Sketching: Computation
I want to teach ways of seeing and thinking. I don’t want to teach software. My dream is to help non-experts understand complex technical processes through direct experience in a mindful, embodied, and playful way. Understanding happens through making: AI through interacting with live systems, creativity through making many small works, computation through sketching invisible processes.
This sketch is part of an ongoing search for a visual language to help filmmaking students and artists understand generative image-making and computational creativity. I don’t want to teach people to run after new technologies. I’m interested in building mental models that help navigate technology through an inclusive, hands-on approach. Using TouchDesigner and real-time image generation with StreamDiffusion creates the right conditions to make invisible computational processes visible, tangible, and open to experimentation.
My creative method, in a few words: Build confidence through experience rather than thinking. Embrace small doses of discomfort and not knowing, step by step. Cultivate presence, using a somatic approach to let go of control and stay open to the unexpected. Produce many small works. If you get stuck, introduce hard constraints by reducing resources and choices. Accumulate, then select. Reduce and simplify until you reach the core of each piece. Assemble the pieces (in a notebook, online, over time, or in a mind map) to identify patterns and principles. Study the relationships between experiments. Build a new, cohesive work from what you discover. Repeat.
Bottom-up thinking and visual pattern recognition, Temple Grandin
Seek truth, open the black box, Bjork