Art & Beauty
Feelings of Structure in Life, Art, and Neural Nets
One of the basic ways we navigate the world is through ‘feelings of structure’ -- our experience of the inner logic of a system or a situation as a tone, a vibe, a mood. I argue that building a technical analogy between ‘feelings of structures’ and autoencoder neural networks lets us construct a kind of theory of vibe: a theory that lets us see how sets of material (/digital) objects express a worldview and vice versa, and that can explain the deep role art plays in expressing, developing, and challenging our understanding of the world.
'Poetry' as the name of a special human relation to the world -- some special kind of knowing, grasping, challenging or asking we effect through art -- came into focus in 18th century Europe alongside the first blushings of a theory of computation and a computational analysis of mind. This talk proposes that for all of their outward hostilities, the Romantic-and-on idea of poetry and computational approaches to thought, language, and meaning are deeply connected: starting from Kant's doctrine of the productive imagination, we will develop one historical thread that runs to the Romantic poets, Phenomenology, and literary theory, and one historical thread that runs to information theory, machine learning, and the science of neural network models. Comparing the two threads, I'll argue that poetics and the science of neural network models have genuinely (if partially) overlapping subject-matter.
Additional information
| Live Stream | https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/zigzag |
|---|---|
| Type | Talk |
| Language | English |
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