Chaos and Aesthetics
Here are the details and results of the Chaos and Aesthetics survey, for interested participants.
Please keep in mind that this was a two month long term project for a class in Artificial Life and thus used as a student learning experience--not intended to be perfect!
Study Abstract
In the psychology of aesthetics, there is evidence that people find visual art which models patterns in nature more appealing than visual art which does not. In the practice of art and design, it is a basic principle that juxtaposing regions of repeating patterns with regions of non-repeating "surprises" create a sensation of "life" in a work of art. In the study of creativity, it's thought that tensions between analytical and associative modes of working is what generates vital art. And in the field of artificial life, it's posited that those characteristics which people think of as making something vital and "alive" exist on the "edge of chaos," in a dynamic regime which has both ordered and chaotic properties. These ideas suggest that people will find images appealing if those images are on the edge of chaos. Cellular automata provide a way to 1) generate imagery in different dynamic regimes 2) visualize the essential tensions of order and chaos found in visual design principles. This project uses cellular automata with states mapped to color elements to produce images which fall within ordered, chaotic, or edge of chaos regimes. After the images were produced, they were used an on-line survey and their aesthetic value rated by human participants. The survey results were analyzed to relate aestetic appeal with chaosticity and dynamic regime.
Summary of Results
| Participation Totals | |
|---|---|
| Participated | 263 |
| Lower Bound for Survey Completion | 208 |
| Upper Bound for Survey Completion | 257 |
| Regime Averages (based on approx. 1040 data points each regime) | |
| Fixed Point | 3.0865 |
| Limit Cycle | 3.5058 |
| Edge of Chaos | 4.5623 |
| Chaos | 3.3163 |
Class Presentation
For anyone interested in the details of the methodology, implementation, or more detailed information and plots on the survey results and my conclusions, here's a PDF of the presentation (including script) on the project I gave to my class.