“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.” —G.K. Chesterton

We can break the creative process down into the following three steps:

1. Gain a deep understanding of a particular system and its rules.
2. Step outside of that system and look for something surprising that subverts its rules.
3. Use what you find as the basis for making something new and creative.

It may not be simple to do, but it is reliable and repeatable.

In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett describes this process of understanding a system in order to step outside of it as “jootsing,” using a term coined by Douglas Hofstadter. “Jootsing” means “jumping out of the system.”

Dennett explains that jootsing is the method behind creativity in science, philosophy, and the arts: “Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs.” The rules within a system could be things like the idea that a painting must have a frame, a haiku must only have seventeen syllables, or a depiction of landscape must have a blue sky. But galleries hang paintings without frames all the time. Haiku without seventeen syllables win international contests. And landscape paintings don’t need to contain a sky, let alone a blue one.

***

Creativity, as Dennett describes it, is not about pure novelty. The concept of jootsing shows us that constraints and restrictions are essential for creativity.

Breaking rules you don’t know exist is not a statement. It’s a common refrain that much of modern art could be the work of a five-year-old. Yet while a five-year-old could produce a random combination of elements that looks similar to a famous work of modern art, it would not be creative in the same way because the child would not be jootsing. They wouldn’t have an understanding of the system they now sought to subvert.

Limitations are essential because they give us a starting point and a shape to work against.

While amateurs may attempt to start from scratch when trying to make something creative in a new area, professionals know they must first get in touch with the existing territory. Before even contemplating their own work, they take the time to master the conventional ways of doing things, to know what the standards are, and to become well-versed in the types of work considered exemplary. Doing so can take years or even the best part of a career. Dennett summarizes: “It helps to know the tradition if you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative.”

***

Understanding a system first is necessary for creativity for two reasons. First, it provides something comprehensible to use as a starting point, and second, it makes it possible to come up with something more interesting or useful. If you try to start a creative effort from nothing, you’ll end up with mere chaos.

Dennett writes: “Sit down at a piano and try to come up with a good new melody and you soon discover how hard it is. All the keys are available, in any combination you choose, but until you can find something to lean on, some style or genre or pattern to lay down and exploit a bit, or allude to, before you twist it, you will come up with nothing but noise.”

Creativity often begins with accidents that end up showing a new possibility or reveal that violating a particular rule isn’t as harmful as expected. Elsewhere in the book, Dennett suggests that any computer model intended to generate creativity must include mistakes and randomness, “junk lying around that your creative process can bump into, noises that your creative process can’t help overhearing.”

***

Most of us say we want to be creative—and we want the people we work with and for to be creative. The concept of jootsing reveals why we often end up preventing that from happening. Creativity is impossible without in some way going against rules that exist for a good reason.

Psychologists Jacob Getzels and Phillip Jackson studied creativity in the 1950s. Their findings were repeated across many studies and described what was termed as the Getzels-Jackson effect: “The vast majority—98 percent—of teachers say creating is so important that it should be taught daily, but when tested, they nearly always favor less creative children over more creative children.”

Kevin Ashton, in How to Fly a Horse, explains why. Teachers favor less creative children “because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.” Ashton notes that the Getzels-Jackson effect is also present in the organizations we are a part of in adulthood. When the same tests are applied to decision-makers and authority figures in business, science, and government, the results are the same: they all say they value creation, but it turns out they don’t value creators.

***

If you want people to be creative, you can’t complain or punish them when they question a system that is “typically so entrenched that it is as invisible as the air you breathe,” as Dennett says. You need to permit a lot of exploration, including ideas that don’t work out. Not everything outside of a system proves worth pursuing. And often the rules that are most beneficial to break are those that seem the most load-bearing, as if meddling with them will cause the whole system to collapse. It might—or it might make it much better.

You also need to permit the making of mistakes if you want to foster creativity, because that often ends up leading to new discoveries. Dennett writes, “The exploitation of accidents is the key to creativity, whether what is being made is a new genome, a new behavior, or a new melody.” Most accidents never end up being profitable or valuable in a measurable way. But they’re necessary because they’re part of the process of developing something new. Accidents fuel creativity.

