Many things trigger my curiosity.
Once they do, those that will survive my overloaded attention span and become a study, a project, or whichever deep-dive activities that grow out of them, have a certain quality, which can be described with a well known example: It's the same attractive quality that some toys, devices, or some other objects have before a toddler decides to take them apart. These objects radiate such a powerful promise of precious and smart inner stuff at work, that the little guy just can't resist to take them apart, find the magic inside, and deal with the consequences later.
In the extreme, that clockwork thing can be totally and heavily abstract, like a philosophical book. The book may be as dry as old bones, treading slowly, building scientific order in tiny dry incremental steps, but I read, I persevere, I read, waiting for the underlying beauty to suddenly show itself, as long as there's hope. That too was just an example. The beauty is almost everywhere.
My personal holy grails are those subjects that, once digested, push a stronger button. These are the subjects that put me on a call to build, or create. There's nothing holy here, really. It can be re-building an old bicycle, or writing a short story, or crafting a very clear educational slide in a presentation. In all of these, I put together stuff out of elements, and something new is born. I am strongly driven to make it inherently beautiful to me, and sometimes, hopefully not too rarely, other people see a beauty too.
Now, there's a range of words that go with such activities. Some activities fall under the umbrella-term of Art. Other fall within the huge variety of craft work. The luckiest of all are people that see and create the beauty in whatever everyday work they do*.
Which brings me to the point of this actually-personal introduction. Lucky me, I enjoy most of the things I do. Conveniently, this time there's already a known category for my current deep-dive, referred to as Generative Art. Let that be the opening of my next post, and the focus of this site, for the foreseeable future.
PS: The dry term "underlying form" is given proper respect in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The name of the book is a beautiful hint about its content.
*Food for thought: How should we categorize what people, who create obvious or hidden beauty in their everyday non-artistic work, do?! Is this actually Art? Otherwise, how should the general magic of putting things together beautifully, be called?