Brutkey

sodiboo :pride_heart:
@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud

Is engineering art?

like, undoubtedly, there are engineers who make art with those skills. take Mark Rober, and e.g. his autonomous piano. there's no practical purpose to that; it's just cool and enjoyable. that's art.

I'm not trying to say engineers can't be artists. most are both. but is engineering distinct from art? or is it an artform?

by "engineering" I really mean here any kind of "means to an end" creation where the creation itself or the act of creation is not the actual reward.

for instance, most people just need a house to live in. so an architect designs the building and builders build it. an architect "draws" blueprints, but it's their job, and there's a clear purpose. drawing is usually considered an artform, but not all drawing is art. drawing a grid to align stuff on a wall also isn't necessarily art. I would say both of these are forms of engineering.

I would broadly classify most forms of creation into "engineering", which is usually to create a tool that is used for a purpose ("tool" also very broadly defined: a house is a tool that you live in), or "not engineering", something created for the inherent sake of it, that wasn't "necessary" for another purpose, but just enjoyable in and of itself.

another example, is in programming: if you are working a 9-to-5 job building a frontend for your sparkling water web store, you are building a "tool". that is engineering, you are paid to create a product to a specification. the website is just a means to an end, with the ends being sparkling water. users want to buy sparkling water from you.

on the other hand, game development is usually done for the sake of creating the game. users want to play the game, the actual thing you are working on, that is inherently enjoyable. this is less "engineering" to me. this is created for the sake of creation.

and with those examples, it might be tempting to call the "not engineering" disciplines "art". but this is a label that feels weird to assign precisely. it basically excludes the entire field of "building houses" from being art. which I feel like it totally can be.

but I'm not sure what else to call the "not engineering" disciplines. it feels like that's what art is. but I want engineering to also be art.

I'm not confused about the boundaries of this division between "engineering" and not. it feels pretty clear and intuitive to me. i just need help placing the label or "art" into this world view.

is it all art, or is engineering distinct from art?

is engineering art?

Wandering Hermit
@wanderinghermit@mindly.social

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud

I think that each project exists somewhere along a spectrum of art to purely utilitarian. The example I think of is designing and building a bridge. I've seen bridges that are so beautiful that I stop and stare. That bridge could also have been an ugly featureless slab of concrete. The difference is in the engineer's skills, inclination, budget, and client appreciation.

I don't think it is a meaningful question to ask if engineering is or isn't art. Like drawing or painting implements, the sculptors chisel, and many other such tools, engineering is a set of tools one can use to create art. Or not.

sodiboo :pride_heart:
@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud

@wanderinghermit@mindly.social

a spectrum of art to purely utilitarian
I would like to correct this terminology as a spectrum of "purely expressive" to "purely utilitarian". this feels perhaps unfair, because I will soon proceed to criticize the terminology that you didn't use.

I really like this spectrum, and it is a nice way to think about creation. but in the classification of "engineering" and "art", I think having one end of the spectrum being "expressive" has a clear problem, because engineering can be very expressive indeed. but art is also clearly expressive; that's like, the whole point, and that's why you even labeled this end of the spectrum as "art".

still, it's clear that engineering tends more utilitarian than most art. so engineering is clearly not at the expressive extreme, but the expressive extreme is surely art.

but something like "a concrete slab to cross a gap" is also hardly engineering. like, I guess it is? in the same way drawing a stickman is art. but it's not really what comes to mind.

I think it becomes quite intuitive that engineering should be everything that tends to the utilitarian side of creation, and art is everything that tends to the expressive side of creation.

but if "engineering" and "art" are the opposite sides of that spectrum, then it feels like they are opposites. that's not quite right, though, because engineering is inherently expressive, as kira explains well. it also seems clear to me by now (after reading some other replies) that there's a lot of overlap between engineering and art. not just in the skillsets as I described above, but in individual applications of those skills. if they're opposites, that sounds like it implies no overlap.

I think it feels more correct, therefore, to say that engineering is more like the middle of this spectrum. because, usually, when we think of "engineering projects", they are utilitarian at their core: there's a purpose. to build a house, for instance. but there's still a lot of expressive parts that go into that. even in just the architecture. it's also clearly art, though that's not necessarily the main "point" of the work.

so I think it seems more correct that art tends to be more expressive, and engineering tends to be expressive and utilitarian. engineering is the center of the spectrum, not an extreme.

what's purely utilitarian, then? i guess these are just Tasks. chores, even. if I'm assembling IKEA furniture, I just need a working table, I'm not creating art. I'm also not an engineer. I'm still "creating" a table, but it's in the most utilitarian consumerist way, it's a means to an end. it's a chore to build this table. it's a chore to screw in the legs.

Wandering Hermit
@wanderinghermit@mindly.social

@sodiboo@gaysex.cloud

Not sure I agree, but as you said, you changed the terms of the discussion. 😊😊

Even a concrete slab requires engineering, lots of calculations and modeling of supports, strength of concrete, amount and placement of steel reinforcement rods, to meet certain load bearing requirements. The primary, overriding goal of bridge design is Don't Fall Down, all else is secondary. That's why so many bridges are ugly, because the organization paying for it wants minimum expense rather than maximum beauty.

So yeah, engineers can be artists or not, but engineering as an activity is just a set of tools that can be used to create things which may or may not be art. Whether the end result is art or not, the engineering goal is satisfied if it doesn't fall down.