In the book Loonshots, Safi Bahcall explores, among other ideas, how to nurture and develop those seemingly crazy ideas that turn out to be paradigm-shifting innovations. He gives many examples of now ubiquitous technologies that were initially laughed at, rejected, or buried. He notes that it’s not easy to immediately buy in to radical developments, and if we want to have environments where creating is possible, then we have to give creativity space and understanding. “It’s worth keeping in mind,” he says, “that revving the creative engine to fire at higher speeds . . . means more ideas and more experiments, which also means, inevitably, more failed experiments.”

As individuals, if we want to be creative, we need to give ourselves space to play and experiment without a set agenda. Amos Tversky famously said that the secret to doing good work is being a little unemployed so you always have hours in the day to waste as you wish. During that wasted time, you’ll likely have your best, most creative ideas.

If your schedule is crammed with only room for what’s productive in an obvious way, you’ll have a hard time seeing outside of the existing system.

The post “Jootsing”: The Key to Creativity appeared first on Farnam Street.

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“The following lessons in design, drawing, creative process, and presentation first came to me as barely discernible glimmers through the fog of my own education,” writes Architect Matthew Frederick in the insightful book 101 Things Things I Learned in Architecture School. The series of books, which we’ve covered before, includes law school, business school, and engineering school. Like others in the series, the book on architecture offers many lessons in thinking and design that transcend one discipline.

Here are some ideas and nuggets of wisdom that stood out as I read the book.

1. Be specific. “The more specific a design idea is, the greater its appeal is likely to be. Being nonspecific in an effort to appeal to everyone usually results in reaching no one. But drawing upon a specific observation, poignant statement, ironic point, witty reflection, intellectual connection, political argument, or idiosyncratic belief in creative work can help you create environments others will identify with in their own way.”
2. Ideas can take away from or add to the essential idea. “When designing a stair, window, column, roof, lobby, elevator core, or any other aspect of a building, always consider how its design can express and reinforce the essential idea of the building.”
3. Throw away your best loved ideas. “A good designer isn’t afraid to throw away a good idea.”
4. The most important skill for a designer to develop. “Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop.”
5. Think about how you think. “The most effective, most creative problem solvers engage in a process of meta-thinking, or “thinking about the thinking.” This means you’re aware of how you’re structuring your thoughts while you’re thinking. You want to test ideas, challenge yourself, see if you understand the other side of the argument, criticizing, and redirecting your thought process.
6. Don’t make it too complex. “Create architectural richness through informed simplicity or an interaction of simples rather than through unnecessarily busy agglomerations.”
7. Consistent and repeatable results come from a process. “True style does not come from a conscious effort to create a particular look. It results obliquely—even accidentally—out of a holistic process.”

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Mostly gone are the days of Elton John and Bernie Taupin sitting down at a piano to work out a “Bennie and the Jets” — crafting the chord progression, the melody, the rhythm, the arrangement, and finally, the lyrics.

The pop music running the airwaves today, those songs you seem to know but aren’t quite sure how you know them, are created in an interesting and deliberate way. Depending on your stance, the result is either horrifying or fascinating.

The method is called track-and-hook songwriting, and employs an entire industry of sub-specialists whose job is to put together pieces of a Frankenstein beast that ends up as a monster hit. Like many other industries, songwriting has been changed immensely by the Internet: With attention spans shorter than ever and avenues for music consumption unlimited and mostly free, hits are more important than ever, not less.

***

This interesting result wasn’t well predicted. Chris Anderson, of The Long Tail fame, predicted that the Internet would lead to less hit-domination and more exploration of individual passions, writing in 2005: “If the twentieth century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be about niches…This is not a fantasy. It is the emerging state of music today.”

