Tag: fiction

Wait, what? Sense-making & sense-breaking in modern art

In a recent paper, my collaborator Tom Rutten and I advanced a tentative theory of how contemporary visual artworks might interact with a predictive error minimization (or “predictive processing“) system in human viewers. The predictive processing model of cognition is a relatively recent figuration of the age-old problem of inference (how humans make predictions from patterns and pull patterns from data), originating in the work of computational neuroscientists like Friston, Rao, and Ballard in the 1990s but prefigured by Jeurgen Schmidhuber, whose theory of cognitive “compression” has been covered previously on this site and its neighbors.

I haven’t yet tried summarizing the paper’s ideas in an informal way, or arguing (beyond Twitter) for its usefulness as a theory. Here, I advance that argument both modestly and boldly. Continue reading “Wait, what? Sense-making & sense-breaking in modern art”

Scribbles

“How do you manage trash disposal in the Endless World?”

As he looked, he observed that the name was not inaccurate. Unlike the other places he’d visited so far, the horizon here never actually terminated… If he strained his eyes, which seemed impossibly perceptive, he could continue to differentiate further detail. There were all sorts of questions he wanted to ask Endless’s god, but that wasn’t the issue at hand.

“Trash? Disposal of industrial and household waste, you mean?”

Endless’ god gestured to a nearby smattering of color, differentiated from emerald fields around. A small town, and indeed, in a single lot near the town’s center was a stack of materials. Corrugated metal, extruded aluminum; thin, dry cardboard, bound in thick bundles; bronze and steel cast into various odd shapes; and colorful sheets, cut to be more hole than plastic, peeking out here and there and fluttering in the wind. All remnants of different industrial processes.

Continue reading “Scribbles”