ADPA 1: The Nature of Art · 7:09pm Feb 14th, 2014
Preface:
Well, this is going to be one of those gigantic blogposts nobody wants to read. I am primarily posting these as a quick reference to avoid retyping the same thing everywhere I go, so bear with me. Also, I recognize that some may find an attempt to categorize and discuss these concepts either arrogant or misguided, but one can't let fear of mistakes stop them from making the attempt, or failure is guaranteed. So, with apologies to anyone who finds this kind of thing insufferable, here's what I think on the topic of art.
This is the first of an intended series of blog posts covering the meaning and design of art, with an emphasis on literature and FIMFiction in particular. This first post is meant to be largely medium agnostic, covering the design and execution of art as an abstract concept, and providing the vocabulary and framework upon which more detailed discussions can be made. The model being discussed is of my own creation, though it is the result of study in several fields (And as such is composed of many old ideas which I do not take credit for). For convenience's sake, I'm going to temporarily name the model the Art as Communication/Transmission model, or ACT for short, in case anyone needs to discuss the model itself in some detail.
This series is called Abstract Design Principles of Art, or ADPA for short.
A quick note on what this series is, and isn't. This series is meant to provide a solid framework for understanding, analyzing and discussing art. It is not meant as a how-to guide for being an artist or author, or even a how-to guide for reviewing art (Though it's closer to that than a writing guide). Despite that, the techniques of construction will be discussed (By necessity) in later posts, and full posts on art appreciation/review and construction using these ideas may be forthcoming (Especially by request).
Tentative Series Listing:
Posted:
ADPA 1: The Nature of Art (You are here)
ADPA 2-1: Delivery in Art (Overview)
ADPA 2-2: Genre
ADPA 2-3: Style
ADET 1: Unusual Cases
Not Posted:
ADPA 2-4: Elements
ADET 2: How to assign genre
ADPA 2-5: Design Approach
ADET 3: Intuitive Art/Natural Expression
ADPA 2-6: Cohesion
ADET 4: Delivery Across Mediums
ADPA 3: Innovation
ADPA 4: Evocative Art
ADPA 5: Audience Interaction
ADPA 6: Appreciation
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Well, with all of that introduction out of the way, let's discuss what art actually is. People have debated this significantly over the centuries, but I posit the following simple definition: art is any medium by which a person can convey/communicate creative thought.
For those wondering whether the definition of 'creative thought' needs to be hashed out in detail, I'll provide the following simplified explanation: Creative thought is any thought more complex than raw logical processing. In other words, a computer wouldn't be able to directly emulate it. A more detailed explanation (or proof) would require mathematics, including information theory (Complexity theory to be specific), or computer science for the applied variant.
In other words, I hope that simple pair of explanations is sufficient for practical discussion, because it would take several blog posts to explain 'the full story' of the topic. I will also note that there are mediums not traditionally considered 'artistic' that people use to discuss creative thought (such as this blog post), and that creativity is necessary in fields often not considered artistic, such as engineering and mathematics. In this case, the priority is what counts; in cases where the field is primarily being used to convey creative thought, it is being used as an artistic medium. Likewise, a traditionally artistic medium, such as drawing, can be used for non-creative purposes (Logical diagramming, as an example).
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With art defined as a form of communication, we can apply concepts from the field of communications to art. In particular, the fundamental abstract steps of communication are useful to us here. Those steps are generally regarded as Conception, Encoding, Transmission, and Decoding.
For art - specifically, for the purposes of reviewing, appreciating or designing art - I would rename these as Concept, Delivery, Presentation and Appreciation. The art itself is concerned with the first three: Concept, Delivery, and Presentation.
In the field of communications, conception is the step in which the idea one wishes to convey is conceived and refined. You decide what you wish to say. In art, the concept includes everything the artist wishes to convey to the audience; whatever emotions, ideas, or content they wish to communicate. This is also referred to as the 'content' or the 'message' of a piece, depending on the art form.
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Encoding is the process of translating one's idea into language that the audience will (hopefully) understand. The analogue in art would be delivery; coming up with the techniques and design to convey one's meaning. Delivery is perhaps the most complex of the three steps to consistently define and understand; depending on the art form, delivery can at times inform content, rather than vice versa, and the form that delivery takes is highly dependent upon the art form being discussed.
