Part of what drew me away from film making as a undergraduate and towards digital art, was the simplicity of creating “art” via electricity and numbers. Once I learned what a synthesizer was and how it worked, I was enthralled by it’s potential. Imagine being in the room the day Giorgio Moroder stopped playing the piano and started making disco with a sound oscillator.  Much like my first forays into Ableton Live — I learned that every instrument can then be sampled and reconfigured in a sequence, then looped to repeat again, or to be tweaked over a time line.  It’s all math.

The same goes for visual art — many of the IDM artists I discovered in the late 1990′s used computer artwork like polygons and hexagons drawn in complex patterns to represent the new and exciting music they were making.  For the seasoned electronic musician, these ideas aren’t new — but for a traditional art collector — the same principles seem to be relevant discussion threads.

From the Boston Globe:

In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. 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.”

He gives the example of a chair in his collection designed by the English Regency architect Henry Holland. The dominant design motif, which can be found in the chair’s arm, is an S-curve. (Mathematically, an S-curve, which twists in space, is complex when compared to a straight line or unidirectional curve.) The back of the chair, writes Brock, sees that S-curve first reversed and then rotated 90 degrees – a simple two-step transformation.

Complex theme, simple transformation: Voila! The chair is beautiful.