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November 27, 2002
Tabor's talk at Doors
I'm getting on a plane now, and I didn't want to leave any draft postings waiting in MT. And hey! This one's about half-formed thoughts anyway.
I've just read Philip Tabor's Doors presentation, a talk that at the time sort of washed right over me, but which I now find to be a really lovely little gem. (More about Tabor.)
Of our usual mode of data apprehension, he said: "We're not seeking a specific piece of information. We're accumulating a semi-random collection of data, ideas and gut feelings which have no immediate or apparent use.
We build up this semi-random cloud of mental stuff to equip ourselves with a continually updated 'feel' for events-so that, when in the hazy future a need or opportunity arises, facts and intuitions will hopefully fuse into patterns that allow us to take actions appropriate to their context. We also hope that, while wandering and wondering in this space, we might stumble across valuable facts or ideas which, had we sought them, might not have been found. Let's call this imaginary cloud 'a space for half-formed thoughts'....a 'daydream engine.'"
As Tabor points out, the imagined "generative space" he's talking about is quite an old concept: oral storytelling techniques often included mental visualizations of spaces and objects in them to jog the memory and create associations. The turn of the 20th century saw lots of artists and philosophers trying to describe and visualize spatial relationships that didn't exist in reality.
Italian Futurism and one strand of French Cubism in particular explored spatial relationships that couldn't be seen. It's no coincidence that at about the same time, a literal but invisible "fourth dimension of space" (and other higher dimensions) was being explored by scientists and mathematicians. Other new developments, like microscopy (yet another connection with Doors of Perception) and the discovery of invisible x-rays proved the existance of other unseen spaces and flows. As Tabor points out, even the previous scientific paradigm of an all-pervasive "ether" that these new discoveries helped overturn was one of flow. The popular French philosopher Henri Bergson articulated all of these ideas in an understandable package, based (surprise!) around the idea of "Flow." (By the way, both contemporary philosopher Patricia de Martelaere's Doors of Perception talk and Derrick de Kerckhove's Archis essay about flow could have been lifted nearly verbatim from Bergson's writings from the 1910s.) (Here's a good short summary of Mark Antliff's definitive book about Bergson and art in c. 1910-20.)
Tabor summarizes the generative space of his "daydream engine" as:
- Its metaphor is spatial, but its spatial character is not limited by the constraints of real space and physics
- It contains flowing patterns that reflect incoming data about the world. But we don't just see these patterns: we sense them as sounds and vibrations; we feel them as wind in hair, taste on tongue, tension in muscles
- Informational patterns are manifested in varying densities of this smoky space; and
- We can sharpen the outlines of things, make them harder and clearer. But we'd only do so when we feel our ideas are ready to coalesce.
Matt beat me to posting pretty much the same quotation. Anyway, it was good stuff. There seems to be a lot loosely connected to these ideas: “seamful design” and “adaptive design”. No particular connection to Cubism around 1913 that I can think of there, though.
Posted by Andrew at November 27, 2002 11:17 AM