The Swamp That Stands Between
The Swamp That Stands Between: Engineering and (Studio) Art
To Be Honest…
I’m extremely surprised that more artists don’t turn up inside engineering. Looking at it pragmatically, engineering and art share quite a bit of cross-dialogue. Engineering, for example, has ill-defined points where a prototype becomes a “finished” article; in many of the same ways that a painter will look at a piece and not be able to say with absolute certainty “this is done”, an engineer will normally look at their circuit design and say “this is up to caliper”. Now, obviously, that isn’t to say there are some distinct divides; no one will be killed if a painting is missing a few lines or drawing in an odd way, but a bridge built with miscalculations or a power plant that’s not assembled up to a great degree of specific calibrations is bound to at least endanger many lives.
Side note, I’d like to make it clear that much of the art I’ll be talking about in this blog post is the artform I’m most familiar with, being studio and digital art; normally very traditional, and falls well before many of the early 20th century movements that began questioning what exactly defines what art is; I refer to art here in a pretty classical, unnuanced sense, and plan on discussing Dadaism, Surrealism, Pop Art, etc. for a later day
But the fact remains that fundamentally, many of the same ideas we see in art appear in engineering. Diagrams, for example. Multiple drafts. Working at resembling real world structures and rendering them, sometimes twisting them or simplifying them, to either get a better understanding or a new interpretation. Both are inherently human, and require large degrees of creativity.
I believe the fundamental differences between these two, and the reason that so few artists turn up as engineers, or so few engineers turn up as artists, is two fold: 1. Engineering and (studio) art’s high bar for entry 2. Engineering’s restrictions
I don’t think many people would argue with me when I say that engineering has a high bar for entry; you need a lot of STEM background, an appreciation for systems often, and you need to not only enjoy being a problem solver but have been encouraged to do so; much of engineering, at least as a student, is as much about will power, perserverance, and a drive to succeed, as it is a series of mathematical expressions and designs.
But why would I say that art has a high bar for entry? This one, I think, is more a mental high bar than a physical one. To any artists reading this, I want you to fill in the following blank in my imaginary scenario:
Person A: [showing an artwork] This is a cat that I drew! I based it off of a photo of my cat, but I used oil pastel and changed the colors around to make it appear neon and change color under UV lighting.
Person B: Oh my gosh, I could never draw something like that! I can’t even draw a ____.
If your answer to that is stick figure, you are one of the many artists who are seeing live the high-bar for entry that is artistry, and very similar to engineering, its a mental one. Where engineering is exhausting while being learned, and requires a large amount of devotion (sometimes at expense of social life, for example), artistry requries a will to improve; it is self driven, at the end of the day, similar to engineering, but unlike engineering it requires constant, subjective comparison. It requires the artist to ask themselves “where did I go wrong”, “how could I improve this”, or “why doesn’t my artwork look like theirs”. The internal battle within artwork creates a high bar for entry that many people are scared to face and overcome, particularly later in life.
All that is to say, that there are high bars to enter both engineering and art, both of them mental, and both of them requiring either early interest in the subject or the drive to pursue them later in life despite societal opposition (less-so is this true for engineering). Resultantly, the chance of meeting someone who has been able to do both art and engineering is lower than you would think.
Moving onto the second bullet, being Engineering’s restrictions, I think that this is one of the things that holds artists back from joining engineering - the fact that engineering is an artform with a great degree of restrictions applied. From my perspective, engineering’s prototyping is a reflection of how it exists as a form of art. The difference from prototyping in art, however, and prototyping in engineering, is that as I said before if you make a prototype the final design, someone could get hurt in engineering. Engineering has built of a long history of rules and regulations (and logically so), but I think that to the average artist, who is so familiar with the ability to build what they want and do what they want with their artform, without rules, engineering likely feels quite restrictive. In many ways its like putting blinders on a horse; it focuses your energy, it keeps you focused on the road ahead; it keeps you and the people around you safe. But I think that at the same time, it’s just as good to let the horse roam a little bit, see the world, get spooked etc (I’m not a horse girl, if you couldn’t tell, and I’m sure many horse people got very mad at me for saying that just now). My main point is that engineering’s restrictions are unfortunately somewhat contradictory to what some artists want to do with their artforms, and resultantly engineering only applies to a few select artists who enjoy challenging themselves by placing restrictions on their own art forms. Engineering, then, is almost a practice in artistic expression that faces many requisites in order to ensure a sense of safety and coherence for its majors.
Call it a happy accident. While I was breadboarding for Lab 2 of HMC E155, I noticed that the wires and the way everything was coming together looks very similar to abstract art. In general, a lot of engineering (especially in its early stages) looks more like an art project than anything else. It made me think a bit about how to define the divide between the two.