Regruntled.com

Arthur Ganson’s sculpture, moving at one end, fixed at the other:

This machine was inspired by dreaming about gear ratios and considering the unexpected implications of exponential powers.

Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear, even embed it in concrete.

Another experiment.

Here’s the result of a typo in one of my programs.  I left out a “-1″.  I’ll take creativity where I can find it.

My process, such as it is:

• I have an idea, like the Voronoi sudoku, so
• I write some code,
• Which generates some images,
• Which gives me ideas for changing the code.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  The process seems to work best when it’s slightly out of control.  How is it out of control?

• When I’m working on the code, I can’t visualize what the image will look like.
• I usually introduce some sort of randomness, which means I really can’t know what will happen.
• I make mistakes.

The result is that I surprise myself, I end up with something that’s not exactly what I expected.  This seems to be a nerdly recapitulation of something from Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art:

The medium should be resistant enough to prevent over-planning.

Joan of Z made these:

Another great recycled creation! When I found this vintage faux fur coat from the 70’s I knew it had possibilities! I have transformed it into any army of little plush guinea pigs with soft fleece tummies and removable microwavable rice bags inside.

I’m reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.  Her thesis is that creativity comes from the Creator, and the book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”.  I think this is totally wrong.

It’s true that we use the same word, “creator”, for both artists and gods, but it does not follow that artists and gods do the same sort of thing.  The Genesis story is “Let there be light”.  There are no preliminary sketches, no outlines, no rough drafts, no prototypes, no models… the Creation was definitely not the work of an Artist.

If we focus on the adjective, “creative”, it’s clear that evolution is a much better model of the creative process.  Evolution builds on what has gone before, and introduces new ideas in the form of mutations.  Genetic combination tries out many, many ideas at the same time, and natural selection culls the ones that don’t work.

Artists do the same thing.  They don’t create something from nothing, they build on what has gone before.  They try out new ideas.  They throw out the bad ideas and they keep trying new variations on the good ones.

The book succeeds in part by flattering the reader: what you are doing is god-like.  God as artist implies artist as god.  I confess to enjoying the god-as-mathematician and god-as-programmer versions of this theme, but a flattering analogy is not necessarily an accurate analogy.