Is an Engineer an Artist?
nautil.us
nautil.us
Most notions of those terms seem to be based on a picture of exemplars or prototypes of those kinds of things, and most determinations of whether somebody/something is an artist/art seem to be based on intuitive similarity comparisons with those exemplars/prototypes.
[EDIT: just thinking out loud, "art" seems commonly, though implicitly, seen as having defining characteristics of ineffability and high cultural status, so people's views about whether X is art often really come down to whether they think it seems sufficiently ineffable and of sufficient cultural status, though they wouldn't say that's the basis for their view]
Maybe meaningless purely in terms of getting to a concrete answer, but IMO collaboratively grappling with and exploring our intuitive ideas is useful, especially when people have different starting perspectives. E.g. this entire thread.
The world is not math, we can't always build our definitions from axioms. Sometimes analogical reasoning is the most accessible way to explore a concept.
I fully agree.
I'd like to see more discussion about what those terms mean when "is X art/an-artist" questions come up.
I do think, though, that the meaning of those terms is often not discussed -- or perhaps, not honestly discussed, in a way that isn't simply serving people's prior judgement on the question -- at the times those questions come up.
Your point still stands of course.
While it doesn't cover all of art in a philosophy of art sense, it covers what I think most people think of when they think of art. Maybe you'll find it helpful (or better yet maybe you'll teach me a lesson).
> Arts are an ever evolving set of methods for communicating feeling from one person to another. [...] There are other ways you might use art, but this aspect of it is the most different from the other end of the spectrum like business or scientific writing where you shape ideas.
IMO, if things like novels and poems are considered art then it can be communicating truths, but truths that are difficult to communicate in explicit, theoretical terms.
> By manipulating their feelings, the artist is in essence influencing the viewer’s conception of their motivations.
This bit wasn't entirely clear to me and I thought it could be fleshed out a bit more.
> Perhaps the true use of art is to allow ourselves to explore different states of being and make better decisions.
It might fit under that but, as I said above, I think it can be used as a means to communicate truths. Eg to broaden someone's perspective on the world
> IMO, if things like novels and poems are considered art then it can be communicating truths, but truths that are difficult to communicate in explicit, theoretical terms.
You're absolutely right. I think that things like novels and poems are located a little farther towards the center on the spectrum I mentioned than something that purely communicates feeling (like an abstract painting). I think the reason they are so successful is that they deliver one or more logically digestible messages along with a feeling. It often seems that people aren't convinced by logic, but rather by a shift in how they feel about something.
> This bit wasn't entirely clear to me and I thought it could be fleshed out a bit more.
Again, you're absolutely right. I felt that way too but I ran out of steam at the time. I think I have the energy to expand on it now. :) What I was trying to say was that your motivations shift based on how you feel, and the more powerful the feeling, the potentially larger the shift. Something is out of balance if you're feeling something very strongly. You'll be motivated to correct that imbalance, and in the process consider a different course of action.
I talked to a friend that had taken a course on AI and minds at MIT and he said he considered emotions a filter on decision space.
> It might fit under that but, as I said above, I think it can be used as a means to communicate truths. Eg to broaden someone's perspective on the world
I haven't quite figured out what a truth is yet. It's definitely a kind of message that emotionally resonates. I sort of sense that the framework I proposed could be worked to encompass them, but I haven't done enough thinking on it yet. In this article I was focusing very narrowly on the extreme case of pure feeling to distill important truths about it, but the middle ground is where most of the important stuff happens. Simple models are good for investigating complex phenomenal since you can see exactly how they work and break down.
I'd be happy to hear your ideas!
ok, I understand what you mean.
> I haven't quite figured out what a truth is yet. It's definitely a kind of message that emotionally resonates.
I believe that the universe exists independently of whatever view of it we have, and that at its foundations truth means the meaning of the information reflects how the universe is.
So in how I see it, the truth of something is orthogonal to its degree of emotional resonance.
I too agree that the universe objectively exists separately from our minds. However, there are many facts about the world, most of them banal. The ones that are useful to us or make the world feel more understandable regardless of their ultimate truth are the ones that resonate. In particular, art often expresses emotional truths about ourselves and our relationships to others. "We're all doomed." "We're all saved." These have little objective reality but can powerfully affect us at the right moment.
