BIOLOGICAL FORM AND COMPLEXITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE ART OF TAI CHI

Vassily Kandinsky, father of the abstract movement, Bauhaus professor and one of the great fi gures of contemporary art, believed in the existence of an «inner necessity» that drove the artist inescapably to create. Naturally, one hundred years after the publication of «Concerning the Spiritual in Art», both the defi nition of and the necessity for creation are still the subject of much debate, with the very concept of art itself being called into question. However, it may be interesting to consider an impetus that is similar for the scientist, whose inner necessity is more obvious, an impulse that one might call «inner curiosity», a need to know and furnish the natural phenomena with a reasonably objective explanatory basis that satisfi es our intellect. The search for complexity in nature responds directly to this inner curiosity and is grounded in different conceptual bases. On the one hand, this quest contains a component that has been inherited from monotheistic Western religions, whereby human individuals are viewed as the centre of creation and their brain as the most complex structure in the universe.