John Maeda, carrots and potatoes

xDxD reads Creative Code by John Maeda while penelope prepares baked potatoes

While engaged in the deepest trance of coding, all one needs to wish for is any kind of numerical or symbolic resource, and in a flash of lightning it is suddenly there, at your disposal. The question is, Where is “there”? “There” is not inside your mind but inside the computer, a blurry space of symbols and numbers that focus in an ever-migrant pattern of sense and nonsense. Perhaps the only moment of clarity in the computer’s mind occurs when it crashes: All processing comes to a halt and any “there” that might have existed completely vanishes. If I were a computer, I would be happy to crash once in a while, because if it were not for the occasional crash, the computer’s human user would waste all of his or her life huddled over a pile f metal and plastic. If the computer truly loved its human, it would want the human to take a break once in a while. To crash is a noble act of sacrifice by the computer.

John Maeda, Creative Code