
Abstraction Art Code Revealing Truth
Abstraction reveals truth by moving beyond concrete details in art and code, managing complexity and clarifying essence to expose deeper meaning and intention.
Title: Unveiling Truth Through Abstraction: From Art to Code
Intro
- Abstraction: "to draw away" from concrete details to reach a more essential understanding.
- Often misunderstood as simplification, but it's more about transformation, revealing deeper truths.
The Dialectic of Art: From Realism to Essence
- Hegel's dialectic: thesis → antithesis → synthesis. Negation leads to elevation.
- Kant: We only experience the world through our perceptions (phenomena), not as it truly is (noumenon).
- 19th-century academic realism (thesis): Focused on technical precision.
- Impressionism (antithesis): Artists like Monet and Van Gogh painted the world as it felt, not as it looked (e.g., Van Gogh's Starry Night).
- Abstraction as negation: Moving beyond appearance to express essence.
- Later movements: Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism. Revealing what is felt, known, intuited.
Abstraction and Revolution
- Example: Closing the Gates at Hougoumont (realism) vs. El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (abstraction).
- Lissitzky replaced soldiers with shapes, revealing the forces shaping history.
- Abstraction strips away surface detail to reveal deeper truth.
Abstraction in Programming
- Focusing on what matters and omitting what doesn’t.
- Managing complexity by modeling the essence of a problem.
- Creating layers of meaning to interact with high-level concepts.
- Hiding the how to highlight the why.
Code example
- Example of calculating acceleration with and without abstraction
- Abstraction makes code easier to read, maintain, and reuse.
Framing Truth: The Artistic and Logical Power of Abstraction
- Abstraction is a disciplined path toward truth, not a detour.
- It strips away clutter to reveal emotional, symbolic, or conceptual essence.
- Artists use it to capture the interiority of human experience.
- Developers use it to manage complexity and clarify intention.
- Abstraction is a lens that reframes reality.
Conclusion
- Abstraction helps to distill, elevate, and understand.
- Behind every surface lies a structure, and behind every structure, a meaning — waiting to be drawn forth