He was wrong, though, as John Seabrook writes in his marvelous book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory:

Nine years after The Long Tail, the hits are bigger than ever. Of the 13 million songs available for purchase in 2008, 52,000 made up 80% of the industry’s revenue. Ten million of those tracks failed to sell a single copy. Today, 77 percent of the profits in the music business are accumulated by 1 percent of the artists. Even Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and an early supporter of long-tail theory, changed his mind. “Although the tail is very interesting, and we enable it, the vast majority of the new revenue remains in the head,” he said in a 2008 interview with McKinsey, the management consulting firm. “In fact, it’s probable that the Internet will lead to larger blockbusters, more concentration of brands.”

In order to fulfill the demands of a hit-driven business, threatened and changed by the democratization of music consumption, the business has evolved to create hits the way McDonald’s creates hamburgers: on an assembly line.

Pon de Replay

Pop stars don’t generally write any of the music they become famous for. They are faces, personalities, and voices, though with the advent of digital music-making and the ability to digitally auto-correct vocal performances, the latter is increasingly unimportant.

The whole thing starts by crafting the track, which is done by the producer and the topliner. John Seabrook lays it out in his book:

By the mid-2000s, the track-and-hook approach to songwriting–in which a track maker/producer, who is responsible for the beats, the chord progression, and the instrumentation, collaborates with a hook-writer/topliner, who writes the melodies–had become the standard method by which popular songs are written. The method was invented by reggae producers in Jamaica, who made one “riddim” (rhythm) track and invited ten or more aspiring singers to record a song over it. From Jamaica the technique spread to New York and was employed in early hip-hop. The Swedes at Cheiron industrialized it. [Ed: Songs like “I Saw a Sign” from the early ’90s.] Today, track-and-hook has become the pillar and post of popular song.

Why do it this way, instead of the old way where one or two people wrote a song and the singer put personal lyrics on top of it? Seabrook thinks it’s because parts of the songwriting process have become extremely specialized, a sort of natural selection process has occurred where songs must be engineered for maximum addictiveness to survive. As they figure out a successful formula, it’s applied over and over to create more hits:

As a working method, track-and-hook tends to make songs sound the same. Dance music producers have always borrowed liberally from others’ grooves. There’s no reason not to: beats and chord progressions can’t be protected under existing copyright laws, which recognize only melody and lyrics. As dance beats have become the backing tracks to a growing number of pop songs, similar-sound records have proliferated. The melodies themselves are supposed to be unique, but because of the way producers work with multiple topliners, tracks and melodies tend to blur together.

In 2009 for example, both Beyonce and Kelly Clarkson had hits from tracks written by the superproducer Ryan Tedder. One was Beyonce’s “Halo,” which peaked at number five in May, and the other was Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” which got as high as number thirteen in August. Clarkson wrote her own top line, while Beyonce shared a credit with Evan Bogart. When Clarkson heard “Halo,” she thought it sounded too much like “Already Gone,” and feared the public would think she had copied Beyonce’s song…But nobody cared, or perhaps even noticed; both songs were hits.

The songs are engineered precisely to hook the listener as soon as possible and then re-expose them to a hook over and over. Attention spans are too short to allow “dead space” in a song:

In a track-and-hook song, the hook comes as soon as possible. Then the song “vamps”–progresses in three-or-four chord patterns with little or no variation. Because it is repetitive, the vamp requires more hooks: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and outro hooks. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown explains. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.” The reason, he went on, is that people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.

Once there is a hooky, chorusy, bubbly tune to draw the listener in and keep them there, the singing comes in next. In today’s pop world, vocal quality no longer carries the importance it once did, nor does writing meaningful lyrical content. The lyrics must have a meter that fits the rhythm of the song, and the vocal itself will be heavily processed and engineered by the time the song hits the airwaves. Dozens of takes will be digitally cut-and-pasted together to create the final song. This process explains why glossy pop seems to carry a similar sound and feel even if the songs are recorded by artists with totally different singing voices.

