David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve
Not the best-delivered talk I’ve ever heard — and he definitely loses it a bit towards the end — but still, it’s interesting.
I’m sure I’ve heard the artistic ‘limited by the shape of the vessel’ argument before, I’m just not sure where.
I guess a portable MP3 player is simply a tool. Much like a painter’s work extends beyond the canvas, to the frame, to where it will hang.
And if you agree — if form really does limit function — then surely that puts engineers above artists.
I wonder if Michelangelo would’ve invented the chisel, if someone hadn’t done it before him…
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Particularly during the bird section, he was pretty twitchy but I thought this was one of the better ones. OK, the last minute or so seemed a bit like it was chucked in to make up time.
Form enables function just as much as it limits. Neither puts engineering above art; the art has its end in itself, whilst the engineering is a subservient technique which cannot create value in itself.
June 19th, 2010 at 8:46 amYou didn’t just use a definitive catch-all for a topic as broad and as important as engineering… tell me you didn’t!
I don’t think the first bridge, boat or road builder was considered ‘subservient’ to any other school/sphere. If anything, we are subservient to the world that engineers build!
June 19th, 2010 at 11:16 amI was following your lead, so ‘engineer’ their meant ‘engineer of the kind of thing relevant to the TED talk’, though I do think the point holds for any species of designed construction (i.e. any kind of techne). Bridges, boats, etc are all things made for-the-sake-of some activity or other and so derive their value only from an end which is outside of themselves.
Now, this isn’t, strictly, a matter of subservience of the kind you suggest; the idea that we could or should be subservient to the `world that engineers built’ is a bit on the terrifying side. Things are things only for us and for the sake of us, from whom all meaning and use is generated.
June 19th, 2010 at 11:27 amThe problem is, the moment that something is created, it is given a human value and meaning.
Like, Michelangelo might not have been trying to improve the beauty of Florence with his David — but the moment it was completed, that became its purpose.
A bridge might have been made purely because the creator wanted to SEE if he could make it — but once it’s made, it obviously has some ‘meaning and use’.
Another way of looking at it is a world without engineers (presuming they are a certain caste, a certain breed). Er — you can’t want what doesn’t exist, perhaps? (Engineers are enablers.)
Though, to be fair, I don’t see how you can accurately ascribe a value or meaning to any given engineered creation.
(How’s that for three streams of consciousness? I hardly understand it myself…)
June 19th, 2010 at 2:34 pmI think we mostly agree, though I don’t think the purpose of David is beautification but the expression of an ideal; its subsequent adoption for other ends doesn’t really touch on its initial end, which is adequate to it.
You make a good point about things built ‘just to see if you can’; they do have the ends in themselves, even if they don’t work.
June 19th, 2010 at 5:29 pm