Mimi's Speech : Navigating the Intersection of Creativity and Code in Artistic Discovery

What are we trying to accomplish? So at the beginning of the semester, and this is for the first people who have been here for 14 weeks, but also actually also the second half, I asked you why come to art school to learn how to code? And the answers inevitably have something to do with doing something creative with code. But as I always ask, what does that actually mean? Right? So the problem is you can learn how to code, but you can't actually learn how to do something creative with code or anything else. That's not a learning thing. Creativity is a process of discovery, which can be modeled, but can't be taught. And ultimately, it is something you need to do we all need to do on our own.

So how do we practice creativity? Right? As an act of discovery, creativity, the whole point of it is, it's crazy. It's unpredictable, it's not destined, it's accidental. How do you set yourself up to be good at making accidents happen? And how do you make artistic discoveries with technology? We all know what making technological discoveries with technology looks like. But how do you make humanistic ones? So to just give one example, the invention of oil painting, which is a technology, technology allowed artists to figure out how to paint ambiguity. The Mona Lisa could not have happened in temporal in any other kind of base. So for us, how do we make discoveries with code the way artists and does designers have through the centuries with traditional media like painting, sculpture, architecture, design, music, writing, choreography, food?

So let's shift modes again, and try to recap this last seven weeks. What we have we've been talking about this whole time, art and its cousin creativity is about bias. We've been talking about bias, taste, aesthetics, how you feel, is it cold? Is it warm? Is all subjective experience, what you like what you dislike, what you love, what you hate? What makes you fearful and what makes you feel safe. computation, on the other hand, is supposed to be objective. Two plus two is four. And there's no let's just disagree. Or let's just agree to disagree in computation. But as we've learned, you can program bias into computation. Because bias, as we've discussed at great length in this class is also what makes a computer algorithm intelligent, like a human, to be intelligent is to be able to discern, to be able to differentiate between what's important and what's unimportant, in order to draw relevant conclusions. This is the attention layer of Bert, what words are actually important?

What do I focus on. But it shouldn't be an unconscious bias, it should be a conscious bias when we choose a wide ranging bias. I want to put forward to you that human bias isn't something to be suppressed, or cleansed from code. I would like to propose a positive framing of bias of bias is something to craft with intention. And as I keep asking you, over and over again, can you discover what's important to you through computation? Can you discover a new love for a flavor that you didn't like before? Or perhaps you couldn't even taste before? You saw it through computation? And can you make these discoveries by tweaking numbers and algorithms by dividing instead of multiplying by defining surprising new modes of interaction that are logically illogical?

And to return full circle to our original question of why come to art school to learn how to code, it should be obvious by now that the task of negotiating with subjectivity is the sole province of art, and no other discipline. And that subjectivity is the active ingredient of creativity. So as you move through the rest of your time here at ITP, I hope you keep making discoveries. And keep wondering not just how to code your next great idea, but how to compute your way to your next great discovery. Thank you very much. It's too late now but in your free time, fill out the course.