Extravagaria Workshop Wiki

DarrenThemes

• Search for Truth
  • What is truth: modern, postmodern
  • "Truth" and "reality" as conveniences
  • Moment of truth
• Art

  Creativity and Science

  Logic
  • Explaining as understanding
  • Becoming clear
  • Moving from an internal work to an external one
  • Personal object -> art object

• Understanding Creativity (in science and in art)
  • History of a discipline
  • Its most creative practitioners
  • Its masterpieces

• The Creative Process
  • Do artists and scientists (and mathematicians) all work the same way?
  • Is the process the same for creative and ordinary folks?
  • Defocused attention
  • Try out (every) ideas that come along
  • Associative thinking and revision
  • Generate & Evaluate
  • Revise & Tinker
  • Explore & Describe; explore and present (map making, writing)
  • Learn & Improve (through discomfort)
  • "Turning the problem over"
  • Stigmergy-getting something down (on paper) to look at; triggers
  • Gather up the "strange night barkings"
  • "Mostly I'm thinking about the not I, the I bar, the bright I, the I of our forefathers, the I liking pie"
  • Tinker, engineer, understand = art or science
  • Constraints/rules

• Aesthetic Judgments
  • Simplicity
  • Harmony, symmetry, and balance
  • Dissonant, asymmetric, unbalanced, complex, & unexpected

• Writing as search for truth and communication
  • Audience
  • Intent of the author
• How much artistic knowledge do scientists require in order to avoid producing ghastly results?
• The ebb and flow of favour between depth and breadth. Specialization and generalization
• Creativity in Computer Science
  • What is the role of creativity?
  • When does CS seem more like art?
  • When do imaginative phases and leaps into the unknown occur?
  • How can defocused attention be fostered?

• Jargon and other ways of creating boundaries between disciplines
• Teaching science/engineering using the techniques of teaching art
  • Teaching writing
  • Teaching how to draw or create illustrations

• Improvisation
  • Exploring a space of possibilities
  • Practicing having new ideas
  • "a reckless encounter with the unexpected"
  • Why does working in a group make one more creative/productive
  • Backup bands, cheering
  • Taking turns taking solos
  • Symphony orchestra with conductor
  • Jazz band with revolving soloists
• Exploration
  • Some software people require a map; others rapid prototype
  • Exploration followed by coding
  • Success and productivity when exploration is required
• Express versus execute (run) (programs)
  • What if programs always worked and expression was what programmers did?
  • Hypertext programs
  • How do you see code?
  • Degrees of "it runs"

• What kinds of places or contexts foster creativity?
• Effects of "the no mind" and the "still pond mind"
  • Could we ever describe programming (or doing science) in the same terms as we describe a master artist doing a masterpiece?
• The role of the coach or mentor
  • In sports
  • The writing mentor
  • In XP and other software methodologies
• Representation (science) versus Evocation (art)
  • Metaphors
    • Representational symbols that assist in the understanding of the concept represented, ideally leading to a broader understanding of a whole class of related concepts.
  • Shortcutsremindingframing
• Science as created reality in a laboratory

• Truth based on juries/judgments
  • Truth in the scientific sense, is a set of hypotheses (see below) about a system which hold true within some set of interactions with the system.

• What is an observation?
  • An observation is the perception of characteristics of a system that manifest themselves while interacting with the system in a particular manner.

• What is a falsifiable hypothesis (when the observations required to falsify are based on a theory of observation)?
  • One in which observations predicted by it are not observed while interacting with the system in the prescribed manner.

  * Photography as an example of crossing the lines demarcating art and science

• The CameraObscura started out as a tool to assist painters to create accurate drawings.
• The invention of photo-reactive emultions has helped make the technology more accessible.
• Photography was used to assist art - photos of animals and people in motion, catalogues of flowers, exotic animals that (most) artists had no access to.
• Usage of photography as art was protested, objected to, logically explained as false & mechnistic by painters.
• But popularity of having your photo taken being more accessible to people who could not afford having their portrait painted has helped shift the balance of opinions, IMHO.
• Today, you have to remind people that there are known uses of photography as a sceintific tool - it is OBVIOUS it is an art...