Engineered Aesthetics

The aesthetic appeal of a person or image is characterized by concern with things like symmetry, proportion, and color–but how much of what we’re seeing is real. “People always look better in pictures” is a common idea when you meet someone whom you’ve only seen in pictures. When we alter an image we highlight and enhance those aspects that will make the image more appealing to look at. Doctoring the lighting in an image does not mean the image is unauthentic; nevertheless, we do have the ability to create images that do not occur in the natural world. At time these creations can appear as crude imitations of what we may see in the world, but other times they can be remarkable visualizations of someone’s imagination. The image above has taken two radically different animals and combined them in a way that we still see distinguishing features from both creatures, but they logically appear as one creature. You may never see a horse with a beak, but it’s remarkable to think we can create the image of what one might look like.