Painting the World with Fractals: How Creative Expression Reveals a Deeper Order of Reality and Consciousness  Nick Day (Conscious Pictures, Sonoma, CA )   C24

"Our graphics [fractals] did more than inform. They made people dream. Colleagues flocked to tell us that we had made them see their own work in a different light, and had helped them by unveiling previously unnoticed analogies. For the first time, they felt that what they saw directly affected what they did next." ~ Benoit Mandelbrot. We are familiar with the typical fractal image, a geometric pattern with a highly complex edge that repeats infinitely when scaled up or down. Fractals were first described by mathematician and IBM scientist Benoit Mandelbrot, who showed that certain phenomena that were previously considered to be essentially chaotic, such as shorelines or clouds, were actually bound by an underlying order based on recursivity. Fractal forms in nature can be explicate, for example tree branches, river deltas, the cardiovascular system, etc., or implicate, apparent only when our default perception has been significantly altered, perhaps by psychedelics or neurological damage. Fractal forms are found in the arts, in painting and storytelling, which are modes of human expression also defined by archetypes. By revealing those geometric patterns that exist at deeper levels of reality, fractals themselves have archetypal properties. In this talk I shall explore the connection between fractals, archetypes and art, and whether this points to consciousness itself having a fundamentally fractal nature.