art
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)
“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Samuel Arbesman’s “The Magic of Code” (2025)
“Enchantment and the belief in nonsense never disappeared in our modern scientific age. Similarly, the worlds of enchantment—or really, wonder—and disenchantment have existed alongside each other in the realm of computing. The utilitarian road of staid and corporate coding has always run beside the path walked by those delighted by the marvels of these machines,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Philip Ball’s “Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does” (2016)
“Perhaps the most curious thing about natural patterns is that they come from a relatively limited palette, recurring at very different size scales and in systems that might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another” (12). “What is a pattern, anyway? We usually think of it as something that repeats again… Continue reading
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch” (2019)
“intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine” (42). “No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always… Continue reading
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Keywords: No Expectations
No expectations is an approach to workflow as open-ended and non-determined. The mindset celebrates continual play on your musical system’s edges: exploring tools, trying things out, noticing how the sounds feel and work on you rather than having preset, a priori ideas of how you should use them. Play a few chords, turn a few… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon” (1993/2023) and “Perfect Wave” (2017)
“If images don’t do anything in this culture, if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything… Continue reading
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