Wonk Alert: Golden Ratio (proportion) in the News

[CHR]

From The Guardian:
Why golden ratio pleases the eye: US academic says he knows art secret

The Golden Ratio (Wikipedia explanation) has long been discussed with respect to creating visually pleasing proportions in art and design work.

From the article:

Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, the human eye is capable of interpreting an image featuring the golden ratio faster than any other.

The article goes on theorize the 'whys'.

Anybody else fascinated with the crossroads of mathematics, aesthetics and innate human perception? I love this stuff.

 

[Rhonda]

oh doh!! We learned this from Ann Jordan in our Maine Masters Class...
I love the theory and look for the meaning in most things I find wonderful ! It is very very interesting..... thanks for the link!

 

[Carol Bice]

Thanks for this link Cathy. I have long been interested in the Golden Mein.

In my opinion, the designers that see this naturally are the real artists. If they have trouble seeing this, they may have a hard time creating pleasing designs.

After I started studying this, I went back and applied it to some of my past work. I found that pretty much all of it was the right measurments for the Golden Mein because it came so naturally to me.

Other thoughts?

 

[Rhonda]

Thanks for this link Cathy. I have long been interested in the Golden Mein.

In my opinion, the designers that see this naturally are the real artists. If they have trouble seeing this, they may have a hard time creating pleasing designs.

After I started studying this, I went back and applied it to some of my past work. I found that pretty much all of it was the right measurments for the Golden Mein because it came so naturally to me.

Other thoughts?

ditto on that Carol. It was quite amazing to me to find that out in my masters classes.. and it does open your eyes, especially searching in Nature and more...

 

[goldfish]

Anybody else fascinated with the crossroads of mathematics, aesthetics and innate human perception? I love this stuff.

Absolutely. Numbers are beautiful. I think Golden ratio is part of mathematical fractals, i.e., infinite series of shapes whose parts resembles the whole. Leather leaf has a shape of fractal, so is a tree.

I remember an article published in Nature some time ago in which the author analyzed the placement of rocks in a famous rock-garden in Ryoanji temple Japan.

Placement of these rosks in the garden might look "random" to untrained eyes, but the authors found it is highly structured.

Read the summary in Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryōan-ji

... Using this model, they show that the empty space of the garden is implicitly structured, and is aligned with the temple's architecture. According to the researchers, one critical axis of symmetry passes close to the centre of the main hall, which is the traditionally preferred viewing point. In essence, viewing the placement of the stones from a sightline along this point brings a shape from nature (a dichotomously branched tree with a mean branch length decreasing monotonically from the trunk to the tertiary level) in relief.

The researchers propose that the implicit structure of the garden is designed to appeal to the viewers unconscious visual sensitivity to axial-symmetry skeletons of stimulus shapes.

Interesting right? Some shapes, including fractals such as golden ratio, tree shape, coastal line, look pleasing to human brain. I don't know why.

 

[anytimeflowers]

Absolutely. Numbers are beautiful. I think Golden ratio is part of mathematical fractals, i.e., infinite series of shapes whose parts resembles the whole. Leather leaf has a shape of fractal, so is a tree.

I remember an article published in Nature some time ago in which the author analyzed the placement of rocks in a famous rock-garden in Ryoanji temple Japan.

Placement of these rosks in the garden might look "random" to untrained eyes, but the authors found it is highly structured.

Read the summary in Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryōan-ji



Interesting right? Some shapes, including fractals such as golden ratio, tree shape, coastal line, look pleasing to human brain. I don't know why.

Way cool. I think the newest theory here is that this is the swiftest configuration for the brain to interpret, and so that is where the appeal is and as a result, we see it as beauty.

 

[goldfish]

Way cool. I think the newest theory here is that this is the swiftest configuration for the brain to interpret, and so that is where the appeal is and as a result, we see it as beauty.

OK, everyone here knows I'm sort of 'anti-design' camp when it comes to flower arrangements. So please keep that in mind.

With that said, I'm always curious why some arrangements look prettier than others to my eyes. Funny thing is that I'm not a designer at all.

To me, the fact that even I can find aesthetics in floral designs means that everyone, including non artists like me, actually has innate ability to "see" what's beautiful and what's not.

Ohara school of Japanese Ikebana has fairly strict formula to arrange flowers. In their "Basic A" style arrangement (upright style), for example, the length of the main stem must be 2-2.5 x diameter of the dish and should stand upright with only 5 degree inclination from the right angle. The second stem should be 1-1.5 x diameter of the dish and has to be slanted at 45+/-5 degree toward the front. And so on.

It is interesting to me that, with this seemingly "too strict" formula, the end results would look so "natural" to human eyes. There is some magic in these numbers, ratios of height vs dish diameter, relative angle of each stem, etc, that makes it aesthetically pleasing.

 

[goldfish]

What you are seeing here is the result of some mathematical transformation of the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Japan.

The top is a picture of the actual garden. There are 15 rocks in 5 clusters. They were made 500 years ago, and no one knew why this simple zen garden looks appealing to human eyes.

The bottom pictures are the result of that transformation. The upper part is the garden with rocks, and the lower part is the temple.

Shown by a red rectangle is the traditional viewing room.

What this reveals is a striking pattern that looks exactly like a natural tree! A viewer sitting at red rectangle will be "seeing" a shape of tree in an imaginary mind, even though s/he is not aware of it or can actually visualize it. It happens all in the brain at a sub-conscious level.

Very interesting.

 

[Carol Bice]

Goldfish, I never cease to be amazed at how your mind works.