{"id":14702,"date":"2014-04-19T22:57:35","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T03:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14702"},"modified":"2014-04-19T22:57:35","modified_gmt":"2014-04-20T03:57:35","slug":"sol-lewitt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=14702","title":{"rendered":"Sol LeWitt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was in a room full of people who are deeply committed to knocking down C.P. Snow’s problem of The Two Cultures<\/a>. To be sure, not everyone in the room was old enough or widely read enough to be familiar with Snow’s famous lecture.<\/p>\n

Yet every single one of them would wholeheartedly agree, if asked, that we need to find a way to bridge the great divide between the Arts and the Sciences. Further, they would say that their own work is largely an attempt to bridge that very divide.<\/p>\n

Yet a problem with all such efforts is that everyone inevitably comes in with some sort of bias, and the nature of your own bias is that you can’t see it. In this case, most of the participants are coming to the conversation from a strong background in the sciences.<\/p>\n

This really hit home for me when somebody got up to speak — one of the rare individuals who has put in the effort required to be equally conversant in “Art-talk” and “Science-talk”. She started describing the work of Sol LeWitt, and then casually asked how many people were familiar with his work.<\/p>\n

To my immense surprise and disappointment, almost nobody in the room knew who he was.<\/p>\n

Trying to think of an analogy going the other way, I likened it in my mind to a group of artists intent on bridging the art\/science divide in the use of procedural techniques, and none of them knowing the names “John von Neumann” or “Jim Blinn”.<\/p>\n

And I was forced to admit to myself that it would be very difficult for me to convince my own computer science department to include a for-credit course about LeWitt or the other proceduralists.<\/p>\n

Clearly something is very wrong here. But I’m not sure what to do about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in a room full of people who are deeply committed to knocking down C.P. Snow’s problem of The Two Cultures. To be sure, not everyone in the room was old enough or widely read enough to be familiar with Snow’s famous lecture. Yet every single one of them would wholeheartedly agree, if asked, … Continue reading “Sol LeWitt”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14703,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14702\/revisions\/14703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}