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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Why can it be so beautiful?

Fractals.... aren't beautiful.
And what do you mean by "in beauty" : "There's a lot of math in beauty".
When we begin to consider the math- the beauty succumbs, and is replaced by a poor, cold surrogate- perhaps with a "beauty" of its own; like the planet mercury, a most beautiful place, till we try and live there.
The Golden ratio is as much a part of beauty as are the host cells that constitute the greatest part of my girlfriend's skin- but I do not love them. And I will never mourn for them. It's our definition of beauty that parts us. Hence, fractals are ugly. (:
 
The only definition of "beauty" I know, is "that which I find beautiful." It's a very personal and subjective thing.

What I mean by their being math in beauty, is that a lot of things we (as in not just me, but many people) find beautiful, have math behind the scenes. Like a sea shell that has a log spiral on it. Or a pattern produced by cellular automata rules, or the spiral of seeds on a sunflower head that has the golden ratio as it's mathematics, or the chaos of a dripping tap, or the fractal fronds of a fern leaf. I see beauty everywhere! We live in such a beautiful world.

Graeme
 
But I find sunflowers and waterfalls and ferns beautiful too. And I'm sure they were always considered as beautiful as now; even before Fermat and theorems and the likes. But I see the math as being apart from the beauty, at least when it comes down to trying to define beauty with an eye toward recreating it.
Perhaps an anology would help illustrate (my feelings):
The credits have just rolled on an unambiguously powerful movie, there are tears in your eyes. An epiphany has occurred and you'll leave the theatre a slightly different person. And as you sit there weighing the reasons for the movie's impact, you dig deeper and deeper, passing beyond story and acting and writing and music, even passing through the locatiion scouts and foley until you hit an organism: the RED team, the creators of the camera that just made the movie. And then you begin to single out parts of that organism, and you come up with a couple of names: Jim and Graeme, and you feel compelled to write a postcard to them, thanking them for your experience. Well, you might not be wrong altogether, but...
 
I think through my studies of math, I have a different perspective that other people. I see the beauty in the thing itself, and that is made more beautiful when I understand "how" or "why" it's made the way it is. It's additive.

Graeme
 
Knowing an object's makeup must add to the experience, indeed.
I've studied the natural scene as one might study cryptography; looking at things for what they might also mean.
All the knowledge of how something is put together doesn't help us express it in terms of beauty, and art. It might provide the information required to write a poem about an Event Horizon, but it won't provide for our lack of sensitivity anymore than it'll help us position a camera as effectively as Hitchcock.
You, like Bertrand Russell, may see things in all their complexities and understand them on a level far greater than I; but to express these things in the language of art, mathematicians are as much at a disadvantage as most. And that is what I'm trying to get my head around with regards to this thread's query about why things strike us as beautiful. I hope I'm not beating this to death.
 
Something I should also make clear with regards to my claim "... there is no math in beauty": even though there is math in the object ie. the sunflower; the object is not the beauty. They are not one in the same. Objects are not inherently beautiful, but they inherently include math. Does math's nature differ when describing an ebola virus as opposed to a rose? Does math vacillate in its praise of matter?
Beauty is an idea; math a constant. Take away the human element and the beauty evaporates, even though the math persists. And the idea of beauty is generally skewed toward all that is conducive to the survival of our species: water, sunsets, clean air, big breasts, and the belief that the planet has taken a liking to us.
 
Bill Anderson said:
Objects are not inherently beautiful, but they inherently include math. Does math's nature differ when describing an ebola virus as opposed to a rose? Does math vacillate in its praise of matter?
Beauty is an idea; math a constant.
Click to expand...

I don't think that beauty has to quantified always in terms of math. There are cultural interpretations here that are perhaps more important.

Math is limited, it is many times internally self-incomplete (Google Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem,) sometimes inconsistent with our notion of physics (Google Banach-Tarski theorem).

Rationality is not always helpful IMHO. Beauty can't be quantified!
 
With every deeper insight through science...biology, physics, astronomy, math, psychology...one gets greater admiration for miracle of creation around us.

All that had to align to create life...
All that had to align to create intelligence...

All that had to align for me to be able to type messages on one slim glowing silver plate in my lap,
sending my thoughts through USB HSDPA thingy on the other side of the planet...

Understanding everything is not essential for expression.
In the moment of expression knowledge should be subconscious.
You focus on what you want to create, not the laws, techniques or tools.
Otherwise you can't clearly hear what you need to hear and bring out what you're supposed to...