There is no "uniqueness" in engineering, there is only a balancing of time, money, reliability, reusability and other purely mathematical concepts. If something is unique then it is often better than alternatives or worse than alternatives. Engineering can be considered a sport much easier that an art.
Art can have seperate equivelents. Like a paintng of a beautiful landscape or a painting depicting pain. Both may have the same price but both are unique. Even two portraits of the same person will be different simply because two individuals did it or how style changes with time.
And therein lies the art. An experienced engineer can come up with simple, elegant solutions that balance those things. Novice engineers struggle to find a good balance and tend to over-complicate the solution.
Crafts are things like coffee mugs or portraits - they require immense skill and can only benefit from creativity, but don't really have anything to say about anything. That doesn't mean they're not good or valuable, though.
If you walk into a garage it can be dirty, greasy and disorganized. It can also be labeled, clean and organized. Hardly considered art
its completely unreasable because all the variable names have been mangled and there is no whire space to organize the blocks. At this point it looks like a puzzle.
If you consider the algorithm an art, I disagree. Algorithms are either more efficient them their predecessors or are efficient for a niche.
If it was purely mathematical, it would all be pretty straightforward.
I was under the impression we were talking about engineers here. But if we are talking from an organizational standpoint, your goal is to have an efficient, lowcost team. Management is not an art just like farming is not an art. There is a right way to do things to maximize money, right way to fo things "ethically" and wrong ways to do things which lead to failure.
Your own personality will often get in the way of your job. It is pretty straightforward because the goal is ultimately efficiency and every "question" has a logical "answer".
If not, there's probably still some art left in management.
Art itself isnt imperfect, every creation has value and is a mix of natures effect on the artist abd the artists own intentions. Imperfect management just leads to turnover of valuable employees, wastefulness and low morale
In the Art World though it's been a raging argument for practically the whole of modernity: who's an artist and who isn't?
Marcel Duchamp proposed that anyone who says they're an artist is an artist, because intent is what makes something art. Likewise anything made as art, is art. (This says nothing about good, bad, or other judgements of the artwork or even the artist.)
Joseph Beuys proposed that every human being is by definition an artist, because the inherent creativity in all human thought and social activity is what makes the difference. He also thought of social systems as inherently artistic -- even your boring old office. Thus the artwork (or brick wall, insurance claim, whatever) can be a more or less interesting artefact but the art itself happens elsewhere.
The Duchampian idea is pretty radical in that it removes authority to confer artist-ness. This is similar in a way to how the software revolution has removed the authority to define an engineer.
The Beuysian idea is of course much more radical, because if you accept it then the question itself becomes nonsense.
I think it's worth noting here that the Art World, as embodied by galleries and museums and professorships and all the trappings of payment and recognition, has mostly come around to Duchamp's point of view about who and what is an artist or art; but demands for itself the power to decide who is a serious artist, and who is a good one. The rich seem to be cool with this; the poor maybe less so.
(I did read TFA/watch TFvideo, and I think the point would be the same but the attention different if Mr. Gallagher had said "poet" instead of "artist.")
Of course anything can be an artistic medium, a lot of the work in the demo scene or from _why I believe qualifies as art, but not the bulk of programming. I say the same thing for graphic design, or wood-working, or even photography.
It's by no means easy to draw this line. It's at the core of the concept of "selling out", and it's fraught on both sides. Many accusations of selling out are due to envy, many defenses of selling out are due to self-justification. Nevertheless, there is a core concept underneath it all that's important: art can derive a lot of meaning from being non-essential and non-utilitarian.
The question to ask oneself is, what would be observably different about the world if engineers are artists, vs. if they aren't? Are we asking whether engineers should be eligible for the Turner Prize? Whether colleges should put an engineering professor on the Arts faculty? Or if there's no particular observable difference, then why not pick any old answer that pleases you?
I think that's where these discussions really fall apart. Sure algorithms or equations or schematics could be very artistic. What "art" is is highly subjective, but you should never forget that art often inspires people and leads them to new places. Its not the only lens to view art, certainly, but its one I like to pull out when these discussions happen. After all, if we call everything art, then nothing is art.
