ABSTRACT
The act of production — the artificer's act of creating an artifact in response to some needs/goals — is the epicenter of creative work of any kind. There is a veritable air of mystery, of obscurity, surrounding this event. How does one make the transition from an initially abstract, often remote, almost invariably ill-structured problem to an artifact one claims is a solution to that problem? And, to the point that is the central concern of this book, is there any connection between the acts of production of art-works and of tech-works?
In this chapter we resorted (somewhat ironically one might say) to a technological metaphor to shed some light on these questions. In brief, recall that to use a metaphor is to map what we do not understand well (or at all) to some domain we do understand well and draw on knowledge associated with the well-understood domain to postulate a solution or a hypothesis that explains the ill-understood problem. Metaphors may or may not succeed. Furthermore, a metaphor is like a scaffolding: once it has done its job it must be dismantled so that the explanation or solution stands on its own to be tested or validated on its own terms, in its own domain.
The basis of the technological metaphor — the thing that is relatively well understood — is what is called here software-system. We have postulated as the metaphor that the act of production is like a software-system.
Our case studies entailed two acts of production from the realm of art and one from the realm of technology. Of the former one was Picasso's creation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the other was a study of the making of a painting by the late 20th century American painter George Rodrigue. For the latter I chose the invention of the original design of a particular off-shore oil exploration and production platform. The choice of these three acts of productions case studies was dictated by the fact that this writer, in the case of the art-works, and a former student, in the case of the tech-work, were the original investigators of these projects.
The software-system-metaphor proved to be particularly fertile in revealing several pathways connecting the acts of production in the three case studies. This is then the eighth bridge between art and technology.
