Painting with light and sensors

When I was a kid, I used to draw all the time; I had a sketchbook with me pretty much everywhere I went. I took some art classes and learned a thing or two about composition. There are some general rules that make or break good compositions: the rule of thirds, foreground and background focusing, framing, so on and so forth.

Even the non-artistic among us can pick out a good composition. It draws the eye, it calls the attention, it makes you look twice.

A favorite recent read of mine was The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. In it he argues that it is easy to be misled by the empircist view that, since it is difficult to obtain empirical knowledge of art, there is no objective beauty. In fact, he roundly rejects the empiricist view on grounds of it purporting that we somehow derive knowledge from observation, when in fact all observation is theory-laden at its foundation (a conversation for another day, though). Composition, and broader yet, beauty, are reliably found in some layouts over others, or some objects over others. He goes on to connect the elegance and deep truths of philosophy and science to aesthetics, but I'd like to stick to aesthetics.

Skipping over some of the finer points of Deutsch's argument, the implications of an objectivity to beauty are quite wonderful to me. It means that it might be formulaic, or algorithmic; it can be crunched out through recipe and process. It means you can distill it from disparate elements. It means you can reliably iterate and improvement has a direction. It means there is a transcendent "language" to art and less subjective than the pop culture arguments might

Art is as rule-bound and elegant as the material world; of it and enveloped by it.

I don't know about you, but I find that absolutely enthralling.