1. Introduction
When the customs of an ethnic group is considered to be emerged from the complex relations
among a lot of factors, e.g.: anthropologically, climatologically, geographically, the way people dress
or choose to be appeared is an important thing to be observed. Ethnic and traditional fashion styles
are becoming the easily sensed identities of the collective identity. The co-evolution of memes and
genes are somehow shaping the way we dress and choose what we think to be the fancy thing to get
dressed with [3]. Memes are reflected as we choose, let us say, South Sumatran songket motif, to
become ornaments attached in our dress, as well as recent general trend of batik dress code in
Indonesian people wedding celebrations attendance.
The large diversity of Indonesian ethnic cultures and traditions become the source of a great deal of
variations of dress or textiles ornamentations and decorations. The varied woven cloth, dyed-resist
clothes, and a lot more are another thing as almost unlimited ornamentations and decorations are
to be observed. Bataknese are recognized with their ulos, Padangnese with their songket, Javanese
with their batik, and so on. These textiles are not plain things but decorated in such unique ways
related to the visual aesthetics attached to the respective collective identities. A lot of interesting
motifs decorate the textiles and they are important and enrich the landscape of the economic
processes laid upon creativity and innovation.
The paper celebrates the richness of Indonesian traditional motifs of textiles by incorporating
phylomemetic tree to see the innovative (read: evolutionary, in big picture) emerged upon the
products and traditional crafts. This phylomemetic trees let us to visualize the “familial” relations
between memes as emanated from the respective cultural artifacts [10]. Discussions about
phylomemetic tree reveal the very elementary structures of information constituting the artifacts.
While the global pictures express the similarities between products, the local ones challenge the
detail information that invigorates the existence of the products as being perceived.
The paper is structured as follows. It begins with discussions about the extraction of information as
shown in the textile’s ornamentations. This is delivered by revealing the basic structure of the
decoration by employing the fractal geometry shown in the artifacts and the fundamental of
colorizations related to them. The latest uses the information in the color histograms of the digital
images of the artifacts. This section is followed by the discussions related to the properties of the
memeplexes and the construction of the phylomemetic tree. The paper ends by outlining the open
discussions related to the visualization of the diversity of Indonesian textile decorations.
2. The Memeplexes of the Ornaments in Indonesian Textiles
The first parameter we propose to see is the one sensitive to the geometrical shape of the motifs.
The fractal dimension of the motif delivers this. We know that fractal dimension measures the self-
similarity of the object or any quantities: the similar structures at different scales at the object. The
measurement we use here is the box-counting (Mikonwski) dimension, i.e.: the fractal dimension of
a set of S in metric or Euclidean space, RN . If we place the object into the observational space
with evenly-spaced grids and count how many boxes are required to cover the object or set, the
fractal dimension is then calculated by counting the changes of the boxes count as finer grid is
applied. This is illustrated in figure 1, Javanese Batik Gurdha and the result of the box counting. The
set is fractal as the calculation gives a power-law,
N = N0r-a
(1)
Here, we have a as the fractal (capacity) dimension (Peitgen & Richter, 1986).