I have about 30 million thoughts running through my head on Thursday but the discussion always seemed to move on faster than my mind could run.
But I did write down some of my questions as we went along:
How is decision making processes random? Are they?
What is art? (seems like we have different definitions of what it is--clearing this up could help us communicate?)
What is my decision making process when it comes to art?
What does Dan mean 'we think so differently?'
Is there a commonality in the creative process?
How do we define creativity?
Is art making at all random?
What is random?
Is predictability bad? How does predictably factor into art? Is 'good art' unpredictable?
I'll muse on a few of these questions in this post.
First I'll address Dan's statement that "we think so differently"
On this point I disagree almost entirely. Sure every person "thinks differently" I don't think that's hard to argue, but I think a more accurate statement would be that we express our ideas differently. And not just because someone uses paint and someone else uses binary, I mean the words we use. I think that lead to a lot of misunderstanding on Thursday. Our vocabularies are different when we're expressing our ideas. I grew up with a Mother who double majored in Computer Science and Mathematics and went on to get a Masters in Math. My grandfather chaired the Math Department at BYU for a number of years. My sister is a Mechanical Engineer . . . I have a lot of experience with trying to express myself so my family gets it. But they do, and often we find we're on the same page in a lot of ways.
Second, How do we define creativity?
I was thinking a lot about this and couldn't come up with something succinct. I thought of one work I like better than creative and it was innovative, but beyond that I couldn't think up any that I really thought expressed what so-called creativity is. Is it original? No, a lot of things I would deem creative but not original. It's sticky really. And it's something I've never really tried to define. I'll keep working at it.
Lastly, Predictability.
We talked about this briefly in class and Dave said, "is predictability bad?" Well, not in some cases, but I think as artists you don't want to be predictable and so yes, it is. What is the point of trying to create (connoting something innovative or new) if it's predictable? It would defeat the purpose for creation.
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Good thoughts -- especially on the difficulty of communicating. I really agree. I've done cross-disciplinary work before, and there is a HUGE inertia to overcome before things become productive. Almost all of that inertia is due to communication issues and getting them ironed out. We definitely face that here. I also think that the effort to overcome the inertia is (almost) always worth it, as some of the best, and most interesting work is cross-disciplinary in nature.
ReplyDeleteAs for thinking differently, I hope there is some commonality, but there are significant differences, to be sure. In fact, if there were not, cross disciplinary collaborations would be much less interesting and less fruitful. In particular, computer scientists are trained to think algorithmically (indeed, some might argue that they think that way naturally and are drawn to computer science because of it). We believe any problem is solvable, given the right "recipe" and it is our job to discover it. Everything is an algorithm.
I know from teaching people introductory programming that not everyone thinks this way (in fact, I'm not sure that everyone *can* think this way). I suspect that artists look at the world, describe the world, determine what is an interesting "problem" and solve that "problem" in very different ways than computer scientists do. At least at the lower levels of (cognitive) abstraction.
On the other hand, I believe that at some high level you are correct and that we do have common cognitive processes that produce "creativity". The difficult thing is that we are usually only aware of our least abstract levels of thought -- the challenge is to try to find out what is going on at higher levels of (possibly unconscious) abstraction.