Using engineering skills and tools for artistic purpose is one of my biggest hobbies.
Please don't hammer the latter one too hard. It's Rust, but not load tested (also on a shared sever). I'm also working on an improved speech algorithm that I hope to finish this weekend. So yeah, please don't kill it or share beyond HN. (Comments and criticism welcome.)
For most engineers, I think the answer is "no": we focus on functionality and efficiency and while some of that may go towards the happiness of the end-user, what we build is generally not consumed directly by that end-user but rather the byproduct.
But...there are cases where you observe a mechanism or piece of code that is not only efficient but beautiful in its simplicity. Perhaps laymen don't appreciate it, but fellow engineers can.
I think that in such cases where the creator goes beyond "good enough" and makes an effort to elevate their creation to a point where peers can point to it and go "Yes! That is how to do it!", engineering can be art.
Depends if it was done with artistic intent (can't personally name an artist which has created a work in that medium but it is a medium so it is possible) or if it was done just as a clever foam design.
Craft and art are not the same thing.
Personal touches in programming are rare and often bad. Going past "good enough" is rarely considered art as its done for code cleanliness or efficiency.
I would never hire a programmer for funny comments. I might hire a battista for her art
But I think we can agree that an engineer has different goals than an artist even in the broadest definition of both.
An engineer is someone who uses well understood solutions and techniques to solving problems that involve the physical world. This is distinct from science, which tries to discover new ways to solve problems or learn new things about the physical world. Often you need to use engineering to do science. So often that the scientists spend a lot of time waiting around for the engineers to move them along. (See: LHC).
The vast majority of engineers, however, are definitely not artists.
This implies, to me, that the author seems to have an almost-classist regard for artists (however he may define the term.) We certainly need visionaries in a variety of disciplines. Encouraging visionaries is one thing that "makes [our country] worth defending." Why unnecessarily burden visionaries with pigeonholes not of their choosing? Certainly enlighten them as to their available paths, their strengths ... but please don't discourage someone from being a visionary engineer by declaring that they'll never be as 'important' as an artist.
Should engineering require art? Maybe our built environment would be pleasanter if more of it did.
As you probably know, in the art world there's a nontrivial business of fabricators. Consider a giant lamp-bear[0]. That's pretty hard to build: it has to not fall over and kill the students, it has to survive the winter, it has to be transportable from wherever you build it.
There's a whole cottage industry that just does things like that. (Not all of them large of course.)
Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists? Probably the closest anyone's come to that is having murals on public buildings.
UI/UX designers are not "artists" by conventional definition, and architects are in such a special zone of "engineering-plus" that some of us end up called Software Architects.
In other words: his exceptional aesthetic sense doesn't make Jony Ive an Artist except in a let's-decide-what-an-artist-is discussion. Which this is, of course. :-)
Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists?
Regarding the general debate here of engineer vs artist, I gave up on it. We have to first agree on what is meant by "art". By some definitions, engineering is very clearly art. By others, it's very clearly not.
I know a few full-time artists who make at least as much as I do. They in turn know a lot of artists who make WAY more than I do.
Sure, I chose a lower-risk path, but was the higher risk as extreme as my young self thought?
There aren't hundreds of thousands of artists making good money, but I think there are likely thousands.
They all probably know the same artists though. Popularity is a bitch.
I liked what dasil003 brought up about the demo scene; I agree with that sentiment.
That italic part added by the author changed the context in a very meaningful way. Before realizing that was added by author I became more inteeested in that conversation.
Such a wise and thought provoking addition to an otherwise disappointing conversation.
"Italics mine" means that the current author (in this case, Brian Gallagher) italicized a portion of the passage to emphasize it, it doesn't meant that they wrote the italicized text. That's still part of Robert Wilson's quote, he actually said that.
Thanks for the explanation.
Haven't you ever looked at a code or software project and gotten that distinct feeling of awe that arises in you when you realize you are looking at something high quality, something that required real craftsmanship to make? That is art.
It most recently happened to me when I discovered Vue.js. As a diehard angular user, Vue was just so clean, so simple, so beautiful - a breath of fresh air in a warzone of competing monolithic javascript frameworks.
Art has no function. Craft has function.
Can you name an art piece that has no function?