February 22, 2009

  • Design Theory:

    Themes and
    Variations

    Horace Brock with his collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

    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:

    Theme

    Diamond theme

    and Variations

    Variations on the diamond theme

    See also earlier tributes to
    Hollywood Game Theory

    Chess game in The Thomas Crown Affair

    and Hollywood Religion:

    http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090222-SoundOfSilence.jpg

    For some variations on the
    above checkerboard theme, see
    Finite Relativity and
     A Wealth of Algebraic Structure.

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