Aesthetics

Edward Burke states that 'Beautiful' is not just a thing that pleases the eye it can be defined by the notion of 'love.'

Beautiful uses gradual variation to create a love or admiration style of feeling.

The feeling o f beauty occurs when all our senses agree, in contrast it seems the sublime is felt when our senses are confused or out of balance.

Beautiful can most of the time be explained by numbers, for example the classical artists tool, 'the golden mean' or 'rule of thirds' as well as the Fibonacci sequence of number in nature.

You can argue though that numbers are never seen as exciting, it is maybe also due to the context in which they are used.

Proportion is a stimulus for beauty, the act of knowing when enough is enough, is the artists most important tool.

Sometimes an objects slight difference is a greater effect than its normal attributes could ever be. This in some senses can stem to being 'sublime.' A much darker and stronger emotion.

Beautiful is often given to something that is delicate, maybe small and petite. While the sublime is used to emphasise huge size and vastness.

Burke states all beautiful things due to gradual variation must be 'smooth' but what about a mountainous landscape? Does perspective or distance have a part in our determination.

Beauty is also described as being momentary, short lived and brittle.

Beautiful colours are calm pastel shades and the eye is seen as truly beautiful as it allows a glimpse into a person mind.

Where as beautiful is only seen as a positive experience the notion of 'sublime' can be sought both in the positive and negative scenarios.

Burke states the sublime is more often negative feelings that cause fear and dread, as this is a much stronger emotion that happiness.

This results in the core source of sublime being 'terror' and often it is used when describing biblical events.

Today's definition of 'beauty' is a strong social quality, as it is controlled externally by the media.

Sublime is caused by something being intense, this may be light and darkness. The terror can often be raised dramatically the audience is hit with both light an dark at random times, this causes obscurities. The same can be said about sounds.

Sublime is caused when the environment the audience is in is vast but detailed just enough to over stimulate the eye retina and block other thoughts.

Perspective can cause the notion of something being sublime. Colour can also cause this entrancing depth.

Sublime is how we try to rationalise events that we simply cannot explain. Before science, many religious events were described using real world adjectives to create the feeling of the sublime.

Burke states that this core terror is programmed into all of us, and because of this is classed as 'taste.'

Both the beautiful and the sublime must to take effect, stimulate the soul and senses before rational thinking can be engaged.

Beauty creates love and the sublime creates fear, this doesn't make them the same but instead of equal importance.

Beauty relaxes the viewer while the sublime shocks and over stimulates the audience into submission.

Both images and words can cause the effects of beauty as it is often the connotations of an object, the possibilities that have the greater effect.

In conclusion Burke states that the sublime stimulates the mind while the beautiful stimulates the soul.

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An example of beauty with a purpose is Harry Beck's London Underground map.

'Form followed function' it was a simple aesthetic design with a purpose.

Actual scale proportion in a sense was ignored in favour of easy understanding. I was a fusion of 'cubism' and science, it was modularised information design.

Interestingly aesthetic beauty was not the key aim although in the end is it classed as art.

The London underground map goes to show that sometimes subconscious acts can some times have greater effect than conscious ones. I really asks the question where does true design come from and backs up Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.

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Mau states that graphics can only take you to the brink of beautiful, images are the key source of terror and the sublime.

Mau also says that all areas of today's design is influenced by the 'Global Image Economy' or the GIE.

This GIE has crammed the world we live in and over stimulates all of us. He uses to describe all classes of design and states that this is the barrier that you design must wrestle with and stand out from.

The 'inventory' makes up the GIE and in turn creates a foreground and background of the world we live in.

It is also important to note that aesthetic pleasing isn't always the best solution for a piece of work. 'Television verite' of reality TV can have all the drama of a feature film but doesn't need to by as polished and finished.

Mau states that music creates notions of love (beauty) and images create notions of the terror (sublime).

A key example of 'taste' throughout time is the USA's 'Betty Crocker,' The meaning of the image throughout time has stayed the same, but had various incarnations to keep it up to date with the fashionable ideals of how the desired meaning is being shown within society.

