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The Meaning of Art, The Purpose of Technology
By Micha | January 2, 2008
As a software artist I am a beast with two heads. I am an artist by compulsion and I am a software designer/engineer both by choice and sheer determination to understand technology. Most people tend to address one head or the other, depending upon whether they meet me first as an artist or as an engineer. Some colleagues grasp the nature of my hybrid approach and they are a pleasure to work with. Some never grasp it at all.
As a child I had often wondered if I would be an artist or a scientist when I grew up. Digital technology, particularly computer graphics, came along as a perfect middle ground where I could exercise both my visual imagination and my need to work through problems methodically.
Although I began my career as an artist and art gallery administrator I was drawn to working with software design and eventually committed to it full time. This was perhaps inevitable because of my precise but wide open definition of the meaning of art. While still in art school I formulated a practical definition of art based on investigations into information theory. I had become enamoured with the way scientists spoke of information as a combination of variety and redundancy and described the ways that signals could be transmitted through the mechanism of carrier waves.
As an artist I pictured various ways in which communication signals carry not just information but also meaning across the great voids that separate all human beings. It was this aspect of my studies that caused me to realize that I had become interested in art not necessarily to make drawings or paintings but because it was a system of communication. In that regard I understood immediately that the concepts of carrier waves and signals as described by scientists corresponded directly to the concepts of form and content that is studied by art historians.
My direct experience as a practicing artist led me to define art as nothing more or less than Minimal Redundancy.
The meaning behind Art=Minimal Redundancy is not really new and has been said using other terms by many who have thought about it.
Occam’s razor is not equivalent to the idea that “perfection is simplicity”. Albert Einstein probably had this in mind when he wrote in 1933 that “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience” often paraphrased as “Theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It often happens that the best explanation is much more complicated than the simplest possible explanation because its postulations amount to less of an improbability. Thus the popular rephrasing of the razor - that “the simplest explanation is the best one” - fails to capture the gist of the reason behind it, in that it conflates a rigorous notion of simplicity and ease of human comprehension. The two are obviously correlated, but hardly equivalent.
From wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam’s_Razor
Art=Minimal Redundancy speaks of the idea that something special and meaningful occurs in communicative expressions that neither lack anything nor contain any superfluous parts. It is a perfect balance of form and content. It does not discount redundancy but regards it as the formal component of communication. Neither does it allow for unnecessary redundancy because that implies an unintended content component and hence a statement of lesser meaning. If you compare a masterwork to an amateur’s painting you may be able to see that the master is able to convey information about a subject with fewer extra bits and pieces than one who lacks that degree of vision, passion and control.
But you could arguably also say the same thing about tennis players or truck drivers although the specific outputs of such practitioners may not have the same impact on the hearts and minds of a wider public. In other words there is surely an art to volleying a tennis ball or backing a transport trailer even though the appreciation and valuation of such ‘art forms’ may not exist as such in our society today.
If you are grasping what I am saying here you may also see that defining art as minimal redundancy frees one completely from looking at it through particular forms or even disciplines. Suddenly the world itself becomes our studio. Anyone can potentially create ‘art’ in any context. Art and Life are indeed inseparable.
My working definition of art was conceived in a context of scientific and technological language. It was therefore perfect for helping me make the transition into a technology focused career. As a conceptual tool, this practical benchmark for creativity has helped me produce new and original inventions as well as provide a platform for critical analysis of technology itself.
And this perspective has naturally led me into the arena of user interface design – where user interface systems can be regarded as primarily human to human relations, mediated by significant technological components, and NOT as human-computer relations, as is implied by the term “human-computer interface design”.
Like “artificial intelligence”, the term “human-computer interface” is unsatisfactory for me because it implies a creative or responsible role for the machine component rather than regarding it as just a communication vehicle. As a blog writer I can talk to you through a ‘pipe’ that has a computer on each end – like tin cans on a string. As a software designer I can also talk to you through that same mechanism but the message, and user experience, will have a different quality.
Art forms such as painting, stained glass and architecture were the multimedia communication vehicles of the past. Cathedrals were the pinnacle of technological advancement in the middle ages and, like the computer today, were the economic drivers and focal point of many social communities. The purpose of this technological marvel was to uplift the human spirit and even today any visitors to the site of a medieval cathedral will still be able to see that it continues to function in this way.
The computer is the cathedral of today. Google is a ‘technological edifice’ that towers over much of our daily virtual landscape. Where medieval peasants may have entered cathedrals to search for meaning, we routinely come to Google to search for links. We stare into the brilliant colours of our computer screens and marvel at what see.
I think it is a relevant question to ask what is the effect of modern technology on the human spirit?
It may or may not be worth pointing out that, despite all appearances, even the most sophisticated computer algorithm possesses no more, or less, consciousness than a blob of paint. Philosophically I am deeply opposed to the idea that computers should be regarded as ‘conscious’ or ‘intelligent’ in some creative fashion that even remotely resembles human consciousness.
Furthermore I am very much opposed to human beings relinquishing their creative potentials to the straitjacket of bad software design. To varying degrees, this inverted relationship with machine, where we see ourselves as unable to control it, has the effect of quashing the human spirit.
As a software artist I am committed to finding ways of preserving and even stimulating creative activity on the part of end users. And the guiding principle I use for achieving this goal is to create designs with Minimal Redundancy.
Topics: user interface design, artificial intelligence, usability, art, community, graphical user interfaces, meaning, user experience, framing, functional design, Humanity, ineffective communication, understanding technology, design simplicity, effective communication, minimal redundancy |
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
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January 31st, 2008 at 6:25 am
Variety and redundancy — interesting. I hadn’t heard it expressed this way, though I can understand it conceptually.
When producing art, it seems to me that “minimizing redundancy” is not particularly inspiring. Couldn’t the same idea be expressed in positive terms, something along the lines of “essential variety”? Or perhaps “essential differentiation”, as in the moment of natural conception?
I suppose minimum redundancy describes the circumstance of starting with too much material and trimming it down to the art, as would be the perspective of a sculptor starting with a block of wood or stone. Or, in user interface design, your fairground arcade analogy of an over-abundance of ideas, with “people asking the wrong questions, creating islands of designs that need to be countered and trimmed back to the one best design for the user of interest.” (The K.I.S.S. of Death for User Interface Design) Perhaps this is the task you’re normally faced with.
Essential variety describes the opposite circumstance of building something from nothing, a more inspiring concept for me.