Since the moment man began to wonder about what is Beauty and how is it possible to reach it, his research inevitably ended up using an ‘instrument’ which seems to have very little to do with the idea of beauty in itself. : mathematics.
This is a subject that, especially in art, is often not widely appreciated, but is treated almost as if it were a taboo or something opposite to artistic expression. Yet in the millennial search for beauty by man, mathematics seems to be a fundamental presence.
Already in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition beauty was seen as a visible sign of universal, invisible, eternal and immutable laws that are the generative cause of the entire phenomenal cosmos.
This implies an idea of an exhisting absolute beauty which manifests itself to us in certain cases. The human search has been precisely dedicated to discovering the variables that came into the game in those specific cases, so that they could be reproduced at will in order to regain something that is as close as possible to that idea of beauty.
In order, to be able to create the conditions for this “beauty” to manifest itself independently and being as less as influenced by our actions and our judgment, I relied on the method that more than any other seems to respect this condition: the CASE.
In the history of art there are numerous artists and movements that have found in ‘CASE ‘ a way of expression; starting for example from Dadaism in the early 1900s to the experiences of Aleatory music or Stochastic painting in the 1960s, and beyond.
In all these experiences the case has always been that fundamental component that has allowed the artist to reach that expressive abstinence that is necessary in order not to influence the whole work.
Hence in this work, the images from which we start are random distributions of rectangles of dimensions, colors and positions that are also random. It is from these images that we expect that visual stimulus of a certain aesthetic quality that is the input for a multi-sensory analysis.
The idea is to try to transform the visual stimuli generated automatically by a computer, into corresponding auditory, olfactory, tactile and gustatory stimuli based on certain relationships that derive from mathematical analysis, from accredited theories or from studies of eminent figures in scientific, artistic and social fields, as well as purely aesthetic considerations.
The attempt therefore is to arrive at a pseudo-sinesthetic perception, i.e. a perception that involves at the same time several possible senses.
So if the case confronts us with a stimulus of a certain aesthetic value from the visual point of view, the intent is to verify whether the corresponding stimuli aimed at the other senses also have a corresponding aesthetic value.
We identify in the concept of randomness the only way to create those conditions in which a possible manifestation of that cosmic harmony is as objective as possible and independent of external influences.
For this purpose, with the help of a software ,a simple program was conceived to randomly generate images.
The generation of images has been structured according to a specific procedure, here below summarily expained:
in the program, first of all, by analogy with the classical framework of a painting, a space is identified. It has been chosen having a square form. Ideally is a square window opened on a world where the action takes place.
Hence the whole action takes place in a space in which the square window gives us a partial view (framing).
At the base of the program there are two objects. A first object is called ‘square’ while the other is called ‘word’.
What is meant with ‘object’ is an entity having certain properties and certain methods.
Initialising randomly ( according to some mathemathic methods ) the properties of these objects, the computer creates the image into the virtual world, of which we have a ( framed) partial view.
So basically the computer choses randomly the color of the squares, changing randomly ( and indipendently) the two dimensions, the position, the angle of rotation and the transparency of the colour. Basically the same thing happens for the object named ‘word’. The only difference is that the words chosen for this objects are chosen randonly from the words of a poem, considering poetry as a stimulus for an extra human sense which is directly connected with our emotions.
For the three figures shown here – according to certain studies, analogies, literature, etc., as explained above – the sound compositions, the perfumes and the associated bas-reliefs have been realised, in order to create a pseudo-synaesthetic experience of the ‘Opera.
This is the attempt … the rest is just statistics