As an example, Seabrook describes songwriter Ester Dean laying down a vocal track for a potential hit:

Dean was dimly visible through the soundproofed glass window, bathed in greenish light. She took out her phone, and as the track began to play she surfed through lists of phrases she copied from magazines and television programs: “life in the fast line,” “crying shame,” “high and mighty,” “mirrors don’t lie,” “don’t let them see you cry.” Some phrases are categorized under headings like “Sex and the City,” “Interjections,” and “British Slang.”

[…]

Grabbing random words out of her phone also seems to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would restrain it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.

[…]

“See, I just go in there and scream and they fix it…” she tells me, emerging from the booth, looking elated, almost glowing. She touches the back of her arm, feeling that million dollar chill.

Moneyball-style, the engineering of musical addictiveness takes an old pop-music concept — giving listeners heavy exposure to a song so it becomes familiar — and uses that to predict which songs will be hits:

The main difficulty Zapoleon had to overcome in creating Hit Predictor [Ed: a music testing service], he says, was that people don’t know if they like a song unless they’ve already heard it. “There’s an old adage that you can only do research on people who are already familiar with the song,” he says. Zapoleon refers to this as the “rule of three” –you have to hear a song three times before you know if you like it or not.

[…]

Zapoleon’s solution was to replicate the rule of three in a two-minute remix of the song. “We take the thirty-second meat of the song,” he explains, “which is generally the chorus but sometime it’s not. And then comes a one-minute version that has the hook in it. And then we come back again to the thirty-second hook, what I call ‘the filet mignon.'” Zapoleon’s online respondents hear the essence of the song three times, all in the course of two minutes.

In the course of a few minutes, these music-testing services can predict how likely a song is to become a hit; computer algorithms can use that data to analyze whole albums of tracks mathematically to see whether their particular combination of hooks and beats can become popular with the right marketing “push.”

A desirable track, built piece by piece inside the Machine, will be fought over by a score of pop-music icons, with a single song having the ability to launch, build, or repair multi-million dollar careers. And so the Song Machine cranks on.

Still Interested? Read the whole book for the story of modern pop.

The post John Seabrook and the Modern Song Machine appeared first on Farnam Street.

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Agnes Martin was a famous abstract painter and minimalist.

In this short interview with Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama from her studio in 1997, the 85-year-old Martin shares the secret of happiness, and some wisdom on solitude.

On happiness …

There are so many people who don’t know what they want. And I think that, in this world, that’s the only thing you have to know — exactly what you want. … That’s the way to be happy.

Later in the interview she turns the table and asks Smith if he feels like he’s doing what he was born to do. When he responds in the affirmative, she replies “that’s the way to be happy.” (This runs counter Cal Newport’s stark opposition to not follow your passion.)

On the worst thing to think about — you:

The worst thing you can think about when you’re working is yourself. … (because when you do) you make mistakes.

Another interesting part of the interview is when she responds to the question on how she feels when the painting is done. She fails to let herself decide right away … instead she waits.

Once the painting is done … I ask if it was a good painting. But I also wait three days before I decide.

While we’re not advocates of the stop-thinking approach, there are opposing ends of the spectrum and thinking too much or even being too rational is not always the best way to live. Martin gave up meditation when she trained herself to stop thinking.

Before you train yourself to stop thinking … I don’t believe what the intellectuals put out. The intellectuals discover one fact and then another fact and then another and they say from all these facts we can deduce so-and-so. No good. That’s just a bad guess. Nothing can come but inaccuracy.

The last point is perhaps the most important. This one strikes at the heart of today’s culture and into the value of an empty mind — free from busyness and distractions. Martin believes that when you have an empty mind, you can see things when they come into it. Imagine the freedom of an empty mind — one not bound by to-do lists, meetings, work and the other muck we dump into it. When the mind is full our attention revolves around the meaningless. And yet attention is perhaps the most valuable thing we have.

I’m reminded of the words of W.H. Auden

“Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”

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Starting with a fragment that’s left of the face of an Egyptian woman who lived 3,000 years ago, de Montebello and Gayford’s book confronts the elusive questions: how and why do we look at art? That is a large subject we will leave you to explore, but there are two parts of this book we wish to draw your attention to.

WE CAN NEVER STEP IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE

“If,” they write, “we stand in front of a work of art twice, at least one party — the viewer or the object — will be transformed on the second occasion. Works of art mutate through time, albeit slowly, as they are cleaned or ‘conserved’, or as their constituent materials age.”

As far as the object, Van Gogh’s Irises and Roses collection comes to mind. Van Gogh employed bright pigments in a way that encouraged them to lose their vibrancy over time, anticipating “time will only soften them too much.” The contrast between the originals and those we witness today is stark — color like all living organisms fades over time.

But even more important than the physical evolution of pieces are the ones happening internal to us.

Gayford writes:

Inevitably, we all inhabit a world of dissolving perspectives and ever-shifting views. The present is always moving, so from that vantage point the past constantly changes in appearance. That is on the grand, historical scale; but the same is true of our personal encounters with art, from the day to day. You can stand in front of Velazquez’s Las Meninas a thousand times, and every time it will be different because you will be altered: tired or full of energy, or dissimilar from your previous self in a multitude of ways.

… Our idea was to make a book that was neither art history not art criticism but an experiment in shared appreciation. It is, in other words, an attempt to get at not history or theory but the actual experience of looking at art: what it feels like on a particular occasion, which is of course the only way any of us can ever look at anything.

This brings to mind the famous fragment of Heraclitus: “You cannot step in the same river twice.”

HOW TO LOOK AT ART

There is undeniably a curatorial aspect to art. De Montebello notes that contrast between addition and subtraction when it comes to selection.  He writes:

In Europe, one often has a sense that a selection has been made by paring down a lot of inherited dynastic objects or spoils of colonization or war. Then a curatorial mind has built on that base. In the USA, you start ab initio. American museums large and small tend to be encyclopedic, whether you are in Toledo, Minneapolis, or elsewhere, because they started from nothing, and from the premise that they’d like to buy a little bit of everything: a couple of Chinese things, a few medieval things, and so on.

While there are differences in what’s on display at American museums, de Montebello also alludes to the “sameness in their governing principles and the criteria used for acquisitions.” The great museums, he argues, “are organisms, constantly changing, and mainly expanding. The collections grow, move in new directions, and, on rare occasion, get sold off. The buildings are adapted and frequently enlarged.” A visit to a museum in itself is part of the learning process.

De Montebello writes:

I have found that when I have forced myself — often with the help of curators — to look at things about which I was indifferent or that even repelled me, I discovered that, with a little knowledge, what had been hidden from me became manifest. I’ll give you an example: for a long time I approached galleries of Greek vases with a sense of dread; whether black- or red-figured, the vases all looked alike to me. Museums were often culpable as they tended to show far too many. So I’d walk into one of those rooms, take one look and dash for the exit. But a curator at the Met, Joan Mertens, told me once to go to the vitrines where only fragments, or shards, were shown. She stood beside me and said, look at one of them as if it were a drawing on paper.

I found I was able to look at it this way, forgetting that it was a fragment of a vessel, a three-dimensional utilitarian object. I could focus on the drawing itself, the line, the composition, and how marvellous it was. But the epiphany came when I was able to put surface decoration and vessel shape together, and look at them as one. It is the only correct way, incidentally.

Fragments are a representation of the whole—to appreciate them we have to engage beyond the instant gratification we so often seek. It often takes us repressing our ego and asking for help to truly see a piece or an exhibit, much like an adult who takes classes to appreciate Shakespeare.

De Montebello concludes:

[O]ne can be taught, and needs to taught, how to look, how to push aside one’s prejudices, one’s overly hasty negative reactions. For me, it was a long learning process, and I have to imagine that for the majority of visitors it can’t be easy either. …  The appreciation of art requires an engagement that is wholly different from the instant gratification provided by most popular forms of popular culture, and museums have a responsibility to help visitors achieve this.

This strikes a familiar note, as we have often called Farnam Street “curated interestingness” for the very same reason: We feel it’s our job to help you find and appreciate the best wisdom the world has to offer.

