Nov 28, 2022 · 2 min read · design-thinking, product-management, creative-process, creative-writing, computer-science
Computer Science is Art
Part 2: Impact, Parallels and Abstractions
Before computer science, I spent a decade as an artist. I’ve guided new product development as a musician, designer, developed architecture, built prototypes, and created start-ups. To me, art is the essence of what it means to create with impact and through this dialogue I’ll make the assertion that computer science and art are the same.
In the film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, Warner Herzog views 30,000-year-old cave paintings, the oldest discovered as he articulates: “Art is the birth of the human soul”. Herzog refers to the theory that these early abstractions represent the first major shift in human consciousness, the ideological birth of modern mankind. Through representation stories were created and told enabling new understandings of the world and precisely at the moment of ink-to-wall we achieved a new perspective — a shared understanding of the human condition.
Art encompasses the methods for immersing and distilling the world around us in order to create. The birth of shared experiences led to the creation of language, culture, expression, and all the things that define modern societies. Our abstractions exist without need for physical form, yet it is the inherent power of ideas that transcend us.
Great art is beautiful, it inspires, and it resonates because it understands and makes people feel understood. It is confrontational and challenges perceptions, it’s inventive and archetypal with each new work expanding the limits of human knowledge and showing us better ways to live.
The artist desperately seeks to understand context, intentions, and implications not as predefined methods and metrics but in order to find true authenticity. To find inspiration in every moment of every day and apply these lessons to make, better. A journey that is deeply empathetic — it takes an understanding of people to build things for people.
Between art and computer science are parallels everywhere. Both are mediums of impact and frameworks for an unlimited potential to create. The human centric work, with both existing only as immaterial and immortal abstractions.
This connection is more important than ever as paradigm changing digital products turn zeros and ones into new digital products, continually reshaping what it means to live with exponential efficiency, enabling new connections at formerly impossible scale. If a piece of work can resonate so strongly among us that it expands the world we live in then that must be its purpose. Computer science and art are the same language just spoken with different words in another medium.