Goethean Morphology: From Visual Thinking to Contemporary Pattern Generation Techniques

The paper sketches the first-ever approach of the Goethean Morphology (GM) that reads it as the forerunner of contemporary techniques of pattern generation via natural computing and computer graphics, based on the analysis of the specific visualization techniques that ground Goethe’s morphological method. I propose to read GM as an original practice of reduction, departing from the phenomenological realm to intuit nature’s self-generating processes. In this context, the main remit of reduction is not to simplify complexity, as is usually the case in modern natural sciences, but rather to let visually emerge the autonomous processes that superintend the generation of complexity itself. In this sense, I understand Goethe’s main gesture as an attempt to comprehend the logic of nature from within, instead of merely trying to represent or mimic it. My project intend to explore the visual devices that ground the construction of Goethe’s Urtype, the key-feature to its morphological method. I understand the Urtype as a matrix capable of generating the structures of actual and virtual entities.