Generative Art is a Valentine Process
Our friends at Creative Capital this week turned us on to the "master" of the zoetrope, Eric Dyer, who generates magic by taking advantage of the mind's hardwired perception rate. Watch the video.
The trippy virtual reality of entering a zoetrope'd tunnel - what a great idea! - takes the practice to new place, one, thankfully, devoid of bulky headsets and the like. Shining a penlight on its walls is revelatory in much the same manner as the paintings at Lascaux.
It's hard to look away. One doesn't want to.
Similarly, Nervous System, the self described generative art studio, turns algorithms - nature's algorithms - into a variety of interesting and functional objects. I've long been interested in the whys and hows this kind of work, not the least because the resources to produce it are increasingly available to makers, not just to industrial designers on substantial budgets. Hobbyists now can get their hands on additive and subtractive manufacturing in the form of 3D printers and CNC machines, respectively, and turn small work spaces into miniature factories creating useful objects that happen to be beautiful.
Today, the Nervous System blog goes into a bit more depth on the science behind why certain flowers explode into form, and suggests that those principles might be applied differently.
Let’s imagine this applied to architecture.
One might, the post suggests, simply add water to objects so that they deform in certain useful ways. The point is well taken. Why can't the amateur or artist, like the material scientist, hack chemistry to produce volume and shape, or even to build shelter?
We are product of a hacked chemistry. Given 13.8 billion years, hydrogen, warped by gravity, produced complex beings capable of having a good look around, of asking questions about their world. Who's to say that the quantum processes that convert light into plant energy at nearly 100 percent efficiency won't some day be harnessed by we nervy beings to solve some particularly vexing problem, to unlock secrets or to halt damaging pathologies. Generative art, indeed.
I think I'll call it the Valentine process.
This weekend, tell someone you care.
Stay curious.
Wayne
A note to blog readers: if you get the IdeaFestival web log via RSS, please be aware that the festival will soon be adopting a generic feed. Please use it instead of the one you use now! If you like getting blog posts by email, just visit the IdeaFestival front page and subscribe to the IF Newsletter.
Video: Eric Dyer, Modern Master of the Zoetrope from Creative Capital on Vimeo.
IdeaFestival Uncut - Stephen Cave, Immortality
We are not immortal, THAT is why we need not fear death. Quoting Wittgenstein, "We do not live to experience death." - @stephenjcave - IdeaFestival 2014
Whether physically, spiritually or perhaps through a legacy, the quest to live forever has been one of the defining features of human experience. Philosopher Stephen Cave discusses how the quest to live forever has influenced and shaped civilization since the dawn of humankind.
The IdeaFestival Uncut video series brings you speaker presentations in their entirety, and can be found on IFTV. Please subscribe! And don't forget to follow the festival on Twitter or like us on Facebook.
A note to blog readers: if you get the IdeaFestival web log via RSS, please be aware that the festival will soon be adopting a generic feed. Please use it instead of the one you use now! If you like getting blog posts by email, just visit the IdeaFestival front page and subscribe to the IF Newsletter.
Stay curious.
Wayne
Creativity is the Mistakes You've Made
We are drawn to edges, to our own / parapets and sea-walls - 'Apart', Robin Robertson
The human mind is able to produce fantastic explanations before all the evidence is in. It's messed up like that.
It also may be the most valuable asset we have. Discussing this unique human ability in context of artificial intelligence, philosopher David Deutsch, explains why knowing, and its contribution to innovation, can't be reduced solely to precedent.
Deutsch:
What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge....
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge.
Unfortunately, what we know about epistemology is contained largely in the work of the philosopher Karl Popper and is almost universally underrated and misunderstood.... For example, it is still taken for granted by almost every authority that knowledge consists of justified, true beliefs and that, therefore, an [artificial intelligence] must include some process during which it justifies some of its theories as true, or probable, while rejecting others as false or improbable.... The prevailing misconception is that by assuming that ‘the future will be like the past’, it can ‘derive’ (or ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalise’) theories from repeated experiences by an alleged process called ‘induction’. But that is impossible...
...the truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds. Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well.
What's so fascinating to me is that knowledge on this account isn't the ability to make predictions based on the past. It isn't inducted, only. Rather, it's an ability to create new explanations that aren't warranted by any known precedent. Those explanations may of course ultimately prove to be wide of the mark.
Or not.
But in contrast to any artificial intelligence (so far!), the human mind, by incorporating error, knows what it knows. And if artificial intelligence is ever to approach the human prowess for developing useful explanations, it will according to Deutsch have be tolerant of misinformation and of ambiguities, the sand-in-the-gears for any generative process based solely on logic.
Deutsch calls this ability to "violate predetermined constraints" and to transcend the past, "creativity." It's the very thing the IdeaFestival celebrates year after year. His essay may be found here.
Stay curious.
Wayne
A note to blog readers: if you get the IdeaFestival web log via RSS, please be aware that the festival will soon be adopting a generic feed. Please use itinstead of the one you use now. If you like getting blog posts by email, just visit the IdeaFestival front page and subscribe to the IF Newsletter. And, as always, connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee
Slant and Silos and Starry Nights
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies - Emily Dickinson, Tell the Truth But Tell it Slant
Using a lovely illustration of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night morphing into the Milky Way's magnetic field as viewed by the space observatory, Planck, an article at Universe Today reminded me today of the importance of slant.
What a remarkable coincidence that the observations of our best telescopes peering through hundreds of thousands of light years, even more so, back 13.8 billion years to the beginning of time, reveal images of the Universe that are not unlike the brilliant and beautiful paintings of a human with a mind that gave him no choice but to see the world differently.
There is, of course, no direct connection between his work and subsequent discoveries. Vincent van Gogh did not have the benefit of 21st century astronomics. Nor did he appear enjoy good health. But Universe Today helpfully reminded me that art has eyes too, that the impressionists of his time bravely painted - and were roundly criticized for their efforts - a world not directly accessible to them. Nothing's changed. What's real are the uncountable photons emptying into your corneal pools right now, the reflection of the screen on which the words to this blog post are appearing. Having been electrified by that Brownian energy, our brains impose sense - they select for meaning - on the physical world of which we're a part. Like Van Gogh, we are not mere ordinators endlessly wading through an infinite data set, but metaphorical beings capable of transcending the moment, of inferring and analogizing, of carefully attending to the subjects of our mind's choosing.
There is an obvious follow up question that I'll leave to you.
Slant, however, that fantastic, uniquely human ability to move between silos - slant is what the IdeaFestival does. Using his imaginative faculty and a technique that left the so-called realists aghast, Van Gogh painted a Milky Way that he could scarcely know.
Starry nights can be yours too. But first you must stay curious.
Wayne
A bit of housekeeping: if you get the IdeaFestival web log via RSS, please be aware that the festival will soon be adopting a generic feed. Please use it instead of the one you use now. If you like getting blog posts by email, just visit the IdeaFestival front page and subscribe to the IF Newsletter. And, as always, connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee