My older video work usually explored the interpenetration of order and chaos. Long before the fractal mathematicians came along to explain things I could see that order and chaos were fundamental formative aspects of many, perhaps all, natural processes in the physical world, and that they mutually co-existed at different scales or at different times in these processes.

These insights were enhanced by my early exploration of the phenomenon of video feedback, of which I somewhat immodestly claim to have been the world’s leading exponent during the Seventies. Video feedback is now recognised as a “classic” fractal phenomenon, though I have never been much interested in mathematically and computer generated fractal images.

I always describe my “abstract” videos as seeking to express on the one hand archetypal forms and on the other fundamentally natural forms. This apparent riddle was only really explained through the eventual work of some pioneering mathematicians in the Eighties. Essentially, fractal mathematics describes the complex processes that define what makes the natural world look natural to us! By using video feedback I was paralleling how those process work in nature, so my “abstract” images felt very natural to me even when they did not represent anything directly in nature.

Good reading:

Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos, John Briggs, Thames and Hudson, 1992

Chaos, Making a New Science, James Gleick, Heinemann, 1988