Taylor thought this might be a way to test this new hypothesis, especially in light of numerous experimental studies showing the prevalence of fractals in human physiology: walking, dancing, martial arts, and balancing movements, such as the sway of posture during standing. “Let’s think about that balancing mechanism,” he said. “You become unbalanced, you’re swaying around, so you’ve got a mixture of smaller, smaller and smaller and smaller and larger waves. It’s a multi-layered thing.”
Drip, Drip, Drip
Coincidentally, Taylor also had a built-in laboratory environment in which to conduct such experiments: public “dripfests” that he regularly held, in which both adults and children had the opportunity to create their own Pollock-like artworks by spraying thin paint onto sheets of paper on the floor. Even before Taylor’s experiment could be implemented, life changed and the concept was shelved. But a few years ago he revived it.
The subjects of the study were 18 children aged four to six, and 34 adults aged 18 to 25. The age discrepancy was significant, as those two groups are at markedly different stages of biomechanical balance development. And this time, Taylor and his co-authors didn’t just look at the fractal dimensions of the resulting images, that is, measure the self-similar scaling behavior of the splatter patterns. He also looked at something called “lacunarity”, examining the variation in gaps between paint clusters.
Pollock’s image Number 14, 1948,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Pollock’s image Number 14, 1948,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst Young man worried by the flight of a non-Euclidean fly,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst Young man worried by the flight of a non-Euclidean fly,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Pollock’s image Number 14, 1948,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Image of Max Ernst Young man worried by the flight of a non-Euclidean fly,
Fairbanks et al., 2025
Results: The splatter paintings made by adults had higher paint density and wider, more varied paint trajectories. Children’s drawings tended to have smaller, finer patterns, greater gaps between paint clusters, and simple one-dimensional trajectories that did not often change direction. “They both have coarse-scale movement, but adults have much finer-scale structure,” Taylor said. “Not only did children have less fine structure, but the fine structure they did have was very disorganized, whereas adults’ fine structure was very uniform. So when the person is walking and how they regain their balance, we think it’s related to how much structure there is at these different scales and how uniform it is.”