William Hogarth / Disinformation - “The Analysis of Beauty” installation

“The Analysis of Beauty” is a book, self-published by the artist William Hogarth in 1753, in which Hogarth put forward his ideas about the aesthetics and symbolism of the sinusoidal, s-shaped, waving, snake-like, and (as Hogarth put it) “Serpentine Line”. Serpentine Lines are produced in “The Analysis of Beauty” tribute installation - by art project Disinformation - in the form of musical sine-waves, created using audio frequency outputs from laboratory oscillators, which are displayed on the screen of a laboratory oscilloscope. These signals manifest as a slowly rotating rope-like pattern of phosphorescent green lines, (subjectively but strongly) reminiscent of DNA. After watching the pattern for a little while, it’s easy to persuade these lines to fuse into a what appears to be a solid object, and, in practical terms, the best challenge viewers can set themselves is to decide which direction that object appears to be rotating in? Sometimes the form appears to be flat, sometimes three-dimensional. So