tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post4468757301852716813..comments2024-01-11T15:12:49.433-05:00Comments on Tao of Photography by Andy Ilachinski: Traversing an N-Dimensional Aesthetic SpaceAndy Ilachinskihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14572501787099507666noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-53994345440432865122009-11-14T05:01:47.385-05:002009-11-14T05:01:47.385-05:00Andy, If you haven't heard it, you'd love ...Andy, If you haven't heard it, you'd love the audio series "Joseph Campbell on James Joyce - Wings of Art"<br />It is a fascinating talk on Joyce's theory of the aesthetic. I think the quotes Campbell has on Art in general are some of the best I've heard/read.tracehttp://traceimages.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-44810396874844616922009-04-07T17:37:00.000-05:002009-04-07T17:37:00.000-05:00Isn't asking "is there a universal aesthetic meta-...Isn't asking "is there a universal aesthetic meta-map" like begging "tell me about tao"? The more deeply one asks about universal realities, the more likely it is that any answers won't be universally true. "The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao", and all that. (Stephen Mitchell's version)<BR/><BR/>Aligning the above thought with the other commentators' thoughts about subjectivity and ilachina's mention of quantum uncertainty, I have a prospective definition to float:<BR/><BR/>subjectivity - that which emerges in others when a universal invariant manifests in oneselfAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-46104110999746160422009-03-28T04:32:00.000-05:002009-03-28T04:32:00.000-05:00Your whole dream gets blown to smithereens, by the...Your whole dream gets blown to smithereens, by the fractal-nature of Universe:<BR/><BR/>The laws of physics that are "visible" at the nuclear scale, aren't electro/chemistry: they are nuclear.<BR/><BR/>The laws of physics that are "visible" at the galactic scale are neither nuclear, nor electro/chemical: but are different, again, and less "personal".<BR/><BR/>--<BR/><BR/>The concept of "beauty" in Joe McNally's mind is oft horrifying, to me, and what I know to be beauty would likely be alien / incognizable to him.<BR/><BR/>What he considers *funny*, however...<BR/><BR/>( photoproject )<BR/><A HREF="http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2009/01/16/where-is-lauries-hair/" REL="nofollow">http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2009/01/16/where-is-lauries-hair/</A><BR/><BR/>or this:<BR/><A HREF="http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/sketch2.jpg" REL="nofollow">http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/sketch2.jpg</A><BR/><BR/>I <I>love</I> this one...<BR/><A HREF="http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/maine_girl_with_horse.jpg" REL="nofollow">http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/maine_girl_with_horse.jpg</A><BR/><BR/>Found it!<BR/><A HREF="http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/_jlm1656.jpg" REL="nofollow">http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/_jlm1656.jpg</A><BR/><BR/>sometimes, he gets it <I>sooo</I> right.<BR/><BR/>To me...<BR/><BR/>Therefore, any "dimension" that differentiated some artist from others, would be useless in other comparisons.<BR/><BR/>Any "dimension" that differentiated "beauty" from "opposite-of-beauty" would be valid in some comparisons, only, and invalid in others.<BR/><BR/>I consider tranquil vitality to be beautiful.<BR/><BR/>I consider abstract elegance to be beautiful.<BR/><BR/>I consider living/spiritual Totality to be beautiful.<BR/><BR/>Some consider abuse to be beautiful.<BR/><BR/>Others consider sickness & death to be beautiful.<BR/><BR/>Not only that, but we're looking at a teensy subset of the animals on this one world.<BR/><BR/>What's beautiful to a crustacean?<BR/><BR/>What's beautiful to rabies, or rabies-deformed-brain/mind?<BR/><BR/>That's the problem with trying to find Universal Subjectivity, it's either Universal, <B>or</B> it's Subjective!<BR/><BR/>--<BR/><BR/>PS, if you want a method that's 5x as fast as Rinzai sect practice, for gaining zen, then use The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to get into R-Mind, and meditate/train IN THAT mode: Totality is made of it, and *real* meditation can be, in that mode. Progress, <I>from there</I> is phenomenal.<BR/><BR/>It *isn't* a "Mere Coincidence(tm)" <BR/>( scientism's Magic Dismissal -- if mind arranges something, is that Mere Coincidence? if one's religion insists that Consciousness isn't real, instead is "The Hard Problem", then... )<BR/>that meditation evolved in kanji & visual-symbol-language cultures, but had to be *brought in* to the left-brain-dominant ones, because it couldn't arise in the crippled "knowing" that words-mind is.<BR/><BR/>Experience it: you'll understand what I'm getting at.