Thanks to today's over production of 'signals,' Influential design today takes things to the extreme, this could be 'Apple's' total minimal approach to graphic and product design. Here scale is used to force the audience to strive to recognise the complexity in how the ideas was conceived.

Mau's '100 logos, 1000 colours' project for the NAi shows this extreme. Here the logo was created then twisted and manipulated on every piece of literature. This forced the viewer to savour every interaction with the brand, like the first.

Thanks to digital technologies, 'imaging' is now more common that 'graphics.' We are starting to see this in logos, such as Universal. It seems graphic designers today are more selectors of graphics rather than creators.

This then begs the question that due to ease of access to graphic applications, logos will start looking like each other, due to fact that images can have more connotations than graphics, i.e. more scope.

One way of getting unique logos is to use unique fonts. One way BMD do this to use a process called 'font breeding,' here two parent fonts are morphed together to create various versions in between. Here the speed and quick variation aspect of digital design becomes a great plus. A version is then picked an implemented into the design, as it was with the Walt Disney concert all brand in LA.

Good design integrates and organises information. Brands such as Coca-Cola relies on the repetition of its image to over saturate the GIE and in turn be the first thing people think of when they want a soda drink.

'Tree City' in Toronto is an example of beauty being grown into a city, it isn't preserving the environment, but creating and developing it. It mirrors the development of the London Underground map, as it is very 'diagrammatic.'

Typography is seen as a 'black art,' it contains cognitive to associative meanings. Unlike cognitive, associative meaning evolves with time and fashion. Designers uses these associative meanings to open up channels between the design and viewer, increasing the bandwidth. This only grows with repetition of image and meaning.

Typography's job is to deliver content by changing our attention. Typography in a sense is closely linked to architecture as it can only develop as much as convention and legibility let.

Design is about shaping time and attention, typography and images are used to create an 'ethos.' It concerns the 'Gestalt' or the overall environmental effect. It is the ability we have to instantly recognise logos etc.

Like TV, typography can control the speed in which information travels. Both reader and viewer must be taken in consideration and 'tracks' laid down to make sure the design appeals to both. Type must be used by understanding how it normally laid out, one example of this is the 'orthogonal gird.' Here typography is closely linked to mass production trends.

The grid pattern can be disregarded as avant-garde, 'Free-Form Typographic Poets' did. The text performed its content rather than just displayed it. Here there is two ways of displaying information, the first offers it on a plate and because of this, is the quickest. The second makes the viewer put together the information in their own head, causing the act of thinking.

It is ok to strive for 'perfection' but once it is achieved and reproduced it loses its uniqueness and in turn its character.

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William J. Mitchell states the city as an interactive environment cannot exist as it it has for centuries. The digital telecommunications revolution will introduce networked living and change this.

TV screens are based on Giovanni Battista Aleotti's theatre design in the Baroque period. Here audiences were entombed in a room that had 3 normal walls and one rectangular 'virtual wall' where the play was performed. This then means the performing space can run parallel to us but we cannot enter it.

'Dynamic architecture' is the next step in networking with the living world around us. We are already seeing it with urban screens being built, the next step is for the building themselves to contribute information to the environment. It seems the new 'point and click' culture will involve even our physical space. This will be done by 'Anti-Proscenium,' smart walls will not just display information to viewers but immerse them in it, creating a very large bandwidth for the senses to react to. MIT's, Joe Jackson's 'smart paper' is a technology developing this media.

Unlike before then, peripheral vision will be a factor and this will be an indicator on how the audience perceive the information as it is very important to naturally understanding you surroundings.

This 'opening' up of the screen will allow 'smart places' to engage our senses at multiple levels. It will be like going from a 56kb modem to a 10GB one.

This kind of virtual reality is a modern interpretation of he Renaissance's obsession with architectural space and perspective.

Due to the notion that to be comfortable in our surroundings and not be totally submersed in VR, a much realistic idea is 'Hybrid architecture.' Here graphical overlaying of our actual architecture will be used to allow you peripheral vision to stay comfortable in its environment will also engaging all of you senses.

This overlaying of information may give birth to a day when we can stop cluttering up our urban areas with all the GIE and target viewers key desires.

Architecture of the future will no longer play with masses in light but digital in space.