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Rendez-Vous with Art adds to our expanding library on art, sitting next to The Power of Art and The Story of Art.

The post Rendez-Vous with Art: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Art appeared first on Farnam Street.

In a letter to his brother Theo, dated July 1882, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, Vincent van Gogh describes how the simple few fundamentals combine into nearly endless permutations.

Absolute black doesn’t in fact occur. Like white, however, it’s present in almost every colour and forms the endless variety of greys — distinct in tone and strength. So that in nature one in fact sees nothing but these tones or strengths.

The 3 fundamental colours are red, yellow, blue, “composite” orange, green, purple.

From these are obtained the endless variations of grey by adding black and some white — red-grey, yellow-grey, blue-grey, green-grey, orange-grey, violet-grey.

It’s impossible to say how many different green-greys there are for example — the variation is infinite.

But the whole chemistry of colours is no more complicated than those simple few fundamentals. And a good understanding of them is worth more than 70 different shades of paint — given that more than 70 tones and strengths can be made with the 3 primary colours and white and black. The colourist is he who on seeing a colour in nature is able to analyze it coolly and say, for example, that green-grey is yellow with black and almost no blue, &c. In short, knowing how to make up the greys of nature on the palette.

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Suppose you visit an art museum and walk up to a painting. I say “Ah ha! I see you’re admiring some powdered pigments, mixed with oil and smeared onto what appears to be a canvas panel.” You say “No, you moron. I’m admiring a Rembrandt.” Good. You’re three-quarters of the way towards a deep understanding of software.

How did this happen?

Well clearly we may, if we choose, regard a painting as a coming-together of two separate elements. The paints and canvas—the physical stuff; and the form-giving mind-plan. I’ll call these two elements the body and the disembodied painting respectively.

Both are necessary to the finished product. But they are unequally decisive to its character. If Rembrandt had (while trying to shake out a tablecloth) accidentally chucked his favorite paint set into a canal on the very morning he was destined to make our painting; if he’d accordingly been forced to go down to the basement and hunt up another set—the finished product would be the same. But if he’d altered his mind-plan—the disembodied painting—before setting to work, our finished painting would obviously have been different.

In fact, the disembodied painting is a painting in and of itself— albeit a painting of a special kind, namely an unbodied one. Rembrandt is perfectly entitled to tell his wife “I have a painting in mind” before setting to work. But plainly the mere body is no painting, not in and of itself. If the paints on Rembrandt’s table went around telling people “Hey look at us, we’re a painting,” no-one would believe them.

This distinction is the key to software and its special character. A running program is a machine of a certain kind, an information machine. The program text—the words and symbols that the programmer composes, that “tell the computer what to do” – is a disembodied information machine. Your computer provides a body.

Unlike Rembrandt’s mind plan, a disembodied information machine must be written down precisely and in full. It’s a bit like the engineering drawings for a new toaster in this regard; the machine designer leaves nothing to chance. Unlike Rembrandt’s mind plan or the toaster drawings, on the other hand, a disembodied information machine can be “embodied” automatically. No skill, judgement or human intervention is required. Merely hand your text to a computer (it’s probably stored inside the computer already); the computer itself performs the “embodying.”

So: A running program—an information machine or infomachine for short—is the embodiment of a disembodied machine. In saying this, we have said a lot. A fairly simple point first, then a subtle and deeply important one—

Some people believe that, when they see a program running, the machine they are watching is a “computer.” True, but not true enough. The computer, that impressive-looking box with the designer logo, is merely the paint, not the painting. When you say I’m watching this computer do its stuff, you are saying in effect I’m admiring not this Rembrandt but some paint smeared on canvas. Some people imagine the computer as a gifted actor (say) who is handed a program and declaims it feelingly. No: bad image. The computer itself is of the utmost triviality to the workings of the infomachine you are watching. It may decide how fast or slowly the thing runs, and may effect its behaviour just a little around the fringes, but essentially, it is of no logical significance whatever. It is a mere body, and bodies are a dime a dozen.

The second point is harder.

