Chaos Communication Congress

Feelings of Structure in Life, Art, and Neural Nets (38x114)

Air date: Dec 28, 2024

One of the basic ways we navigate the world is through ‘feelings of structure’ -- our experience of the inner logic of a system or a situation as a tone, a vibe, a mood. I argue that building a technical analogy between ‘feelings of structures’ and autoencoder neural networks lets us construct a kind of theory of vibe: a theory that lets us see how sets of material (/digital) objects express a worldview and vice versa, and that can explain the deep role art plays in expressing, developing, and challenging our understanding of the world.