Digital Wanderer | On indices and the artistic

On indices and the artistic

2009-01-08

Kaganov is killing it in almost every post

"Young man, the earthly dimension and space - that is merely dimension 3. And God - that is dimension 4-4.5" "Come again, excuse me?!" I marvel. "Four - four and a half," the old lady repeats, looking at us with clear white eyes. "What did you measure it with?" I'm completely lost. "Why, with holiness, holiness..." the old lady answers.

By the way, on topic. It seems the modern system of registering substances in chemistry assumes exactly this approach – each substance simply has a number in a special registry. As Yatsutko says – “and rightly so, I think”. I call this the index approach, and about a year or two ago I realized that's exactly how it should be – after all, there's a comp that will instantly tell you what these or those numbers mean. Why memorize all this junk if you don't need it in life? And if you do need it, you'll memorize it yourself, simply because you use it often, or because you find it interesting. This, by the way, has some connection to Spirituality and Biorobotism. It's supposedly uncool to just dumbly measure everything with numbers, even the classics wrote about it.

I have told you so much in detail about asteroid B-612 and even gave you its number only because of grown-ups. Grown-ups really love numbers. When you tell them that you have a new friend, they never ask about the most important things. They never say: "What kind of voice does he have? What games does he like to play? Does he catch butterflies?" They ask: "How old is he? How many brothers does he have? How much does he weigh? How much does his father earn?" And after that they imagine they've gotten to know the person. When you tell grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of pink brick, with geraniums in the windows and pigeons on the roof," they simply cannot imagine this house. You have to tell them: "I saw a house for a hundred thousand francs," and then they exclaim: "What a beauty!" In exactly the same way, if you tell them: "Here is the proof that the Little Prince actually existed: he was very, very nice, he laughed, and he wanted to have a little sheep. And whoever wants a little sheep, undoubtedly exists," if you tell them this, they will only shrug and look at you like a foolish baby. But if you tell them: "He came from a planet called asteroid B-612," this will convince them, and they won't bother you with questions. Grown-ups are just that kind of people. You shouldn't be angry with them. Children should be very forgiving of grown-ups. But we, those who understand what life is, we, of course, laugh at numbers and figures!

But I think this is all artistic bullshit – who's stopping you from organically combining the use of dry numbers for technical needs, and the creation of creative stuff with artsy bells and whistles? The only thing stopping the creators is the wiring of their brains, and even then not always – they do make games and movies, technically very complex things, but quite creative, at least oftentimes. It's the musicians and artists who want to manipulate pure abstraction and appeal directly to the subcortex, except nothing works out for them, at least in mass production. The masses don't want to get Pollock and Rothko straight up, try as you might, and they don't want physics and chemistry textbooks either. They want something in between, and something that resembles their everyday life. I think the brain was wired this way by evolution, so that the organism is primarily interested in questions related to its immediate existence and reproduction, rather than any sort of abstraction of a technical or artistic nature.