Typesetting by Natural Selection

From the book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick:

”In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet’s statistics. In search of data on the letters’ relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E’s, nine thousand T’s, and only two hundred Z’s. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text.”

This is a striking example of Evolution by Natural Selection, not originating from the Nature, the one with plants and animals, but from simple human experience.

Over years from the late 19th century to do 1970s and 1980s newspaper Linotype machine operators who work with hot metal typesetting systems learned to stock metal letters in right amounts. Lacking even a single pre-cast metal letter could prevent the newspaper from being printed. Having them in surplus would be wasteful as they were heavy, required storage and costed. These constraints constituted selection pressure akin to Natural Selection in biological systems.

Like a blind watchmaker newsletter operators over years of trial and error learned to store pre-cast metal letters in right amounts matching actual frequency of letters in the Alphabet so that that they never miss a print.

Alfred Vail who along with Samuel Morse were developing and commercialising American telegraphy simply observed and exploited Natural Selection in typesetting systems and achieved something that could only be achieved with computers today.

Resources inspired me to write this story:

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick, 2011

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, 1986

Rupture

Art is meant to be a rupture, a violent departure from conventional, a rebellious stand against the world order. 

It is the agony, the sorrow, the pain, the darkness, the sarcasm, the arrogance, the intensity, the insult, the drama, the madness make the Art. Everything else is trash.

Art is not for fainthearted, for those who do not dare to face their inner world, not for whom constantly escape from hell within.  

Success

I think, anxiety from “fear of failure” must be embedded in our DNA like every other animal species.

Little has changed since our ancestors walked across the savannah under scourging heat, searching for food and threatened by wild animals.

Today everything from our education systems to business systems leverage the same anxiety.

At school we are constantly exposed to tests utilising our primordial fear. Success is cherished, failure is demonised. Obedient individuals are programmed to contribute to the overall success of the larger group they belong to.

It is only until recently with the rise of startup culture, failure was made welcoming and become important part of development process; the idea is to learn from mistakes in organised fashion. Alas this is an illusion.

At the end of several fail-improve cycles, the business may come to an abrupt end when it runs out of fuel. Some say 90% of tech start-ups doom to fail.

In other words, it is important to differentiate failure as a useful business process, as opposed to failure as business, the latter is unfortunately akin to returning empty handed from hunting.

So where does this leave us at?

As we get older we begin to realise other important facts of life; time is getting scarcer, we are not getting any healthier, and our hormones (including the ones that drive anxiety) get weaker.

With anti-anxiety, anti-cholesterol, and anti-high blood pressure pills on the table, suddenly it may occur to us “what the hell have I been doing to myself all this time? Fuck success!”, and this is, dear friends, my definition of “maturity”.
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Journey

Art is an individual journey. Like every journey it has a beginning, a flow, and an end. If there is no journey there is no Art.

Each piece in your Art should tell a story stitched to a different piece. Each piece should be meaningful in its own as well as when stitched together.

Art

It is what we eliminate makes Art, not what we add.