But...if nothing else - knowledge makes you appreciate things more.
Curiosity itself is an important characteristic.

Understanding also helps your work evolve, because you define your current level and can define keys for the next one.
If that is your goal.

I perceive it this way. Some don't.
Difference in perspective is essential. One of the elements which makes every human creation unique.
 
Joofa and Omen. I don't think you've read the thread carefully, at least not as far as understanding my position is concerned.
 
"I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was."

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

For me, the above statement sets up an important priority. It explains an intuitive feeling I have always had but never saw put in words before. I have been drawn to film and photography all my life, I find beauty in stuff that resonates, or rather, reverberates deep inside bouncing of distant echoes of memories, fantasies and desires.

A while back I got into a long time of thinking about positive and negative emotional reactions from images. I decided to try to capture an image totally without any emotional impact. Looking for the perfect "zero" image. The image that is right in between yin and yang, an unemotional image. Needless to say, it is impossible, but it was a fun experiment.

As for beauty in film, it seems impossible to divorce it from the structure of the story. As an example: In "the lives of others" a superbly constructed script, there is this scene at the very end of the film where a man is in a bookstore, he reads a line of text and it alters the entire perception of all the images that came before, what was once a dreary image, now is a beautifully remembered image. This is masterful filmmaking.
 
Bill Anderson said:
Good luck with your books on Philosophy, semiotics and math equations y'all.
There might be beauty in math, but there's no math in beauty. At least none worth the trouble of averting ones attention from the beauty itself. Bertrand Russell said it well, almost poetically, but Bertrand was no Poet, or painter, or musician, or filmmaker; he was something else.
And notice how Mr. Russell qualifies his statement with "Mathematics, rightly viewed..." What is, "rightly viewed"?
Which pretty much brings us back to the original question of this thread.

"Is that perfume from a dress, that makes me so digress" wrote (more or less) TS Elliot. Breaking the perfume down to its chemical constituents might be fun for some - even a passionate endeavor for the likes of Primo Levy; see his novel -The Periodic Tables - for a beautiful and artistic account of bridging the gulf between chemistry and the human condition. However, as far as this thread goes, the important thing about the novel is that Levi used no math in its message, he, like Elliot, digressed. He had to rely on the essence of math- math without the numbers.
And Carl Dreyer relied on the essence of the human spirit when he showed Joan of Arc's hair- brutally shorn off- being swept into a garbage basket, emphasizing and beautifully abstracting Joan's (brief) shunning of her religious ideals.
Put away your calculators lads, there ain't no cure for love (:
Click to expand...

There's the logical and the illogical part to all that. Noone is denying the illogical or we can say beyond-logical part of things.

And actually there's a lot of math in poetry, d'ya know? Hexameters and stuff. But it isn't all math, alright.
 
All I can say is that sometimes when shooting everything gets into balance. The lighting is perfect, the actors are perfect, you adjust perfectly to the circumstances and everything is fine... at this moment you can't go wrong, as long as you remain a servant of beauty and truth.
You started off with hard work, study, disappointments, pleasure and growth. And so things continue.
I think it's something to be very humble about. We all have a great job!
 
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." --Albert Einstein
 
In reference to Shawn's original post, I would add: With all due respect to all my brilliant colleagues, I regard math as a language of sorts.

The aesthetic experience that we find pleasing when viewing a particular shot or sequence I believe transcends our linguistic limitations. I think it awakens the part of our brain that dreams. Cinema could be described as a shared dream. When we experience imagery that awakens that part of the mind that is dormant while we're conscious, I believe it triggers an emotional response. I think the feeling Shawn describes, IMHO, is the only time when our conscious mind and our unconscious mind achieve a shared moment of equilibrium. When the dream crosses the transom of reality and for the briefest of moments, we can feel something that could be described as divine.
 
Jeff Coatney said:
In reference to Shawn's original post, I would add: With all due respect to all my brilliant colleagues, I regard math as a language of sorts.

The aesthetic experience that we find pleasing when viewing a particular shot or sequence I believe transcends our linguistic limitations. I think it awakens the part of our brain that dreams. Cinema could be described as a shared dream. When we experience imagery that awakens that part of the mind that is dormant while we're conscious, I believe it triggers an emotional response. I think the feeling Shawn describes, IMHO, is the only time when our conscious mind and our unconscious mind achieve a shared moment of equilibrium. When the dream crosses the transom of reality and for the briefest of moments, we can feel something that could be described as divine.
Click to expand...

Me Love this one
 
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