On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:10:49 -0800, charlie b
wrote:

But machines only do EXACTLY what you tell them to do, with very basic
instructions. While some interesting "art", be it 2D images or sounds,
computer generated stuff seldom deals with aesthetic things well,
or consistently. When it comes to "soul" in furniture making I'll still
go with "wetware" driving tools and muscles.

I think we've only really scratched the surface in understanding how
math plays into the underlying fundamentals of what makes a thing
beautiful. You look at a fractal and there's this thing more
complicated than anything we could come up with, and yet it's based on
something simple. Music is math. You need not be aware of the math
to make great music, but the number of people who can actually do it
is limited. For the rest of us, let's take any help we can get.
Being able to hit a baseball is math. Again, you can be oblivious to
the math and be the best hitter in the world, and undertanding the
math doesn't mean you can hit the ball.

Imagine a computer program that could spit out designs based on
formulas and you could sit back and say No, No, No, Interesting but
No, No, Hmmm... what if I switched that around like such and such
and...

They make 2d and 3d images out of fractals, they make music out of
them, who wants to try furniture?

Some things lend themselves to abstraction - no interplay between
theoretical and real world. That's where the "workmanship of risk"
approach CAN more consistently produce good or even great pieces.

How much of our own work is copying what some other person made? In a
lot of ways we're just really inefficient and inaccurate CNC machines
substituting our own preferences and trying to make up for our
mistakes.


-Leuf