Repeating Circles, Changing Stars: Learning from the Medieval Art of Visual Computation

Abstract

Good designs , very generally speaking, have a repetitive quality. Goodness in repetition has little to do with the viewer’s comfort in receiving the expected. Rather, we appreciate repetition because it allows us to recognize—or even to think that we wondrously discover—the new and the different amidst similarities. Whereas repetition implies consistent relations of similar parts, differences challenge these relations and stimulate our interpretive capacity towards recognizing multiple, unique but still meaningful, wholes. Dialogues that arise from repetition and variation characterize a good design . The aim below is to draw attention to a centuries old visual design with a repetitive quality that resonates with computational iteration while finds its character in variations that result from seeking and seeing different relations.