Themes and
Variations
The Boston Globe today on a current Museum of Fine Arts exhibit of works collected by one Horace Brock–
and Variations
Variations
The Boston Globe today on a current Museum of Fine Arts exhibit of works collected by one Horace Brock–
“Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into ‘themes’ and ‘transformations.’ A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.
Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other, or of what Brock calls their ‘relative complexity.’ Basically– and this is the nub of it– ‘if the theme is simple, then we are most satisfied when its echoes are complex… and vice versa.'”
Related material:
and Variations
See also earlier tributes to
Hollywood Game Theory
and Hollywood Religion:
For some variations on the
above checkerboard theme, see
Finite Relativity and
A Wealth of Algebraic Structure.
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