Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.
There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.
Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.
I love the idea that if you build something with enough depth and texture, you can watch it again and again and see new things every time, and that's very important.
No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And the sun has spots.
