Shapes of Imagination by George Stiny

Author:George Stiny [Stiny, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: visual calculating; shape grammars; the embed-fuse cycle; Oscar Wilde; John von Neumann; Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

(In this series, I can change any term including the verticals into any of its successors in the schema x → Σ F(prt(x)), with two reciprocal rotations and a reflection in x → t(x). The term and its successor are divided with respect to x and t(x), each into four component parts/lines that are equal from term to term.22 As the series extends symmetrically past 2π, the hinge folds down to the base of the A, instead of up to its top. This kind of switch also goes for Reuleaux’s series of nuts and bolts.) It’s uncanny—how the two kinds of A’s in my three squares are the same in one series. There are surprises galore whenever I open my eyes, and remarkable things to see—for example, two exaggerated A’s in my three squares that aren’t in my series and maybe a third, and the smaller M in Steingruber’s A that’s many other things, but this is enough for the time being. It seems that visual calculating in shape grammars isn’t the same as symbolic calculating in Turing machines. In Turing machines, symbols are simply as in themselves they really are. Isn’t this invariance what makes calculating possible in the first place—every string of symbols is easy to read as an elaborate sort of coded number. What would happen without invariant symbols? What if they weren’t always the same? What if symbols were each and every one a Rorschach test? I guess this spells the end of Wilde’s aesthetic formula with its warrant for ambiguity and unbridled change, and of pictures and poems, and art and design. It appears that calculating isn’t seeing—unless of course, calculating is as in itself it really is not. How can this possibly be true? But that’s what I’ve been trying to prove in “Seven Questions” with Coleridge, and von Neumann and Wilde, and in my expansive notes that tie in lots of others, and now, in this exhibit with my three examples to show the sweep of the embed-fuse cycle. Maybe there’s a way to put all of this together in a single sentence—

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