Art as an Evolutionary Fitness Indicator
To be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low-fitness individuals to produce. Applied to human art, this suggests that beauty equals difficulty and high cost. We find attractive those things that could have been produced only by people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy, endurance, hand-eye coordination, fine motor control, intelligence, creativity, access to rare materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time. Also, like bow...
notesThe artwork must connect to the potential mate and communicate the fitness of the artist, but it cannot be too errudite, or it becomes elite art and the communication becomes noise.
Artists Work Alone, Scientists Collaborate
Any artist or novelist would understand—some of us do not produce their best when directed. We expect the artist, the novelist and the composer to lead solitary lives, often working at home. While a few of these creative individuals exist in institutions or universities, the idea of a majority of established novelists or painters working at the 'National Institute for Painting and Fine Art' or a university 'Department of Creative Composition' seems mildly amusing. By contrast, alarm greets ...
1 It is considered irresponsible for scientists to work alone.
Why Not Creative Commons with a Caveat?
I realize the whole point is to get a lot of free content out there, especially content that can be mashed up, but why won’t Creative Commons provide an option along the lines of this: Write to me and tell me what you want to do with my music. If I like it, you can do so immediately. If I don’t like what you want to do, you can still do it, but you will have to wait six months. Or, perhaps, you will have to go through six rounds of arguing back and forth with me about it, but then you can... notesWhy not a license that requires you to contact the artist and pitch your mashup idea? Why not allow the artist to put a disclaimer that they don't approve of your mashup?
Bernie Cosell on Java
Java didn't feel right. My old reflexes hit me. Java struck me as too authoritarian. Thats one of the reasons why I mentioned that Perl felt so good, because it's got the safety and the checks but it is so damn multidimensioned that the artist part of me has a lot of free board to express things early and to think about the right way do things. I have some freedom.
When I first messed with Java—^this was /vhen it was little baby language, of course—I said, "Oh, this is just another one... notesDescribing his first impressions of it as authoritarian and designed for not-so-good programmers.
Roger Ebert's Response to Clive Barker
Let's turn again to the golden boy. As you meet his haughty gaze, let me read you some of the things Roger Ebert has written about video games and art.
"I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist."
"Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices."
"Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
At one point, Clive Barker pleaded, "I'm jus... notesBarker argues that video games allow us to escape reality, Ebert retorts that we need to engage reality.
Experienced Becoming Replaced with Facsimile
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist’s vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.
As admittedly useful as the Internet is, ea... notesWe are replacing the real world, real experience, with images and film, replicating it, but the experience is degraded in the replication.
The Beauty of a Flower
I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree, I think. And he says--"you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing." And I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as r...Why science makes the world more beautiful by providing insights into its beauty. This doesn't just apply to something commonly considered beautiful, like a flower, but to all of the world, natural and technological, to simple rocks, sand, wind, stars, planets, the sun. We scientists are a keenly aware of the molecular organization, epic history, thermodynamics, universal scale, wave phenomena, and everything else that goes into even the most mundane details of our existence.