<BR/><BR/>Cheers,<BR/><BR/> -AntrygAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-47048295022327802162009-03-21T15:12:00.000-05:002009-03-21T15:12:00.000-05:00I may be over simplifying your problem, hocwever I...I may be over simplifying your problem, hocwever I understand it as "What set of features is capable of both minimizing the differnce in individual works on one artist, while maximizing the differences between the work of more than one artist?" If that correctly states the problem, the answer is, the artist(s). The apature in which the artist is defined varies depending upon the discipline.; shorter for photographers than for painters or composers.Furthermore, view humans as a quantum system decohereing into classical manifistations, (Kauffman, "Reinventing the Sacred.") each work is no more than an articulated probability among a wave function of probability. Consequently, the result of the solution to your problem sits along-side a myriad of adjacent possibilities, any one of which may be the primary resourse of the next work, making one wonder how meaningful the exercise.<BR/><BR/>Howard Goldson, hwgoldson@gmail.comAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-71974966895496349832009-03-20T16:51:00.000-05:002009-03-20T16:51:00.000-05:00I followed a link here from The Online Photographe...I followed a link here from The Online Photographer, and I'm very impressed. Very thoughtful posts.<BR/><BR/>Your thought experiments reminded me of Paul Churchland's <I>The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul</I>, where he explains a neural net program, I believe, that was created to learn how to recognize faces from photographs and do some sort of sorting procedure on them. The axes along which the computer learned to sort faces were not at all what a programmer might have chosen, and were difficult to interpret. You could see the images that the computer used as endpoints, but they wouldn't have been very helpful for any human needing guidance on the sorting task. I think Netflix is running into the same sort of issues with their recommendation engine where the categories we might intuitively sort with are not what ends up working. It could be that the feature set that defines beauty in photography is not one that is usable (if it exists). So we could feed pictures into our neural-net beauty identifier and have it confirm for us that something is beautiful, but we still wouldn't really have a recipe for beauty.<BR/><BR/>It also seems like artistic beauty and mathematical truth may be importantly different in that you can have degrees of beauty but not of truth. You can have degrees of mathematical elegance, I guess, but your proof either works or it doesn't, right? If true, that might complicate any translation.<BR/><BR/>The subject is very interesting, but it does also strike me as pretty implausible that beauty would be objective enough to do this sort of work. I think of the chapter titled "A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words" in Kundera's <I>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</I>, in which he explains what two of his characters mean by "woman," "cemetery," etc, and how those meanings are so shaped by their very different backgrounds such that they end up having very different interpretations of their shared experiences and seriously misunderstand each other.<BR/><BR/>Finally, have you seen <A HREF="http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/02/22/beauty/" REL="nofollow">this article</A> (or one like it) about Horace Brock, who claims that beauty, at least in some areas, can be mathematically defined?tkhhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03396789090773395823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-58614920003884795222009-03-20T09:20:00.000-05:002009-03-20T09:20:00.000-05:00What is the underlying meta-pattern that connects ...What is the underlying meta-pattern that connects the patterns?<BR/><BR/>perceptionAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-56652514623147710232009-03-10T11:10:00.000-05:002009-03-10T11:10:00.000-05:00Cedric, as is becoming your meta-pattern ;-) your ...Cedric, as is becoming your meta-pattern ;-) your insightful comment both goes to the heart of the blog post and uncovers a (not-quite-invisible) few meta-Koans scattered throughout.<BR/><BR/>Of course, the difficulty with all of this (the post, life, and the univserse), is the impossibility of truly objective discourse. Our entire lives are but pointers (and sometimes, equally as paradoxically, stronger pointers for *others* than ourselves), as we wrestle with what *we* mean, struggling to find words where none can possibly exist.<BR/><BR/>Still, I cannot help but wonder, whether it is my deliberately willful *act* to fathom an aesthetic meta-pattern that is itself what renders me incapable of apprehending "it" (the "truth", the "meta pattern"), or whether there is truly an uncrossable chasm between (what we ordinarily think of as) subjective and objective worlds. In a way that is very reminiscent of quantum uncertainty among complementary variables, a "scientist" may indeed be capable of penerating deep into an "objectively aesthetic space," but - precisely in so doing! - will also be blind to the otherwise "obvious" subjective truths even casually visible to the shaman.Andy Ilachinskihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14572501787099507666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-41363918256615863302009-03-10T06:01:00.000-05:002009-03-10T06:01:00.000-05:00Hi Andy,This is a most thought-provoking post. I c...Hi Andy,<BR/>This is a most thought-provoking post. I confess to having read it multiple times not so much to decipher its meaning but rather to suss out the intent. Unlike Steve Durbin above I do not possess the background (artistically, academically or scientifically) to fully understand the details of your "problem". However the question you raise about a <I>"universal aesthetic meta-map"</I> reminds me of the quest sought by alchemists of old. The transmutation of one thing into another, in your case, the transmutation (albeit in mental terms) of beauty into truth. I'm not sure if I am on the right path here but that is the thought that came to mind.