Artists tend to get a bad rap – I certainly know that from personal experience, with my parents wanting me to study mathematics instead of art because they feared I’d never get a job. That’s because art can seem esoteric and irrelevant, and yet it is where I have found a point of view that is fully compatible with the world of computation. Because the arts are not about what you can just see or sense; they’re about discovering what underlies it all – about understanding what lies at the essential core of anything and everything. For example, artists know an important fact about apples that isn’t immediately obvious when you bite into one. Try drawing an apple from memory and you’re likely to draw a circle with a stick on the top. But an apple is not based upon a circle or a sphere – it’s more of a pentagonal solid. Go ahead and cut an apple in half, not sideways but in cross section. What do you see? Do you see the pentagon? Knowing this fact will let you draw an apple more realistically. It turns out that majority of plants on our planet have this fivefold arrangement – in the apple’s case, it emerges from an apple blossom. The easiest way to verify this for yourself is to type the emoji for cherry blossom, which reveals an analogous fivefold symmetry. So a good artist knows this fact about the apple and draws from its natural underlying geometry – that you can’t see unless you are really understanding (not seeing) intently. […] We often mistakenly think that artists just depict the world the way they freely imagine it to be. I was certainly guilty of that misconception earlier in life, but the experience of being immersed in the arts allowed me to know the mind of the artist at a much deeper level. The artist’s ability to hold both the foreground and background together simultaneously in their primary plane of thought is a skill I came to fully appreciate.
stem: john maeda
perspectief: computation is an invisible, alien universe that is infinitely large and infinitesimally detailed. It’s a kind of raw material that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, and it’s what powers the internet at a level that far transcends the power of electricity.
titel: machines are living
bron: how to speak machine: computational thinking for the rest of us (2019)
mopw: meerstemmige encyclopedie / appel