Olivier Bodini

«I have been working in my scientific research for 30 years on objects that are both complex and structured. Are these objects interesting? Complexity and structure do not make these objects works of art, or even beautiful objects. Visual perception in animals is the result of a Darwinian evolution dedicated to capturing important information in a given environment. In fact, I believe, and my experience tends to prove it, that we need to go back to our vision’s primal function in order to understand how it proceeds and how it can be satisfied or not with the objects presented to it. I am not an expert on art theories but I think that in a way and without admitting it, all these theories try to describe that in a given historical and societal context, I just interpret them through a scientific prism. For my part, I try to develop a framework which corresponds to what I believe to be an element of our perception and which is called ‘the power law’ in Mathematics. It consists in describing what is the size distribution that the objects present in the visual field must follow to bring satisfaction to the individual. This distribution is also, by chance, the one we find in the graphs built from the interactions observed in social networks like Twitter or Facebook. My tables describe these interactions in their complexity, their structure but also their power law distribution and I am always happy with what I get ;-)»