Readings

Fridays in summer are not studio days, so I took the boys to the library to keep up with our summer reading. I have a huge stack of books related to the paintings I'm working by the bed that I am working through, but I was looking for a little distraction and found Alec Foege's book The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Made America Great.

As I took the book off the shelf, I knew I was being inspired by a story on NPR earlier this week ("Hacking Real Things Becomes Child's Play at this Camp"). The report described kids at Def Con learning the basics of programming by hacking televisions and other household electronics. I was enchanted listening to these children describe finding bugs in Facebook apps (an accomplishment that could have a payoff of up to $1,000 to the child). I thought about my own childhood, and the countless hours spent unintentionally destroying things at my father's workbench. I have long maintained that the difference between artists and engineers is that while both people can take things apart, only the engineers can put them back together.

Listening to the story, it occurred to me that hacking is tinkering in the 21st century - that the ability to take something apart, modify it, and make it go in a new way is a function of being fluent with code. Just as one generation manipulated mechanical tools, and the next generation manipulated electronics and circuits, this generation has to manipulate chunks of script to reshape its world.

Foege's book only gets about one page before the identity of the hacker and the tinkerer are conflated. To his credit, he touches on the idea of the perergon early in the book. It seems almost essential to the idea of the tinkerer that there is something going on that takes up most of the frame, and then there is the tinkering...which calls to mind an important detail: a couple of people are missing from Foege's index. Samuel F.B. Morse and Abbot Thayer. Both were painters and inventors - Morse perfected the telegraph (its writing system of dots and dashes bears his name) and Thayer's observations about wildlife helped make him the father of modern camouflage. Morse is much better remembered for his code (despite his paintings continued exhibition...) and Thayer is remember as a painter, if at all.

But we'll be back for them...so much to read...