Let me allow Gerard Thomas to introduce himself first, as per his website’s about me section:

Through my passions and interests I have managed to do a lot of things in the field of design – from designing motorcycles (Ducati Motorcycles), mountain bikes for Mountaincycle, apparel, and experiential installations for the likes of Sony, Samsung, Telstra, Optus and The NZ Navy, to doing illustrations for magazines. I’m that person HR type people can’t cope with.

Unashamedly drawn to conceptual ideas and design, I create artworks in graphite, three dimensions and continue to develop my own, increasingly abstract, corner of the science fiction universe called ‘Sub Orbital Machine’.

The conceptual ideas part intrigued me. Indeed, take a look at these:

https://iamgerardthomas.com/product/gulf-oil-gt40/

https://iamgerardthomas.com/product/lancia-stratos-hf/

https://iamgerardthomas.com/product/mini-cooper-s-works-rally/

I would link the images directly, but it looks like Mr Thomas has made the effort to replace the link with https://iamgerardthomas.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/i-am-gerard-thomas-and-fuck-off-1.png, so I’ve taken the hint and decided to link to his page instead. I could of course copy the images here to discuss them but at that point I’m pretty sure I’m well past good internet citizen behavior.

Alright, yes back to conceptuals! If you take a moment to appreciate the images above, despite missing a great deal of detail, the cars they represent are instantly recognizeable to a large swath of people, including me. That’s impressive, isn’t it?

It’s reminiscent to me of this Picasson work where he deconstructs a bull down to a few basic lines:

This did get me thinking of whether we can apply a similar technique to a program or piece of software. I could come up with some examples of hardware devices, or corporate branded operating systems, but that just showed me that it’s a visual concept that we abstract down to a simpler visual concept. Obviously, I cannot abstract Bethoven’s 5th down to a series of black lines on white paper… can I? Ideas are uniquely expressed in mediums comes to mind.

In that case, code is text. So I should be able to abstract text down to other text, right?