For instance, deciding to convey your feelings in an oil painting instead of a novel is part of the delivery. How many layers that oil painting has, how much nuance and detail you put into every aspect of it, how much color (And what color) is appropriate, are all further examples of delivery. In short, if the concept is the design goal, then the delivery is the design itself. Delivery is, much like encoding in communications, centered on finding a 'common language' with the audience; a means of conveyance that they will understand. As an artist encodes their message into a delivery, they make many choices that will fundamentally alter who understands their work, and how. Since these choices fundamentally control how much of the concept gets into the work, and how, it is natural that there is some back-and-forth between concept and delivery.
Delivery will be discussed in more detail in later posts, since the division between it and the other two design aspects varies a bit from medium to medium.
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Transmission describes the means by which a message is conveyed to the audience. For instance, if one speaks aloud, then they are transmitting their encoded message via speech. In communications, this step assumes that natural language of some sort is being used, and transmission is used to describe how it's put forth (Speech, texting, voice recording, etc,).
At first, it may seem that transmission and delivery have some difficult overlap; after all, there are art forms that are specifically meant to be spoken aloud, and those that are meant to be written down. However, this overlap isn't as problematic as it may, at first, appear; if one writes a story, and that story is then read aloud to a group of people, the story itself - that is, the design of it, or the delivery - does not change (Assuming the speaker reads it accurately). What changes is the presentation.
Presentation is the artistic equivalent to transmission. It describes the context in which one's art is experienced. Notably, presentation issues can include technical errors on the part of the artist; a technical error is an error which is not a (mistaken) choice on the part of the author, but rather the situation of their technique having failed them during the execution of their work. Delivery is all about choices, and thus design; presentation is all about the end result, and thus the execution. This is equivalent to speaking clearly (clear transmission) in communications; an individual may have something meaningful to say, and may even know a truly meaningful way to say it down to the finest details, without being able to actually say it themselves.
Consider the case of a choreographer who is wheelchair-bound, or the blind painter. These individuals may have lost (Or may never have had) the ability to transmit their messages, but may nonetheless be able to conceive and design them. Likewise, a poor grasp of English does not mean that an author has nothing meaningful to say, or even a poor sense of how to say it; they may simply not have what they need to present it correctly.
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Since art appreciation (decoding) is a step taken by the audience, it is not directly relevant to discussing the construction of art itself (outside of the point that one encodes messages to make them understandable to the audience), and so won't be covered fully here.
That concludes the explanation of ADPA 1. Future posts will discuss style, genre and delivery in more detail, with a possible post on the process of art appreciation coming after the series on art construction is finished, if requested. It is worth noting that the process described here matches the general creation process used in abstract design of Conceptualization->Design->Execution, but the borders are slightly murkier than they typically are in fields like programming. In some pieces, Delivery may be Design, but also impact Conceptualization and Execution, for instance. Readers who are familiar with this process are encouraged to consider the parallels and differences.
I am Nyronus and I approve of this post.
I don't think I understand where you're headed with this. Is there something we can say or do if we define art this way that can't be done if we define art in other ways?
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Like any model, the goal is to give people a way of approaching and discussing the subject intelligibly. I've found this model to be very useful when editing, designing, and reviewing. The next post (Which I am writing right now) is concerned with Delivery in Literature, and the whole thing would be more difficult to parse without this model.
This claims that computers can never be intelligent, and that humans have a soul or some other non-materialistic creative force. It will raise objections yet not answer any questions, since no one can say with certainty whether any of the things we accept as artistic and creative can be done by computer.
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Information theory is a field I've done some work in. The goal of that paragraph was to give someone a benchmark or way to look at the idea. A full explanation of what computers can and can't do (And how that relates to human consciousness) is outside the scope of this document, but there are several hard assertions that can be made about the subject.
If you're familiar with numerical methods for emulating Calculus, for instance, you should already know that computers can't properly emulate high-level symbolic logic. At the very least, modern computers cannot.
Edit: That having been said, it's a fair criticism of my paragraph... it probably is too distracting. Thanks for your comment.
Compare Dramatica's Forming, Encoding, Weaving, and Reception.
There is no known logical operation that humans can do and computers can't. There's a long tradition of philosophers saying things like, "Hah, first-order logic is undecidable, therefore computers can't think!" But it is always the case that such things are undecidable for humans as well.
It any case seems likely that first-order logic is more powerful than you need for human thinking, as neural networks are more like finite circuits of propositional logic than like first-order logic.
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They based it off of the same theory of communications I did, but their derivation is specific to literature, and they make many specific statements about the nature of storytelling that aren't sufficiently abstract or generalized to fulfill the purposes of the ADPA, even in regards to storytelling (and certainly not in regards to other art forms)
I really appreciate the link, though. It's reassuring to think I'm not the only one that approached art-as-communication from a Communications Theory standpoint.