People often find it difficult to keep in mind that, when they see a program text, what they’re looking at is a machine. The fact that, for the time being, the machine they’re looking at has no body confuses them With good reason: This is a subtle, maybe a confusing point. They leap to the conclusion that what programmers do amounts to arranging symbols on paper (or in a computer file) in a certain way. They look at a program and see merely a highly specialized kind of document …

This mistake is fatal to any real understanding of what software is.

Understanding software doesn’t mean understanding how program texts are arranged, it means understanding what the working infomachine itself is like—what actually happens when you embody the thing and turn it on-what kind of structure you are creating when you organize those squiggles-the shape of the finished product, the way information hums through it, the way it grows, shrinks and changes as it runs, the look and feel of the actual computational landscape. This is where software creativity is exercised. This is where the field evolves, metamorphoses and explodes. Talented software designers work with some image of the actual running program uppermost in mind. Failing to see through the program text to the machine it represents is like trying to understand musical notation without grasping that those little sticks and ellipsoids represent sounds.

This kind of information is hard to convey. You can’t directly see a running program. You can sense its workings indirectly, but you can’t open the hood and look right at the mechanism. An ironic reversal of the Rembrandt experience: Here the mind-plan is tangible, but the embodied thing itself is not.

Finally concluding

[I]f you get carried away, and start asserting that “music is the mechanical manipulation of symbols on staff paper,” “programming is mathematics,” you have committed intellectual suicide. You’ve mistaken the means for the end. You’ve cut yourself off absolutely from all real inspiration, creativity and growth. And you have failed, profoundly, to understand the character of your field.

A dangerous mistake. Where software is concerned, an all-too-natural one.

The post What A Rembrandt Can Teach you about Software and Programmers appeared first on Farnam Street.

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Paul Klee was a painter who wrote extensively about color theory. His lectures, Writings on Form and Design Theory, taught at the German Bauhaus school of art in the 1920s, were published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks. They are considered as important to modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Giulio Carlo Argan, in the Preface to the first volume of Klee’s notebooks, writes:

The writings which compose Paul Klee’s theory of form production and pictorial form have the same importance and the same meaning for modern art as had Leonardo’s writings which composed his theory of painting for Renaissance art. Like the latter, they do not constitute a true and proper treatise, that is to say a collection of stylistic and technical rules, but are the result of an introspective analysis which the artist engages in during his work and in the light of the experience of reality which comes to him in the course of his work. This analysis which accompanies and controls the formation of a work of art is a necessary component of the artistic process, the aim and the finality of which are brought to light by it …

Herbert Read called the collection “the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics.”

And now, these astonishingly beautiful works of art are available online (Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (PDF, 23 Megabytes), Volume 2: The Nature of Nature (PDF, 43 MBS))

If you’re like me, prepare to spend the rest of your day in this treasure trove of amazingness.

Still curious? The notebooks make an excellent addition to your budding art library.

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Two excerpts from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell found in The Essential Blake.

The Voice of the Devil
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death.
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire.
Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.
But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!

Proverbs of Hell

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
A dead body, revenges not injuries.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Folly is the cloke of knavery.
Shame is Prides cloke.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish, smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once, only imagin’d.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit: watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits.
The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.
One thought, fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
He who has suffer’d you to impose on him knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!
The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.
The thankful reciever bears a plentiful harvest.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
The soul of sweet delight, can never be defil’d.
When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius, lift up thy head!
As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
Damn, braces: Bless relaxes.
The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!
Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird of the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Enough! or Too much!

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Against Interpretation is regarded as a quintessential text of the 60’s. “It wasn’t the Sixties then,” she writes. “For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.”

Interpretation

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Taming Art

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Genius

…interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality.

Avoiding Interpretation

to avoid interpretation, art maybe become parody. Or it may become abstract. … Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content,t here can be no interpretation.

Our Task With a Work of Art

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

Art

Art is not only about something; it is something. … Art is seduction, not rape.

