On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 11:43:14 +1100, Ahad Aboss <ahad@telcoinabox.com> said: > In a sense, you are an artist as network architecture > is an art in itself. It involves interaction with time, > processes, people and things or an intersection between all. This Friday's off-topic post for NANOG: Doing art is creative practice directed to uncover something new and not pre-conceived. Successful acts of art produce something that not only wasn't there before but that nobody thought could be there. The art is the change in thinking that results. Whatever else is left over is residue. An engineer or architect in the usual setting, no matter how skilled, is not doing art because the whole activity is pre-conceived. Even a clean and elegant design is not usually intended to show beautiful connections between ideas the same way poetry or mathematics might. Hiring an engineer for this purpose almost never happens in industry. Rather the purpose is to make a thing that does what it is intended to do. It is craft, or second-order residue. Useful, possibly difficult, but not art. Some people want to claim ownership of a recipe for predictably creating residue of a certain kind. An artist knows that this is not good for doing art because nothing new can come from it. If they are committed to their practice, they will not seek to prevent others from using an old recipe. Why would they? They have already moved on. Some older thoughts on the topic: http://archive.groovy.net/syntac/