Broken Symmetry

Neuroaesthetics

From Jonah Lerner at The Frontal Cortex:

Mark Rothko painting might be nothing but perplexed neurons in the V4 area of the visual cortex, or abstract art might be nothing but the peak shift effect. That, I think, is reckless hyperbole. The beauty of art is that it needs to be explained at multiple levels, from the action potential of retinal photoreceptors to the cultural shifts of 19th century France. Each of these descriptions is valid and important and essential. There is no privileged kind of discourse when it comes to understanding why we stare at Pollock's colorful drips of paint, or Cezanne's mostly empty watercolors. What intrigues me about neuroaesthetics is that it's another (and mostly novel) way to understand art.* But that doesn't mean it's the only way.

The senstivity of a set of symbolic rules and procedures to the context in which they are communicated could be described as a continuum from thin to thick -- i.e., from mathematical equations that are contextually invariant to English, for example, which can express multiple nontrivial messages to different (or even the same) audience simultaneously. There is a tradeoff between economy of information and adaptability with context.

Lee Bontecou at the Moderna Museet

If you're in Stockholm this summer, be sure to check it out:

da Vinci and Synchronized Flow

On Tuesday, the misses and I took Sarah to the da Vinci exhibit at the Tech Museum in nearby downtown San Jose. It was a worthwhile trip, including a variety of scale models of mechanical inventions from the era, some copies of his notebooks, and a couple of his paintings. The effect of seeing these in a dark room with proper lighting, isolated from any other paintings, is quite different from seeing them in a hot, crowded, and somewhat visually jumbled surrounding at the Uffizi. On the other hand, I wish they'd included more biographical information about da Vinci in the text. For example, I had to explain to Joann his habit of writing in mirror image, which neither she nor I found explained anywhere in the gallery.

One image that caught my eye (because of its relevance to synchronized flow theory) was this sketch of workers coordinating their labor. I took the photo with an iPhone and no flash. da Vinci commented that coordinating activities multiplied force. He seems really to have thought of individuals and groups as machines made of meat.

The Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship

Via Peter Klein at the Organizations and Markets blog, I find this quote from Evan Osborne:

What is seldom appreciated is that successfully reconciling the interests of and coordinating scientists, financiers, doctors, patients and other constituencies is a complex and subtle human achievement.  It is similar to other acts of creation and coordination that we admire as the highest forms of such achievement – acts such as the writing or performance of great music and the creation of great paintings.  The highest praise for such works of art is that they are beautiful, and commerce too should be seen not in purely utilitarian terms but also as an act of human creativity and expression.

Worth checking out here.