Author Archives: flowcreate
Surface Experimentation
First Figure
Can the activity of thinking / idea development be rendered tangible, be given form – Initial experiments:
- bringing children’s drawings into proximity with an image of the child.
- Do these images simply present form and surface or can integration be reached between the two?
…and does this begin to express the activity of thinking – a child, their identity formed through interactions and response to the world?
The photo drawings were created by projecting children’s drawings onto a child’s face and taking photographs, then attempting to blend and explore the boundaries between the drawing and the face.
What is offered by the relationship between 2 and 3 dimensions? – where does one become the other and what is the significance of the cross over in suggesting the development of thought – does it symbolise a blurring between the physical and mental/creative world?
Qualities that could be bestowed with metaphoric/symbolic meaning include:
- Scale
- alignment with the face from projection
- Opacity/transparency
- flat imagery
The actual process of generating the images involved: rebuilding the solidity of the face – white to heighten areas and washes to push back – decision making took place in the moment of creating.
Thinking Loops: extending our capacity to think…
Thinking Loops
Extract from Andy Clark Supersizing the mind
Consider this famous exchange between the Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman and the historian Charles Weiner. Weiner, encountering with an historian’s glee a batch of Feynmen’s original notes and sketches, remarked that the materials represented ‘a record of [Feynman’s] day-to-day work’ But instead of simply acknowledging this historic value, Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness:
I actually did the paper’ he said
‘well’ Weiner said, ‘the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.’
‘No, its not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is paper, Okay?’
Feynman’s suggestion is, at the very least, that the loop into the external medium was integral to his intellectual activity (the ‘working’) itself. But I would go further and suggest that Feynman was actually thinking on the paper. The loop through pen and paper is part of the physical machinery responsible for the shape of the flow of thoughts and ideas that we take, nonetheless, to be distinctively those of Richard Feynman. It reliably and robustly provides a functionality which, were it provided by goings-on in the head alone, we would have no hesitation in designating as part of the cognitive circuitry. Such considerations of parity, once we put our bioprejudices aside, reveal the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine. Such body – and world-involving cycles are best understood, or so I shall argue, as quite literally extending the machinery of the mind out into the world – as building extended cognitive circuits that are themselves the minimal material bases for important aspects of human thought and reason. Such cycles supersize the mind.