The first drawing formed while I was talking two Melissa Steckbauer. She’s an artist from Wisconsin, US, and working and living in Berlin, Germany. The drawing probably reflects our talk as well as an instance of collaboration and creative team processes. Both of us worked on pretty much each part of the canvas while alternating. What I learned in this process is that collaborative drawing is a good tool for communication. What I cannot say is in what way it influences a conversation and contributes to the exchange of ideas, viewpoints, and general information.
The second drawing formed while I was thinking about things that I value in life. In this particular situation my train of thought boiled down to my very own understanding of freedom. I say very own because different people might understand different things when talking about freedom and their associations connected with it. In this drawing I interpret freedom as the possibility to add any element that comes to my mind anywhere in the picture without limiting myself to arbitrary constraints (e.g. beauty, symmetry, esthetics, color, content, etc). In a way similar to the previous drawing this picture formed in a process around a central element (activity, term)
In sum I came to the conclusion that arts is defined by a process around a topic with the goal to express ones mental pictures in context with associated emotions.
Alright, probably arts cannot be defined in such a short sentence with such simple concepts, but still I feel it gives me a better interpretation of the domain as well as a sense of methodology and value.
In particular I have the impression that artistic approaches can help express the content of abstract domains such as computer science (which hopefully provides the link to the topic of my blog ;-)).