shadow of something that does not yet exist
Properties
- tags
- philosophy/process ai/co-creation creativity cybernetics
Shadow of something that does not yet exist
- I noticed this while making a Person/codekiln/GitHub/beans coffee log entry. I had a poem and a scene in mind. I tried to render the scene as an image, but I ran out of time and settled on something that felt close but not right. The image I used was not the thing I had in mind. It was not even a clean approximation. It felt like a shadow of something that had not fully formed. The thing itself did not exist yet in the world or even in my own mind as a stable object.
A different model of creation
- It is not idea then execution then artifact. It is more like a field that gives rise to a direction, and that direction produces a series of attempts. Each attempt changes the field. The direction shifts as I follow it. The artifact is one temporary stabilization in that loop. It is not the goal. It is a trace left behind as the system moves.
Shadows, becoming, virtual and actual
- Plato wrote about shadows as copies of real forms. Here the situation is reversed. The form is not fixed or fully known. It is more like what Whitehead would call a process of becoming. He wrote that the many become one and are increased by one. The image is one such increase. It is not a copy of a prior form but a moment in an ongoing process. Deleuze makes a similar distinction between the virtual and the actual. The virtual is real but not yet actual. Each artifact is one actualization among many possible ones.
Cybernetics and the tight loop
- The system includes me, the tool, and the outputs. Hutchins described cognition as distributed across people and artifacts. The image feeds back into my perception and changes what I am aiming at. Schön described design as a conversation with the materials of a situation. Here the material includes the model itself. The loop is tight. Each projection alters the next vector.
Closing terms
- I will call this a shadow of something that does not yet exist. It is a pre-actualization trace. It marks a direction more than a destination. It is useful not because it is correct but because it lets me continue the motion. The work is to stay with the vector and let the field clarify itself over time.