<BR/>To me, the question seems like a koan and perhaps that is intended, after all you start off by comparing the problem to <I>"a transient stepping-stone"</I>. You state that the answer lies in finding <I>"an objective language (or, least as objective a language as possible) to describe the subjective propensities of, and differences between, individual painters, musicians, or photographers."</I> But is this not quite unlikely, the <I>"objective language"</I> part I mean? Language by nature, is dualistic or subjective. Even if you could come up with some words or parameters approaching objectivity they would only at best be objective to one or to some but never to all. In other words I would say that the answer cannot, in reality, be found either in language or in the mind. So this puts the question back into koan territory.And with that in "mind", Christopher Alexander whom you say suggested that <I>"purely subjective measures of 'beauty' have an objective dimension"</I> gives a perfect paradox to the whole problem. Because a koan is often paradoxical in nature in order to help us alter our perception of reality. As a paradox your problem makes no sense and as a koan it tells us that it is how we think that makes no sense. My guess is that the mind must see the problem more simply before it will cease to be a paradox.<BR/><BR/>Oh... and <I>"timeless path toward gradual self-enlightenment"</I>... that's funny :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-52257126407235723382009-03-09T14:41:00.000-05:002009-03-09T14:41:00.000-05:00Steve,Thanks for your thoughts and the link to wha...Steve,<BR/><BR/>Thanks for your thoughts and the link to what looks like a fascinating paper. As you say (and I don't dispute), the feature space I describe is more fanciful than real - there is simply too much "subjectivity" to be captured by objective manner. My interest, though, is more to use this "concept" as a conceptualization of what such a space *might* look like. And, as you point out, we *do* have a fuzzy impression of it via some quasi-objective features we've been able to identify and articulate.<BR/><BR/>Note that Christopher Alexander (whom I mention in a postscript), in his magnum opus (which is truly cosmic in scope!) *does* suggest - extremely provocatively - that heretofore purely subjective measures of "beauty" have an objective dimension. That is a radical suggestion to be sure; but science (and art) often owes progress to just such seemingly "absurd" proclamations.Andy Ilachinskihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14572501787099507666noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-44749928011652895932009-03-09T14:40:00.000-05:002009-03-09T14:40:00.000-05:00See Rudolf Arnheim's workSee Rudolf Arnheim's workAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493601.post-52342960698821164212009-03-08T18:36:00.000-05:002009-03-08T18:36:00.000-05:00Your concept is intriguing; I feel fortunate to ha...Your concept is intriguing; I feel fortunate to have the background to appreciate it. But I do have a major objection: you seem to assume that there exists a more or less objective "feature space" that might function as you describe. Yet I believe that the evaluation of artworks--not only their scoring on various feature dimensions, but the nature of the dimensions themselves--is a somewhat subjective thing. If so, your musings might apply to each viewer's aesthetic space on a one-by-one basis, but be difficult to reconcile overall. On the other hand, perhaps we share some cultural proclivities.<BR/><BR/>To me the somewhat astonishing fact is that, as you point out, humans are fairly capable, with study, of recognizing and distinguishing among many artists. Though maybe it's not so surprising as it seems at first blush: with only a dozen features, and allowing a score of high, medium, or low on each, that's potentially enough to separate half a million (3^12=531,441) artists from each other, if each pair differs along at least one of those 12 dimensions. (I'm ignoring the variability within a single artist's production.)<BR/><BR/>As a case in point, I just noticed that my very recent "Dark Water" series has a significant amount in common with some of your "Process" portfolio. But, I suppose fortunately, I don't think anyone would have too much trouble distinguishing after s little bit of observation. The provocative thing here is that we have similar academic backgrounds. Artistic determinism?<BR/><BR/>P.S. Regarding contrast and similar differentiators: you might be interested in papers related to <A HREF="http://people.csail.mit.edu/soonmin/photolook/" REL="nofollow">this work on photographic style</A>.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com