Ostranenie - Crossover between Art and Programming

It looks like that I have to say something at a camp next week. So I trumped up the most easy topic for me, the art. For me, the art is very common and familiar thing that I spent a lot of time to discuss such matter in my youth. And more importantly, it is somewhat strange topic for colleagues. I hope it will be fun.

One of the most important functions in the art is ostranenie. Ostranenie is a term coined by Russian critic Shklovsky, which means looking a familiar things in unfamiliar ways to find a unexpected side of the subject. For example, most surprising thing for a student who learns a sketch first time was there are no outlines in the world. Young kids often draw an outline to express the mom's face. But reality is that a human brain extracts an outline from a contrast of of light and shade.

Also a programmer often faces ostranenie. A human tends to think based on an intuition. But a computer only obeys logics, it never cares about human's common sense or intuition. The conflict often cause errors. But the errors give us precious ideas that we have never noticed. Human beings have developed common sense and intuition through the long history and culture, so it is very difficult to perceive a difference between logic and intuition without a computer.

We can regard the invention of computer in philosophy as the invention of photograph in the history of art. The invention of photograph provided an artist first different eyes beside human's. And it brought Impressionism in 19th. Likewise, we met another kind of brain for the first time by computers. No one knows what is born from there because the history of computer is still young. But we can explore new directions in terms of ostranenie.