Tools

You have noticed that you have reached the House through a computer. This is natural. It is not quite true to say the House only exists as data in a computer, since it is being built using tools of a Mathematical nature. It exists anywhere that the objects of Mathematics exist. As a Platonic form, for instance, if you believe in such things, or as badly scribbled marks on random pieces of paper. Certainly, the most practical way to visit the House is with a computer, using a set of tools I've developed for approximating images of imaginary things.

I'm spending a lot of time thinking about tools, and (because nothing can be simple) thinking about thinking about tools. I'm reminded of a phrase I heard somewhere a few years ago: "Critics talk about art. Artists talk about brushes." The point, as I see it, is that when you are working on something you don't spend a lot of time thinking about how impressive it is, or how important it is, or anything of that sort. You think about the actual act of creating. You think about technique.

So I'm building this imaginary house, and I'm not spending any time adorning it with symbols, or leaving heavy tomes filled with my philosophy of life inside it. This doesn't mean I'm not going to -- those of you who were hoping to avoid big doses of Jeff Lassahn's Pontifications (Volumes I through XIII) will have to act quickly to enjoy the house while it's empty. What it means is that I'm deep in the act of creation, and I'm talking about my brushes instead.

And here I go...

The pictures you see are generated by a ray tracer. It calculates the paths of rays of light through a model of an imaginary world, and costructs a picture of the results. The ray tracer I'm using is very simple. I wrote it in a few days many years ago, and I've been using it for little projects like this ever since. Because of it's simplicity, and because it naturally supports quadratic curves instead of the triangles that are the only object many computer graphics programs work with, the images have a very smooth look. I enjoy the simplicity. I am not using texture mapping, or any of the other tricks of the graphics world to add roughness to the images. What appears in the images is an accurate view of the imaginary object I am building.

The other tool that is essential for building the House is a language. Mathematics is already a language of sorts, and if I was doing this without the aid of a computer the normal language of geometry would be what I would use to build the House. But like all natural languages, Mathematics is much to messy to be used by a computer. I need a formal language, a subset of Mathematics that allows me to describe shapes and give them names with enough precision that a computer can understand. I have designed a computer language which does just this, and written an interpreter program with the help of Bison, a wonderful computer program for writing programs which work with formal languages.

There is a little argument going on in the culture of computers. As various programs get written each one makes a decision between being a tool based on language and being a tool based on kinesthetics. Do you talk about what you want to do at the keyboard, or do you grab the mouse and manipulate a representation of what you want to do? Many casual computer users don't realize that this is an argument; it's presented to most people as an inevitable evolution towards computer systems which are easier to use. That's not what's really going on, though. What's going on is that computer programs have moved towards nonlinguistic methods of doing things, which actually is easier to use for simple things, but which makes some things nearly impossible. Trying to do something subtle or compilcated with many modern computer programs very much resembles playing a game of charades.

It is with this argument very much in mind that I'm using a linguistic tool to build the house. I'm very much a devotee of computer systems that accept instructions, and particularly those that can be made to accept compilcated instructions. So I've arranged things here as a sort of funhouse mirror image of the way computers look to most people. Instead of using a kinesthetic computer program for the fundamentally language based task of creating documents, I'm using a linguistic program for the kinesthetic task of creating visual art.

It's an interesting set of brushes. We'll see what I can make them do.