


Traditionally, software applications for computer graphics have been based on real-world analogies. This kind of agility or duality allows the system to describe concepts more broadly, in terms of “latent” properties. Depend- ing on the context, such a concept can have many meanings: for example, a balloon drifting through an empty subway station is rather sad, and creepy. We work with the notion of “agile concepts”. This statement is a rule of sorts, but flexible. For example, a beach ball and a balloon both are round, buoyant and playful. Properties of things can be used to think about how concepts relate to each other. A central theme in our system’s design are concept properties. Gravital doesn’t always recognize the subtle distinction between them. These ideas can be inspiring, interesting, trivial, silly, or rude.
#NODEBOX NETWORK DATA GENERATOR#
To put it in the words of Veale, Feyaerts and Forceville, Gravital is a generator of ideas, produced by roaming a search space of concepts. Our experiments with “ Gravital ”, a software system for sketching and brainstorming, have sought to provoke this mental agility. But as Veale, Feyaerts & Forceville have argued in their introduction to this volume, we know that mental agility is a common hallmark of creativity. Or we may need to break it down into smaller subsets. Perhaps we haven’t unraveled all of them yet for creativity.

No system is without rules however – or pigs would fly.
#NODEBOX NETWORK DATA MANUAL#
So a new chapter of rules would have to be written, and so on, until the manual fills the entirety of The Library of Babel. When presented with a manual, we wager some of them would instantly create new artwork that contradicts every rule in the book equilibrium is not necessarily a goal. In their opinion, everything can be transformed into anything to fit their art. “Why would anyone steal a useless book?” they ask. Now, artists on the other hand respond with a puzzled look. “If there is no manual, we’ll need lots of data”, they think. They can resort to statistical prediction if the manual goes missing. They are used to working with ambiguity and underspecification in language. The linguists in the lab find the joke mildly amusing. “How could you not have a manual”, the developers wonder. By contrast, the domain of art and design is an exotic jungle. Someone yells: “the Graphic Design Manual has been stolen!” This tends to humour the software developers (many researchers in the lab are), since their field (computer science) is clearly defined with procedures, rules and goals. have a recurring joke in our research lab.
