LitHub: Amy Kurzweil on Text, Image, AI and Artistic Translation

Amy Kurzweil (whose book Artificial: A Love Story is top of my Christmas list) writes about how transforming an idea from image to text (or music, or a digital form) is actually translation, same as from one language to another, and how much our brains understand ideas that aren’t explicitly articulated in the form. It’s an excellent (if annoyingly low-resolution) piece.

It reminds me of a comment in a Metafilter discussion recently:

I remember my painting teacher long ago teaching me this lesson when I was getting upset about not being able to perfectly render something exactly right in a painting. They pointed out that if I wanted it to look 100% lifelike, I should just take a photo. Why was I not taking a photo? Because I wanted to say something that was more than “this is what X looks like” and that is why art is different from just recording something.

It is similar in other art forms. Why are you saying this in a play rather than a novel? What difference does it make to see a person acting out a story it in front of you, rather than to hear the character’s inner voices in your own head? How is a statement about gender made through a song or through fashion different than writing an essay? Back to painting, someone like Picasso could have painted a perfectly lifelike representation of a person (even a hand!) if he wanted to, so by making an abstraction he was saying something else. Once photography exists, abstraction in painting can exist, because painting can now do something else.

A friend of mine always pitches design to left-brained clients with the idea that “words are just really complicated pictures” and we should try to find ways to convey ideas without words first. It’s more universal.

Here’s the trailer for the book: