Picture Envy #20 – Creative Matrices

I'm sitting at my desk, sick with the flu, listening to the soundtrack to A Beautiful Mind. James Horner riffing on John Nash, the New Jersey mathematician that won the Nobel Prize for his work on game theory while battling schizophrenia.

I like math. It's my dirty little secret, like I'm the music lover afraid to admit I admire the sound of steel guitars and Nashville twang. Still, symmetry and iterative patterns please me, and that means that I need to like math. And, like those that hide their love for smoking, there's only so long that I can hide the smell of my love for math.

Abstractions and structural details, the curlicues and gewgaws of light and form, are the focus of this week's picture envy. 

Whateverland, 20 Degrees (Dec. 16, 2004).

Tangents and parabolas are probably the most obvious and yet most lovely of repeating, organic curves out there. <em>20 Degrees</em> represents a series of intersecting tangents running along a curved plane. Part of Whateverland, Archie Florcruz' always-interesting website.

Low Resolution, Got Lost (Dec. 20, 2004).

Less a representation of geometric form than of the integral of a Riemann's sum, Got Lost reminds me of that stage of night when I've enjoyed a good fifties era bar a bit too much. It's that drink after the last one you should have had.

 Photojunkie, The Biosphere (Dec. 20, 2004).

This one's obvious: Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, defined in technical language as the "triangulation of a Platonic solid or other polyhedron to produce a close approximation to a sphere," which is technically accurate yet irritatingly opaque. I remember coming to Montreal, as a kid, and visiting the botanical gardens, which were on display near the Biosphere. I don't remember much about the Biosphere. It was there. I remember seeing exhibits on flora from Japan and the American Southwest – delicate ferns, bonsais and broadsword thrusts of yucca – and then wandering around the city before having roasted lamb in a small, too dark Greek restaurant.  A memory that is technically accurate yet irritatingly opaque.   

Comments

[teahouseblossom]

I was a fan of James Horner before he did Titanic and everyone became a fan of James Horner.

I have a collection of his soundtracks. I haven't heard any of his recent stuff, cuz it seems to have gotten repetitive. But check out Glory and Searching for Bobby Fischer, if you're looking for more of his stuff.

[TPB, Esq.]

Glory is an amazing soundtrack. I haven't heard much other than
Glory, Beautiful Mind, and Apollo 13, largely because I hated
Titanic. I'm a huge fan of Thomas Newman, who is also a great
soundtrack composer (American Beauty, Shawshank Redemption, and
Road to Perdition, e.g.).