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One big pattern

Recently I got into a conversation about the ubiquity of art compared to math. A few years ago, I would have vehemently vouched for art. The advent of calligraphy and writing, the first mark of human expression, and general personal fulfillment can only be satisfied by a creative outlet, or some subset of art, I might argue. Fast forward to my junior year in college, going on three years as a Quantitative Finance major, my appreciation for math and numbers has indubitably grown. Every aspect of art and music can in theory be quantified or digitally represented, be it from machine learning analyzing your Spotify playlist, to NFTs rocking the art world, to the burgeoning phenomenon of having artificial intelligence write us stories. I’m not naïve enough to think eliminating the human element in human expression results in anything as personally gratifying as authentic forms of expression; but I am saying that there is a pattern to all our activities. As such, my thought process has shifted from the narrow perspective that only one can truly rule the human race to the appreciation for the influence of art and technology on one another.

I’m not the first person to ever draw the connection between art and technology. One of my favorite books to recommend in the topic of interdisciplinary studies is Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, wherein he explains patterns give rise to life and exemplifies this point through the works of a renowned logician, artist, and composer (Godel, Escher, Bach respectively of course). I won’t claim to have made it through this dense volume, but even an infrequent curiosity might lead you to appreciate some of his thoughts at least as much as I have. The point here is that every action that you or I might take arises from a pattern which one might deem human tendency. If we consider enough variables that contribute to this pattern, we can more accurately predict the results of human efforts, including in the arts. 

Another way of representing some of these patterns is through the lens of what I have recently come to know as rhizomes. Rhizome is a philosophical term which encompasses concepts, theories, or ideas that can be described as an acentered multiplicity. The meaning behind this is deceptively simple. In fact, it perfectly sums something you have come across many times in your lifetime: a map. A map is acentered (does not have a start or beginning — you can start analyzing a map from any point you choose) and multiplicitous (as the map grows, the characteristics of the route you might trace will completely change but will still be connected to the place you started looking from). The main idea behind a rhizome is that it exercises the fact that there is no beginning or end, but will continue and branch forward from every point on a given schema, much like the subterranean root (think ginger) it is named for. It is a visual scheme describing the relation of interconnected things. 

The usage of rhizomes uniquely bridges art and technology by employing an image to represent the interconnectivity of all sorts of things, including how we interact digitally. A government, school administration, or hospital staff cannot be represented rhizomatically because these structures are hierarchical. If we remove the president or some managerial entity in any of these structures, the structure would cease to exist. Instead, the rhizome represents the people interacting with these structures. We can model this by the universally experienced Instagram rabbit hole. One profile might have thousands of connections to other profiles which then have thousands of connections to other profiles and so on and so forth. If this one profile is deleted, the connections stemming from that profile are also removed, but the profiles they connect to and those profiles’ connections stay intact. We might also use the imagery of a rhizome to represent neural networks, virtual reality, and even the concept of technology in and of itself.

The beauty of patterns lies in the fact that they present something logical, organized, and mathematical through a visually pleasing and humanly satisfying vehicle. We as humans cannot exist outside of the perception of others and the thread of the human race renders us unable to behave outside the expectation of what it means to be human. This interconnectivity can be recognized in multiple ways, be it solely through the lens of art or technology, or through some thought experiment that combines the two such as rhizomes.

The Doodling Duck is an Opinion culture column written and created by Pooja Rajadurai to discuss art as it relates to pop culture, trends, and students.

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