Comment by yason
14 years ago
Oh, those were the times.
What makes working in a finite, very limited set of resources so rewarding is that those limitations turn mere programming into art.
You can't have art unless you constrain yourself somehow. Some people paint with dots only and some people express themselves in line art. If they allowed themselves any imaginable method that is applicable, they wouldn't be doing art. They could just take a photograph of a setting, and that photograph wouldn't say a thing to anyone.
Endless bit-twiddling and struct packing may turn trivial methods into huge optimization-ridden hacks and not get you too far vertically but given only few resources, those hacks are required to turn the theoretic approach into a real application that you can actually do useful work with. Those hacks often exhibit ingenious thinking and many examples of that approach art—and the best definitely are. And any field where ingenious thinking is required will push the whole field forward.
Similarly, for example, using a Python set as a rudimentary spell-checker is fast, easy, and convenient but it's no hack because it requires no hacking. It's like taking that photograph, or using a Ferrari to reverse from your garage out to the street and then driving it back. Which ingenious tricks are you required to accomplish that? None.
The bleeding edge has simply moved and it must lie somewhere these days, of course. Maybe computer graphics—although it has always demonstrated the capability to lead the bleeding edge so there's actually no news there. The fact is that the bleeding edge is more scattered. Early on, every computer user could feel and sense the bleeding edge because it revolved around tasks so basic that you could actually measure with your own eyes. Similarly, even a newbie programmer would face the same limitations early on and learn about how others had done it. Now you can stash gigabytes of data into your heap without realizing that you did, and wonder why the computer felt sluggish for a few seconds. Or how would you compare two state of the art photorealistic, interactive real-time 3D graphics demos? There's so much going on beyond the curtains that it's difficult to evaluate the works without having extensive domain knowledge in most the technologies used.
Findind the bleeding edge has become a field in itself.
I understand your general thesis, but your statements about art just seem completely off.
> You can't have art unless you constrain yourself somehow.
> They could just take a photograph of a setting, and that photograph wouldn't say a thing to anyone.
While I realize that art is subjective, I'm very surprised that you would put these conditions around what you consider to be art. Especially since it seems to be a condemnation of a large subset of photography.
Just curious, but would you like to give me a couple of examples of recognized good art that isn't constrained by some rule, method, technique, or approach?
A large subset of photography isn't art. In fact, most everything people create isn't art per se—if it were, there wouldn't be good art nor bad art, just art and lots and lots of it. Spend a few hours on some photo-sharing site and see what people shoot. They're photographs, but rarely art.
But there are grades of art. Look at this search: http://goo.gl/2mLVI — a thousand sunset pictures, while maybe pretty, aren't generally art and not because it's the same sun in each picture. Most of these pictures have nothing to say. Now, some object lit by the sunset or silhouetted against it gives a lot more potential to be art. A carefully crafted study of a sunset in the form of a photograph can be art, but it requires finding certain constraints first, finding a certain angle that makes the photograph a message, and eventually conveying through the lens something that makes the viewer stop for a moment, to give an idea, to give a feeling, to give a confusion.
I'm genuinely mystified by your response. Art is an entirely subjective endeavor. You seem to think that you can decide what is and is not art. Frankly, you're not qualified for that task (read: no one is).
> A large subset of photography isn't art
> a thousand sunset pictures, while maybe pretty, aren't generally art
Seriously? Because you get to decide? Your response just seems incredibly egocentric. You can define what art means to you all day long, but you can not define what art means to everyone.
I don't think so. Photography as art has never been just pointing and shooting. You have to find the right natural lightning, or the right facial expression, or the right color composition, etc. All those restrictions make the photography an art that no anyone can achieve (at least, without extensive training and effort).
I strongly disagree that extensive training is required to create art. Art comes in many forms, and it's a quite myopic to imply that only professionals can create art.
I guess we'll just have to disagree.