ART

owlemma
digital collage  8.8" x 11"  2012

...is the physical rearrangement of patterns, and creating (or discovering) new patterns.

The patterns themselves are both physical, i.e., the atomic structure of clay, and informational, i.e., the Madonna's breast and also the arrangement of bits in the machine that displays Her breast.

In this way a chemist is an artist.

The commonality of science, art, music, speech and writing is in this shuffling of patterns.

What enables these activities is the non-stop operation of the brain.  These neural operations can be seen in everyday (and night) experiences.  The brain orders the sensory input in various pattern manipulation modules.  Ordinary waking visual experience is composed of a vast cutting and pasting and pattern fitting production.  It's how you recognize faces or can name colors.  There's a brain app for that.  What delights (and disturbs) us about dreams (or cutting edge artworks) is their creative, surprising nature.  It's a pattern mash.  These processes can be seen more nakedly in dreams, hallucinations, visions, and in pareidolia (seeing faces in clouds, e.g.)  They can be seen in your life in the form of memories, aspirations, fears and convictions.   Your brain writes the environmental script.
An artist is a dreamer attempting to control the dream, or to wake up.
But wake up to what?
Ordinary attention is a dream- of another order.
She blinded me with Science.
Central to attention is the ability to discard the irrelevant, but if we could witness our own internal creative processes, we would be bewildered by their complexity.  The artist is the one who attempts to pay attention to the cognitive dissonances of our scene-building machinery, and say "look here, a new pattern!"
Pump it, Baby.