Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Indonesian archipelago is a landscape of vast diversity.
From the west to east we witness the tracks of the evolving culture and the collective intelligence spreading all over
promising our further understanding for the way social and humanity developing, creating,
and become what we are today.
gazing through the world of how humanity creates such beautiful crafts
and visual arts within the elements of ethno-architectural products,
from bali
dayak in island of borneo
toraja in celebes,
ethnic-groups in papua,
aceh, batak in northern sumatera and definitely much more...
gives us the amazement for the beauty of ethnic diversity in a social singularity of indonesia...
a survey delivered by the Indonesian Archipelago Cultural Initiatives
the Gorga Expedition 2012
to make a comprehensive documentation on bataknese gorga in some traditional ancient and some modern buildings
with adaptations of the traditional gorga...
The curlicues - some kind of fancy twisting shape or curls
from series of of concentric circling shapes
are decorating in such way expressing faces
some of them are called barong, kala, paung, and so on
all are emerged over the ethnic groups in Indonesia...
Let us zoom in the variations of bataknese gorga
in this case an "ULU PAUNG"
the statue that looked like a head of buffalo put at the top-front of batak traditional houses...
the variations in bataknese houses is so stunning!
The variations of curlicues within bataknese gorga is never congruent one another
yet we know that such details and complex patterns are emerged from ancient civilizations
without any recognition with modern geometry tool that we are familiar with today...
...Bataknese gorga, may not be merely a kind of ornamentation in the traditional houses
...they may be a kind of signs symblizing the philosophy of Batak people...
...keep on growing
...just like the "tree of life"!
...a complex beauty, sophisticated!
How did they make it then?
What is the magic behind the complex and sophisticated patterns?
Apparently, nations and ethnic groups within Indonesia - just like in some other places in the world...
are keen on the brancing curls ...of a tree of life...
...as in Lampung woven fabrics, songket...
woven fabrics from Lombok,
hariara tree in Bataknese gorga...
the "batang garing" tree in dayak ornamentations,
...also in cultural symbolizations in the region of Ngayogyakarta...
that becoming the "kayon" in Javanese shadow-puppet shows...
...also one in Bali...
mystery of life is related to the way of branching trees, filling up the spaces of the reality
...folklores, mythology, and ethno-cosmology based on astrology, probably even the archaeo-astronomy,
often have connection with concept of "tree of life" or it's element...
how simple things in return emerging complex phenomena in return,
chaos, even seemingly random,
modern geometry recognize some these as fractal...
fractal is an interesting geometrical shape with dimension is not 1, 2, 3, or mere integers, but also fraction...
The dimension is said to be exceeding its topological dimension...
fractal has an extra-ordinary symmetry,
the symmetry of self-similarity
research observed hundreds of painting and carving Bataknese gorga that are still available for documentation
...interesting to see how the ancient Batak people created the gorga with dimensionality between 1.4 to 1.6
Bataknese gorga is not merely curves...
not also a two dimensional shapes...
Bataknese gorga is in between!
Bataknese gorga transform the two dimensional spaces by filling in the one dimensional shapes
forming a self-similar patterns of which dimensions are between 1 and 2...
Let's use our imagination a bit...
compare the previously showed Gorga with the fractal motiffs of this Sierpinski Triangle of close dimensions...
or this dragon curve fractal...
Complexity sciences see trees and multi-cellular organisms in iterative processes...
Astrid Lindenmayer postulated a system capturing such complex growing shapes...
a system that is well-known as L-System...
L-System can be seen as "turtle-geometry"...
turtles walks on a finite space with certain rules...
by incorporating certain rules, the tracks of the movement emerge patterns...
by following just few simple rules, the the iterative process emerges curlicues...
these rules are really simple...
the simple rules emerges the curl patterns
...depicting how trees grow...
complex patterns are yielded and our aesthetic appreciation turns it into particular visual arts...
Research suggests three simple rules in turtle-geometry emerging patterns similar to Bataknese gorga...
...filling up the emptiness that are explored with concentric circling move in certain angles
...it may also a randomized or a constant one..
following the patterns of growing plants...
...and the last one, the movement may not overlap the existing tracks...
...a turtle is forbidden to approach tracks from the previous movement...
Bataknese gorga, is now seen as a kind of geneative art:
by employing simple rules, variations of visual aesthetics are yielded!
Bataknese gorga is grown computationally....
L-System geometry captures production codes for curlicues in bataknese gorga
The existing limitations of the lack of modern geometry and tools
has brought them to create artistic crafts by employing a kind of geometry
of which modern mathematics recognized it as L-system turtle geometry several decades ago...
...a recent computational model that is just similar to the ancient bataknese gorga
also want to capture the dynamics of growth, branching structures,
within the scope of "tree of life" cosmology...
this could be a sort of way people from the archipelago practiced their mathematics at the ancient times...
simplicity yields aesthetical complexity!
restoring it may give alternative chances for inspiration for modern life facing today life
...and the future?!