Morality

Morality is a code of acts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, which prescribe a standard for behaving or tiring to behave toward other human beings general (that is, to all who are acknowledged to be human) as if we were inspired by love. Needless to say, love is something we feel in truth for just a few individual human beings, among those who are known to us in reality and in our imagination. … Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.

The Metaphor of Art as an “Argument”

The metaphor of the work of art as an “argument,” with premises and entailments, has informed most criticism since. Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.

Love and suffering

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness. We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, but one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. … For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

If this has you curious, you should read the entire book.

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You’re a painter. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you: neglect, derision, disgrace? Worse than all these misfortunes is to have to mutilate your masterpiece, the bravest thing you’ve ever tried. That’s what happened to Rembrandt in 1662.

That’s how Simon Schama introduces us to Rembrandt in his amazing book: The Power of Art.

20 years before, when Rembrandt was in his 30s, Amsterdam couldn’t get enough of the young master. “Over and over he had confounded expectations, and expectations adjusted accordingly to whatever it was he had done.” He was on top of the world.

By 1660, when Rembrandt was in his 50s, he

was living in a modest dwelling on the Rozengracht, opposite a pleasure garden. There were drunks in the street, knife fights on the corner. The tongue-clickers now saw him as someone from whom things had called steeply away: credit, property, the benisons of the mighty. God did not distribute fortune idly, so the truisms of the pious had it. Thus, in some fashion, Rembrandt’s fall from grace must have been ordained as a caution against sinful pride.

But then a lucky break. The Amsterdam elite desired a monumental history painting for their new town hall. Govert Flinck, their first choice for the job, unexpectedly died leaving Rembrandt with an opportunity to redeem himself and change everything.

The commission would be one of a series of paintings illustrating the history of the Dutch.

Together the cycle of histories would remind Amsterdammers that, while they were not themselves masters of an empire, their history began with an act of virtuous insurrection against the arrogance of the Roman Empire.

Rembrandt’s work would be the most important. He would be painting the Batavian leader Claudius Civilis at “the very moment of swearing his brethren to pledge their lives to the liberty of the Fatherland.” If he succeeded, Rembrandt would clear his name and return to prosperity.

The result was something no one expected and for the ruined painter it was a massive gamble.

Everyone knew about Rembrandt’s ruffian audacity; his regrettable imperviousness to the niceties of decorum, personal and professional. But with all those reservations, the civic worthies must still have been unprepared for what they got from his hand.

Wanting to save face, the worthies decided that letting it hang in the hall was better than leaving a vacancy where the masterpiece belonged. However, a few months later they changed their mind. “It’s confrontational coarseness” was too much and they ordered it removed, rolled up, and sent back to the artist. Rembrandt didn’t receive a penny for his work. Someone else, someone predictable, was hired to fill the space. They knocked off a painting in record time. “It might have been the worst painting on public display anywhere in the Netherlands. But no one complained.”

If Rembrandt wanted to rescue something from his masterpiece he would have to cut it down from the enormous arched space it was designed for into something for a residential buyer. So the cutting began.

You can learn more about Rembrandt by watching this Power of Art BBC series .

Still curious? Pick up a copy of Simon Schama’s, The Power of Art, or watch the excellent BBC series.

Related:
Bernini — The Power of Art
Caravaggio — The Power of Art

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The Palace of Versailles, also know as The Château de Versailles, began as King Louis XIII’s hunting lodge. It is now considered one of the most beautiful achievements of 18th-century French art.

The son of King Louis XIII, Louis XIV, expanded the palace and moved the government and the court to Versailles in 1682. The improvements continued until the French Revolution, when the château “lost its standing as the official seat of power.” In the 19th century the château became the Museum of the history of France.

Thanks to the Google Cultural Institute, we can now tour these amazing grounds.

Versailles after the French Revolution

From gardens to Trianon palaces

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Still curious? Check out the official Château de Versailles website. If you use Google’s browser, Chrome, you can also take an interactive stroll around the palace.

The post The Château de Versailles: From The Seat of Power to The Museum Of The History of France appeared first on Farnam Street.

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

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