Communications - December 2010

your story. You look and say, “Well, gee, that’s stupid!” or “That doesn’t make any sense!” Well, yeah, it’s a bug!

My second observation about the interaction of art and science is related to the early days of Disney when filmmaking and animation were brand new. This was also part of a technical revolution at that time. They had to figure out how to do color and sound and matting and so forth. They were working out all of those things for many years before the technology matured. Now people look back historically and all they see is the art that came out of it. Very few people pay attention to the role of the changing technology and the excitement of what went on there.

When computer graphics became practical, it reintroduced technical change into this field and invigorated it. I believe that technical change is an important part of keeping this industry vital and healthy.

Yet the tendency of most people is to try to get to a stable place. They just want the right process, which I think is the wrong goal. You actually want to be in a place where you are continually changing things. We’re writing our new software system now—strictly speaking, we don’t have to do that. I believe the primary reason for doing it is to change what we’re doing. We’re keeping ourselves off balance, and that’s difficult to explain to people. Most people don’t want to be in an unstable place; they want to go to the comfort zone, so you’re fighting the natural inclinations of most people when you say where we want to be is a place that’s unstable.

hanRahan: You’re in a very unusual situation to have so much art and science mixed together. It would be nice if software companies and technology companies had more of those two kinds of people involved.

At Stanford we have an arts initia-
tive in place right now, and one reason
it’s popular is not because everybody is
going to become an artist, but because
everybody should learn about art and
the processes that artists use, such
as drawing and sketching and brain-
storming. We think that even if you’re
a mechanical engineer or a computer
scientist, if you get exposed to the arts,
you’ll be more innovative. Art adds so
much to technology and science just
by encouraging a few different ways of
thinking.