Art and Co-incidence
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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.
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I'm a visual art and I work with co-incidences all the time.
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<p>Co-incidence is fundamental to art, design and communication. Everyday life has a certain texture of co-incidence - most things are similar in many ways it's only when and unusually high level of patterning or similarity occurs that we think it's usual, composed or designed.
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<p>Works of art, design and representation have far higher rates of co-incidence than ordinary life. These co-incidences tell us we are experiencing something that needs to be looked at differently. On the one hand co-incidences are information redundancies - repetitions. But at the same time they are improbabilities that stand out. Artists and designers use them to underscore their intentions and to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity in communication. I think the headings you give are all relevant to art.
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<p>I have also experienced some episodes of mania. During periods of mania it is striking that ordinary/everyday experience becomes more densely patterned by a sense of living among co-incidences. For example, I have been thinking of the word 'crocodile' (an actual example) then a few moments later the word crocodile is spoken on the radio. These kinds of phenomena encourage the belief that my thought is influencing my surroundings. At more sober moments it seems more likely that I was listening the to radio unawares - and it was the radio that was prompting me to think about crocodiles...
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<p>The interesting question, from an aesthetic point of view, is why do people ENJOY co-incidences and co-incidence stories. Ernst Gombrich in his book on the decorative arts The Sense of Order suggests that in early life we search for regularities, repetitions etc. and as we develop we switch our attention to exceptions, anomolies etc. Co-incidences link earlier and later styles of attention. Co-incidences are repetitions that are anomolies - anomolies in the form of repetitions.<br />
Date submitted:Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:23:22 +0000Coincidence ID:5471