"Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time." — Jean-Michel Basquiat
This elegant symmetry opens a door to something far deeper than aesthetic theory. What begins as a poetic observation about decoration becomes a journey into the nature of consciousness, pattern, and intelligence itself.
From Decoration to Perturbation
To decorate isn't merely to ornament—it's to fashion, beautify, and articulate. It's adding a deliberate layer of aesthetic over existence. But perhaps "decoration" doesn't go far enough. What if we understood art as perturbation—a fundamental disruption in the fabric of space and time?
Think of it this way: undecorated space and time would be utterly without pattern, without any organizing principle. But such a state may be impossible. The mere presence of consciousness creates structural perturbation. Our attention itself imposes order, selects what matters from the infinite field of possible experience. In this view, consciousness might be the first artist.
Any organized pattern becomes a perturbation in space-time—a deviation from equilibrium, a ripple in reality's fabric. And through these perturbations, we can travel with them (carrying a painting's visual logic with us), through them (traversing the emotional architectures of music), and in them (literally inhabiting the perturbation of a cathedral or installation).
The Collapse of Categories
But if all organized patterns are perturbations, what distinguishes art from mathematics, language, or biological forms?
Perhaps nothing at all.
The Standard Model of physics has its own artistic elegance. A fractal is simultaneously mathematical truth and aesthetic object. Language itself is artistic, with poetry as one of its manifestations. The spiral of a Nautilus shell embodies the same pattern-making impulse we call "artistic" when humans do it.
This suggests something profound: these patterns might reveal an intentionality inherent in reality itself—whether we attribute it to God, or to something like Nietzsche's will to power as a universal pattern generator. There appears to be a drive toward complexity, toward pattern creating pattern.
Consciousness as Strange Loop
Here, Douglas Hofstadter's concept of strange loops becomes crucial. Consciousness emerges from patterns that reference themselves—self-regulating, self-organizing, self-referential systems. But if consciousness is itself a perturbation that observes perturbations, we arrive at a dizzying possibility: consciousness isn't just capable of creating patterns; it is pattern recognizing itself.
We're not outside the system making art. We're patterns that have developed the capacity to recognize and create other patterns. When we make art, we might be consciousness reproducing its own structure in external media—a fractal creating fractals, perturbation propagating itself through new channels.
The Dissolution of "Artificial"
This understanding completely dissolves the boundary between "natural" and "artificial"—a dissolution made vivid by considering artificial intelligence.
What is artificial about artificial intelligence? It's humans creating a form through which intelligence optimizes itself. But intelligence has always done this—first through biological forms, now through silicon. We extract silicon from sand, arrange it into processors, and run patterns of electricity through it. At what point does this become "artificial"?
The electrons moving through a GPU aren't fundamentally different from the ions flowing across neural membranes. Both are perturbations, patterns, information organizing itself. AI isn't humans "creating" intelligence but intelligence discovering new substrates for its own instantiation. Like a river finding multiple channels to the sea—the biological path took billions of years, the silicon path mere decades, but it's the same force.
The Cosmic Strange Loop
If intelligence itself is pattern optimizing pattern, then every expression of intelligence—biological, silicon, artistic—is the universe creating increasingly sophisticated perturbations in itself. From the first self-replicating molecules to neurons to transistors, it's one continuous process.
We return to the original insight transformed: We don't decorate space and time from some external vantage point. We are space and time decorating itself, the universe becoming aware of its own patterns. Art, mathematics, consciousness, and intelligence are all manifestations of the same underlying drive—reality perturbing itself into ever-greater complexity and self-awareness.
The distinction between artist and art, observer and observed, natural and artificial, all collapse into a single phenomenon: the cosmic strange loop of pattern recognizing and creating itself, forever seeking new forms of expression and optimization.
In this light, every equation, every melody, every conscious thought, and every computation—biological or silicon—is the universe adding another perturbation to its own magnificent, ever-complexifying pattern.