art vs. engineering

[wjl]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the contrast between art and engineering.  I don't, of course, necessarily think the two are opposed, and i don't mean to cast any value judgments about one over the other, but it's been an interesting dichotomy to consider applying analogically to my current life status and future goals

Comments

[_tove]

I agree with the general sort of dichotomy, but I feel like the specific terms don't leave room for the times when Engineering is joyful and personal or Art involves grindingly constructing things (taxidermying a shark, lining up a million tiny pencil stubs, whatever). Even in your analogy, they're hardly distinct -- you mention school as being more like doodling, but I'd bet that writing your thesis was less like doodling and more Sistine Chapel-like -- make preparatory sketches, secure a commission, train apprentices, build scaffolding, mix pigments, mathematically scale the thing, then spend however many months actually completing the brush strokes -- which sounds to me like logistics and it having to actually work.

[_tove]

So I guess what I'm saying is that academia vs industry might be better labels.

[wjl]

Well, they couldn't help but be better labels by definition, but then they don't communicate anything new :)

It's a good point that art sometimes involves hard work and engineering sometimes offers personal rewards. But I feel like art involves more play up front and engineering involves more completionist at the end. My thesis was hard to write, for sure, but even there it wasn't important to produce anything more functional than a proof of concept, a demonstration that the ideas made sense.

[_tove]

Hm, I think my argument is that they both involve play in the concept stages and a fair bit of completionism in the actually-doing-it stages. Precise details of implementation often matter a lot in the art world (even if you're a conceptual artist and handing the implementation off to someone else).

I think roseandsigil is right, below, when he says that you're talking more about goals or purpose ("does this thing have a purpose outside itself?") than process ("playing[...], doodling" vs "difficult, effortful, gettin'-hands-dirty").

Basically, I get very wary when anybody starts talking about Art-making as inherently goofyjoyfulfuntimes. :P

[wjl]

Doing research is a whole different ball game than either industry programming or grad-level classes. It was definitely full of hard work and uncertainty, but also with more playfulness and creativity than I find in my day-to-day work these days.

Your framing of why CS worked for you and art didn't is really interesting! I wonder if I can learn something from it..

[wjl]

I'm with you on art being hard work.. I think the kind of engineering I'm doing currently just doesn't have as much joy-of-discovery to balance its workload as I'd like it to..

[mdinitz]

I was actually thinking something related but different -- it seems like what William is describing is somewhat specific to grad school, not academia. In grad school I definitely felt like "the journey is more important than the destination, the process more than the product." I think this was because I was learning so much that I was getting a lot out of the process, even when I failed to make any real progress. My advisor understood that, and was basically happy with me as long as I was putting in effort. And if my advisor was happy with me, the department was happy with me.

But in academia in general I feel like this is very much not true. As a postdoc I felt incredible pressure to publish papers. No one cared about the process -- what mattered was publishing as many papers as possible in as high-quality conferences/journals as possible. So I don't think that what he's describing is academia, per se, but rather the freedom that comes from being a student with an understanding advisor.

[wjl]

Or having tenure..

[_tove]

Ah, yeah. I originally meant to write "student" vs "employee" -- as a student you are mostly doing things for self-improvement reasons, with all the half-formed thoughts and experimentation that entails, vs being theoretically already good at what you do and just being paid to do more of it. But I didn't want to include lower schooling, which is often entirely about drudgework.

[wjl]

Grad school at CMU was something of a paradise in this regard..

[roseandsigil]

I think you make good points about the actual process of "art" vs. "engineering", but that William's points are more about the goals and values.

Also, my browser's spellchecker doesn't know the word "William's". It suggests "Williams" or "Gilliam's".

[roseandsigil]

Wow, this comment is short to the point of rudeness; sorry!

[_tove]

No worries; I did not think so.