Function will no longer follow form, but code.

With commission free web-sites, it is now the extra bandwidth of information they offer that come into play, the quality.

May organisations operate 'electronic fronts' and 'architectural backs' For example both digital and physical shops show a automated controlled point of sale, but still need human interaction to process the orders.

It is important to finally note that the power of the physical place will always prevail when particular cultural, scenic and climatic attractions are thrived for. Simply, we will sometimes use networks to avoid places, and sometimes we will go places to network!

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Art Nouveau was a period in time where beauty and glorification had to be balanced with technological advances.

David Rokeby is an installation artist that creates work that directly engages the human body or that involves artificial projection systems.

As with Mitchell's 'Asynchronous' theories on communication, Umberto Eco states, 'By means of the sign man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.'

Symbols are instruments that convert raw intelligence into culture.

Symmetry and elegance speak of pride in creation.

An 'Acheulian Hand Axe' from 1.5 million years ago is the first solid example of a shared 'taste,' or style to producing something that works well and efficiently.

Glaser also states that beauty is when, 'The imaginative and the functional fuse and finally become indistinguishable.' Or Mau states its when two objects collide and make a third.

The 'Eye of Horus' uses the Fibonacci series to be drawn correctly in proportion.

'Hue' comes from the old English term for 'beauty.' Tone is then the scale of the hue in terms of light and dark. Tints and shades are variations of tone, and intensity is the purity of the hue.

'Britannia' means the painted ones. Also is important to remember that colours are the product of our mind and not reality.

For an investigation into colours role in art, Amedee Ozenfant decided to see how much a particular 'hue' occurs in various mediums.

In regard to smart architecture one area to look at is 'volume carving.' Here objects can be recorded from various angles then created in 3D on the computer. It is only a matter of time before we can then output the object into a 3D space and create an hologram.

A design example of gradual variation in practice is the 'biezer curve' from Pierr Biezer. These curves are used more and more in computer graphics to create a notion of natural or organic aesthetic projection.

Another curve is the 'Catmu-Rom' spline implementation that made Pixar successful in creating natural animation for the cinema screen.

Mitchell also sates that we must use 'dynamic architecture' to create media that reacts to the weather and seasons, so that the advertising doesn't have to be so direct. He ways media should compliment the architecture it covers, not disguise it.

We must be careful not to use screens in architecture to just radiate tackless, meaningless information. They must become a part of the landscape and only show themselves when needed. It poses the question 'Can the pixel replace the rivet and bolt?'

Michelangelo gave St. Peters the 'de Lehire" dome. To him the most beautiful arc, it is the curve of greatest resistance. It begs the question that sometimes beauty maybe just personal preference?..

Robin Collyer is a photographer that produces photographs that have all the advertising and marketing rubbed out. These landscapes with the absence of graphics become very disorientating and knock you off balance. There is a real ghost town feel about his retouched photos. It seems that in today's world where we just add information upon information, the absence of it grabs your attention more than its presence. The images look very clinical and make the viewer feel lost and alienated. In a sense they create a notion of the end of the world and fear in the audience. maybe a 'sublime' style emotion.

Fletcher states that 'Imaging is visualising as language is to thinking.'

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Visual representation of information allows un-linear learners to understand complex accumulations of results or teachings. Our brains regard 'sight' as the most sensitive sense. This means a large chunk of the brain regarding senses are reserved for what we see. This means that when reading for example, although you are reading words, the 'bandwidth' of information is very narrow as all you are interpreting is shapes. When visually represented the 'bandwidth' widens as colour, scale and perspective come into play.

Spatial and visual VAK learning is the creation of images, pictorial imagination expression, understanding of the relationships between images and meanings, and between space and time, to communicate information.

Typical users of this intelligence learning style are artists, designers, architects, ton-planners, inventors, engineers, beauty consultants etc. The jobs where this can be useful is when painting a pictures, designing a dress, creating a co-orporate logo of simply packing the boot of a car, Tetris style!!! These kind of people like to learn using pictures, shapes, images and 3D space.

It is important to note that students learn by 30% of what they see and 90% of what they say and do. More often than not visual learners benefit from using 'Mind Maps' to link information.