Okay, I know my artistic friends will roll their collective eyes on my interpretation of this art piece. I'll risk it — I know for certain none of my former software engineer colleagues will read this. So here goes…
Life on the Bus…where to start. A bus is this thing a software engineer (my former life) might design into a user interface (the visual part of, say, an iPhone app.) When something happens on the interface, an event pops onto the bus — depicted here as dark brown right-angled lines (in Aegean Antique Brown marble) as they trace their way across a void. The brightly colored rectangles are the listeners — yet another mental construct we invent to listen to the bus (basically they are just eves droppers), waiting for the events for which they've been instructed to listen. They pluck the event off the bus, and then do what needs to be done. Collectively, these constructs govern how the user interface behaves.
I found myself drawing this when I was planning this mosaic, even though none of what I was drawing exists in any physical sense. This depiction of the world existed in my (and my colleagues) minds. My human brain just needed a way to visualize these imaginary objects, the things software engineers create that are invisible to everyone — including ourselves.
So I fashioned this mosaic as an homage to that part of my life where these imaginary beasts I'd imagined, created, perfected, and diagnosed. They were beings who had behaviors, which gave them a reality, at least within the bounds of our minds.
Perhaps behind some iPhone app, lurking beneath a browser page, lives (ha!) a bus. As Nemo inhabited a Matrix. Here is my bus. The fifth and final hexagonal stepping stone for our thyme garden.