In his book The Beginning of Infinity, famed quantum physicist David Deutsch uses the existence of flowers and our propensity to find them beautiful as an argument for “objective beauty.” Flowers evolved to be attractive to bees, not humans, and yet there is no human civilization on earth that has not glorified flowers as a symbol of beauty.
Deutsch argues that objective beauty exists, and that flowers employ objective beauty, via their graded curves symmetry with subtle variations and color harmonies. Flowers are beautiful because the union of symmetry and color is difficult to achieve, and it is guided by complex internal logic mechanism making this achievement possible. Deutsch says that using the same methods for finding objective truth — conjecture — that we can discover objective beauty.
Inspired by this concept, in Objective Beauty, we embark our own form of conjecture, utilizing Deutch’s alleged ‘objective beauty’ in the forms of flowers and plant-life, and transposing their essence into mediums more consistent with the commercialization of a very different type of beauty.
In this series for Numero Netherlands, we center around a singular question: if we understand and acknowledge that objective beauty exists in nature, is it possible for us as humans to harness the ability to create it as well?
