Fascinating! Thanks for the summary of how you interpret these artists! But even though I didn’t have any insight into their work, I think I still understand what you’re trying to explain based on other experiences. But there I encounter another hurdle, probably parallel to my lacking understanding of these artists’ work.
I’ve been surrounded by design all my life, so I can look at a poster and see that it looks intentional but I can try as I may to create something of the sort myself and still see that it’s not even close. But that’s not actually what I want to say. What I want to say is rather that my exposure seems to have taught me to recognize something even though I don’t understand how it works. That’s a huge advantage for designers or artists who want to speak to me or to any other nonspecialist.
I’m afraid, however, that a lot of EA concepts that I would like to impart are too far removed by inferential distance for most people to ever recognize any intentionality. I hope I’m wrong. My experience with the board game Othello is quite aligned, though: I used to be pretty good, so when looking at some games of players better than me, I would see a move that would give me shivers and make me stare at the board in awe. I didn’t understand it, but it was surprising (“break the conventions”) and looked perfectly intentional. At the same time, it was usually clear to me when one of these better players just accidentally clicked the wrong field. If I hadn’t been pretty good at the game, though, I would’ve seen just a random chaos of black and white chips.
There was some study where people were asked to solve a number of hard language tasks, some of them unsolvable. Somehow people had an intuition for which tasks were solvable long before they managed to actually solve them. Maybe that is related to the effect that artists are using. But again it only worked because these people already had a lot of background in language.
Maybe the only ones whose interest in EA we can possibly pique using the most fine-tuned types of weirdness are a small fraction of young progressives at universities, and not even just for reasons of moral differences but because we can’t communicate EA ideas effectively enough to anyone else.
Fascinating! Thanks for the summary of how you interpret these artists! But even though I didn’t have any insight into their work, I think I still understand what you’re trying to explain based on other experiences. But there I encounter another hurdle, probably parallel to my lacking understanding of these artists’ work.
I’ve been surrounded by design all my life, so I can look at a poster and see that it looks intentional but I can try as I may to create something of the sort myself and still see that it’s not even close. But that’s not actually what I want to say. What I want to say is rather that my exposure seems to have taught me to recognize something even though I don’t understand how it works. That’s a huge advantage for designers or artists who want to speak to me or to any other nonspecialist.
I’m afraid, however, that a lot of EA concepts that I would like to impart are too far removed by inferential distance for most people to ever recognize any intentionality. I hope I’m wrong. My experience with the board game Othello is quite aligned, though: I used to be pretty good, so when looking at some games of players better than me, I would see a move that would give me shivers and make me stare at the board in awe. I didn’t understand it, but it was surprising (“break the conventions”) and looked perfectly intentional. At the same time, it was usually clear to me when one of these better players just accidentally clicked the wrong field. If I hadn’t been pretty good at the game, though, I would’ve seen just a random chaos of black and white chips.
There was some study where people were asked to solve a number of hard language tasks, some of them unsolvable. Somehow people had an intuition for which tasks were solvable long before they managed to actually solve them. Maybe that is related to the effect that artists are using. But again it only worked because these people already had a lot of background in language.
Maybe the only ones whose interest in EA we can possibly pique using the most fine-tuned types of weirdness are a small fraction of young progressives at universities, and not even just for reasons of moral differences but because we can’t communicate EA ideas effectively enough to anyone else.
I should’ve phrased this as a challenge. :-3