This is my eighth article pertaining to the design field and its relationship with mathematics. Design in essence cannot be accomplished without specific degrees of control, and almost always has a definitive point to make. How well the ‘point’ can be made is attributed to how well the design was carried out. This cannot be said about all art-forms. Art can be about anything or nothing at all, which makes art primary, and design secondary. In this respect design can be seen as separate from other art forms, because the designer has a precise goal. In order to understand any design language at its core, the viewer must understand visual acoustics on multiple levels. The level I have chosen to start with is numbers. I will show their relationships with each other through geometric and proportional means, and describe how numbers can be ‘seen’ and ‘produced’ through artistic expression. Design language cannot be truly understood without awareness of this knowledge. Not only is this the groundwork for every art form, but it is also the chosen architectural language of the natural world.

Last article we discussed the number 7 and how it pertains to desire and past experience. The main ideas that came along could not be engaged due to their need to be seen as a group (the seven-fold illusion of a rainbow is such that it cannot be experienced without first dividing of its colors and then grouping them back together as one). This deliberate first act of division upon the whole is metaphorically the primary function that gets carried along with the 7. Division of the whole could be carried on forever without the slightest need to return to its original whole. The fragments created in this manner appear to us as a pool of jigsaw-puzzle pieces, with no apparent order to them at all. An impulse to return the puzzle to its wholeness arises. Here then is the introduction to our number 8.

The pieces of our puzzle are many and seem to have been scattered unto the edges of infinity. To re-assemble them (based on what we have gathered from our experience through the 7) we will see fit to arm ourselves with the ‘eight limbs of the yogi’. Our magician from the last article pertains to this so-called ‘yogi’, whose partnership with the forces of nature tickled our senses. He reveals himself now to be but an enlightened scientist. We have clear conceptions of this aspect throughout history including the Thoth of the Egyptians, the Hermes of the Greeks, and Mercury of the Romans (See Thoth, Hermes, and Mercury Image). These supposed individuals in their time served as wise and rational men who delved deeply into the art and science of ‘magic’. Their apparent powers were seen to encompass both the passive and active aspects of the elements. These elements were often given rudimentary titles such as Earth, Fire, Air, and Water which, if you are counting both passive and negative, equal 8 in total. Eastern teachings of this kind usually refer to the 8 chakra systems of the human energy- field, whose spectrum is not unlike that of the rainbow. Yet how can this be? The rainbow is described as having a seven-fold structure. To explain this in a musical sense we can refer ourselves to the piano (See Repeating Octaves on a Piano Image). The seven repeating notes (white keys) of the piano are C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Going a single step further means repeating the C note upon a higher tonal ‘octave’. This higher repetition of the original sounds much the same, yet it is not. Metaphorically it has been re-born to start the cycle anew.