Chaos and the Surreal The invention of Chaos Theory is usually attributed to mathematicians, but artists and philosophers found ways of expressing the idea long before mathematics had the necessary computer power at its disposal. Chaos in its formal mathematical sense is relatively recent in its conception. It was Edward Lorenz, an American mathematician working in the 1960s, who pioneered the idea, coining the term 'butterfly effect' around the same time that computers reached powerful enough levels to cope with the calculations necessary to develop the theory. The non-linear approach that defines the theory, the idea that highly complex systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, was revelatory in a world where calculus had been the prevailing mathematical mindset since the time of Newton. A new branch of physics was born. But what if art had got there first? Four decades earlier, a group of artists and philosophers in Paris had begun to rebel against the excessive (as they saw it) use of logic and rationality that had been embraced by the intellectual elite since the Enlightenment. Breton, Dal and the other Surrealists actively celebrated the unpredictable -- they valued artwork, films and books in which the conscious mind could find no meaning. They argued that the work spoke to a deeper subconscious, an elemental part of ourselves that could not be reached through the false rationality that mankind imposed on itself. According to the Surrealists, human existence was dictated by a powerfully random undercurrent, not by cogent reasoning as