¶ Pattern
Index Entry
Kepes at M.I.T. made a beautiful demonstration ∫of the scientist’s and artists need to articulate∫. He took hundreds of eight by ten black and white photographs of modern paintings and shuffled them thoroughly with photographs taken by scientists through microscopes or telescopes of all manner of natural phenomena: sound waves, chromosomes, and such. The only way you can classify photographs with nothing recognizable in them is by your own spontaneous pattern classifications. Group the mealy, the blotchy, the striped, and so forth. The pattern groups of photographs were put on display. The artists’ work and the scientists’ were indistinguishable. Checking the data, it was found that the artist frequently conceived of a pattern in his imagination before the scientist found it in nature. Science began to take a new view of artists.
