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

[platypuslord]

I agree with this post. :)

[wjl]

Haha. So what are you up to these days? Still painting houses..? :)

[_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

[roseandsigil]

Yes! Or at least, the mathy stuff in grad school fell more into the "art" box in my brain than the "making things" box my jobs have.

Actually, one specific thing I found interesting about grad school was that it was about "self improvement" rather than making things for other people, and industry is the opposite.

[wjl]

Maybe that's the thing: I'm just selfish and want to keep learning new things rather than making stuff for other people :) Maybe the trick is to find a way to do both..

[lindseykuper]

Before I started grad school, my job was to do Perl plumbing to support the creation of online textbooks and and supplemental course materials. Basically, it was about slurping data in from various XML (and almost-XML (...I don't want to talk about it)) sources and spitting it out again in a certain proprietary database serialization file format that we had to reverse-engineer. My team and I wrote tools to do this stuff. The rest of company, even my direct supervisor, didn't really care about whether our code was good, or even to what extent we wrote code at all; they just wanted the products that they would sell. (Before I was hired, they outsourced the work to a company that manually imported things into the database one by one.) On the other hand, at the end there wasn't really anything that I could especially point to and say, "There, that; I made that!", because the part that I did was so unspecific to any particular product. So, in a way, it was the worst of both worlds: not only was the process not valuable to them, but

[wjl]

It's an interesting point you make about bring replaced by machines. One standard response to "machines destroying jobs, oh no!" is that in a true techno-utopia, people whose jobs get automated become free to pursue whatever creative or artistic endeavors they really want to pursue. Thinking about that made me wonder what creative or artistic endeavors *i* would pursue if given the opportunity, since I don't really think of myself as an artist, but reflecting back on my grad school experience, I realized that doing undirected research is a kind of art for me..

I don't think I'm really adding much to what you said here, but it is interesting to me to see the discussion come full circle back to what got me thinking initially..

Anyway, enjoy the grad school experience :)