hw1 | Music 256A

Cody Hergenroeder

Part 1

Reading Response: Sublime Design

Cody Hergenroeder
9/26/2021
Music 256A/CS476A, Stanford University

I resonate with Definition 1.2 from Artful Design, Chapter 1: "Artful Design is Technology in Search of the Sublime". I love that artful design is a combination of top-down and bottom-up practices. I was wondering how this combination works in practice, whether it's some unified force to be found, or if there is a kind of alternation between bottom-up and top-down searching independently until they find a happy medium where theywill unite. Principle 1.7 points to them being intertwined, but doesnt detail precisely how. Ge later mentions the sublime, which reminds me of the phrase "numinous experience", but I guess that doesn't quite capture it--this concept of 'sublime' should evoke the same fear and awe that we have of the infinite recursive loop of just being in this conscious experience.
I like the vibes I get from this synthesis of problem-solving and aesthetic exploration, it matches well with my personality of pragmatic idealism; Artful Design seems to both suggest the importance of finding utopia, while imploring that we must find it wherever we are at. We need to imagine/plan/design the beautiful because to prioritize anything else is to lose sight of what's truly important (e.g, the elucidating thoughts we think as we wake up and go to sleep), and yet if we don't recognize potential in the tools that are in our hands and the materials around us, we'll never be able to construct it. The chair we're sitting on must have the potential to be the throne of a king, the crib of the most tired baby, the pillage of a conqueror.
My mind is drawn to how my classes with Ge in the past have drawn from design principles, synthesizing the sublime with the pragmatic; balancing the needs for a structured, standardized education with the need to have fun and enact the kind of creativity that comes to mind for you. In the past, we have been consulted on extending deadlines for assignments and the like, as well as considered when guidelines for assignments are stretched beyond their prescriptive meaning and interpreted to be more inclusive (within certain bounds of reason, I can also remember at least one instance where it was obvious that a student's assignment simply was other than what was assigned). There is a balance to be had.
When we hold the sublime in the palm of our hand we are faced directly with the beauty and terror of what it means to be alive truly, experiencing this body and this moment--all at once what is the most immediate and close (pragmatic) and what is the most profound, divine, transcendently beautiful, and far-away (idealism). In the sublime, I see my own pragmatic idealism.

Design Etude #1

Parts 1 & 2

  1. The curvature of the street in Inception, when the whole world curves around and the top of some buildings touches on the top of others in a hairpin curl. It has to do with its function. it brings out the inner dream world. it suggests the world that you imagined to yourself as a kid when you flipped yourself upside-down and saw the ceiling as a floor and the cabinets as doors, that that world is valid.
  2. The thick, large windowsills in EVGR. I like the function of being able to stand in so large a windowsill and look over my campus. This interplays with form; the sills of the window are simply gigantic; like big puffy bold letters, they bring comfort to a room that is otherwise lifeless, cookie-cutter, and sterile. it appears and is safe in its strength, its sturdiness.
  3. Windows that serve as walls, of a house i went to recently. I was inspired by the sheer beauty of their form/function--the transparency that lends itself to the function of being able to see (and thus being part of) the nature outside. I was further inspried when i notice the house's residents had drawn all over these windows in whiteboard marker, writing thermodynamics equations and the like--bringing the nature scenery to life by juxtaposing with the urgency of day-to-day thinking, planning, solving.

Part 3: Guerilla Design

Remembering/saving my favorite tweets to return to later and truly ingrain into my mind is a purely cognitive task. It's a necessary cognitive task, like returning to flashcards or re-reading your favorite book to make sure that it *really* impacts you. But it's a high-energy one, one that requires you to stop what you're doing and build your schedule around boringly returning back to these same old thoughts over again. A habit that was never going to last. However, the room in which I dwell is a blank slate of a room. EVGR rooms, with their sharp right edges and wide white walls and vast blankness, are empty vessels of a great big nothing. But I know my room can perpetuate a great big something, that serves a great end, and is an end unto itself.
I started with sticky notes, but I've decided to print these tweets that mean so much to me (and will continue printing them over the course of the year) and apply them to the walls of my dorm. I want my room to be filled with cognitions that represent a vibrating & vibrant energy--thoughts so big that they hyperbolically expand the space of my room by their very presence. Inherently beautiful thoughts that also serve the great end of filling my mind with them, making my mind a factory of their beauty.

Here's what it looked like after I printed 5 of my favorite tweets:

Here's what it looked like after I hung up these tweets, making new right angles in my right angle room that isn't so empty anymore:

Part 2: Chuck

Below you will find my ChucK file that makes some kind of sound. It plays noise via ADSR, and filters out the high frequencies randomly (150-600Hz). chuck.ck

Part 3: Creating my Webpage:

Welcome.