is as if the movement has been frozen in time. So, this kind of movement can be called, "and analog model of actual movement." It is kind of a reverse process in which the original movement no longer moves, but it is represented in the final non-moving product.
.H.
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http://www.macduff.giointernet.co.uk/aeoc/strange%20attractors.htm
Strange Attractors
Strange attractors are the objects central to chaos theory and provide a link between dynamics and geometry and between feedback and fractals. They are a geometrical representation of of the history taken by the state of a chaotic system. The special properties of chaotic systems (that they never repeat exactly but follow similar paths and that they are highly sensitive to initial conditions) relates to the fractal properties of the strange attractor. A fractal object has self-similarity, or scale invariance. That is, it has similar detail on many scales. Fractal properties arise due to the repeated iteration, or feedback, of simple rules. In the Ueda system whose strange attractor is shown, this corresponds to a repeated folding and stretching of the state space, like pastry that has been repeatedly folded and rolled out. Repeated magnification of a portion of the attractor would reveal ever more similar detail.
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