On Teamwork What I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80’s, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit — I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something — and one day he told me, “come into my garage, I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said “come out here with me,” so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said “come back tomorrow,” as the tumbler was turning and making a racket. So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in — through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise — had come out as these beautiful polished rocks. And that’s always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview teamworkpassionargument
To prove it in purity The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect. "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot creativitylifeobsessionpassion
AI-art isn’t art An Essay by Erik Hoel erikhoel.substack.com AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful. …Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art. artconsciousnessbeautymeaningai