The Curious Engineer

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Aaron Hertzmann’s blog

aaronhertzmann.com

Aaron Hertzmann’s essays on art, technology, perception, and how they intersect.

GraphicsScienceEssays / personal

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
87 from 19 Apr 2020 to 5 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://aaronhertzmann.com/feed.xml

2026 6

  1. Science Fiction AI Has Nothing to Do with Real-World “AI”
  2. The Brain Is Not Just A Computer, and Cannot Be Simulated by One
  3. Scribbling, Abstract Art, and Visual Recognition
  4. People and Animals are Conscious
  5. Dogs Do Not Know Things
  6. Why Drawing is Hard: Visual Limitations and the Skills to Overcome Them

2025 6

  1. Technology and Social Isolation: From Cars to “AI”
  2. How “AI”-Generated Imagery is Different From Previous Art Technologies
  3. The Menace of Mechanical Music: Was John Philip Sousa right?
  4. Books That Changed The Way I See The World
  5. Non-Violent Communication, and Technical Communication
  6. Violent Communication in Scientific Paper Reviews

2024 13

  1. Choices During Painting: A Case Study
  2. How I Paint Space: Multiperspective Arrangement
  3. Learning from Painting, Part 7: Finding Inspiration, Six Years Later
  4. How We Perceive Shape in Painting and Photography: Perspective
  5. Book Reviews on Consciousness and Intelligence
  6. Distortion and Multiperspective in Art and Photography
  7. My Journey in Art and Computing, So Far (SIGGRAPH Award Talk)
  8. Judgments That Get in the Way of Making Art
  9. Why Evolution Isn’t Just Optimization
  10. Perspective Distortions: Why Normal Cameras Make Faces Look Weird
  11. Visual Illusions Explainable by the Limitations of Peripheral Vision
  12. The Illusion of Awareness: Why We See Much Less Than We Think We Do
  13. Computer Graphics Research As Scientific Modeling of Pictures

2023 15

  1. “That’s Not Art:” Art Worlds Define Art Differently
  2. Three Types of Art Technologies
  3. What is Creativity? Can Computers Be Creative?
  4. Why Industry Research Labs Should Publish
  5. How and Why I Blog
  6. Reminiscence: My first SIGGRAPHs
  7. Occluding Contour Breakthroughs, Part 1: A Surprisingly Hard Problem
  8. Occluding Contour Breakthroughs, Part 2: Getting It Right
  9. Occluding Contour Breakthroughs Part 3: Which Algorithm Should I Use (or Research)?
  10. Computer Science Venues Should Publish Position Papers
  11. The Curse of Performative User Studies
  12. Can You Tell If A Painting Came From A Photograph?
  13. Notes on the Hockney-Falco Thesis, and “Tim’s Vermeer”
  14. Changing Melodies: Art and Research are Often Open-Ended Exploration
  15. A Catalog of “AI” Art Analogies

2022 15

  1. When Machines Change Art
  2. Status Quo Bias
  3. Artworks as Experiments
  4. Amateurs: Making Art at Technological Cutting-Edges
  5. Four Important Eras that Define Art
  6. Confusing Definitions of Art (Definitions, Part 1)
  7. Useful Ways to Talk About of Art (Definitions, Part 2)
  8. We Aren’t Just Computers
  9. How Photography Became An Art Form
  10. SIGGRAPH Papers Committee Notes: 2022, and the future
  11. Two Recent Art Books
  12. Creative Explorations with DALL-E 2
  13. Photography is not Objective, Art is a Set of Choices
  14. Why Dark and Light is Complicated in Photographs
  15. How Does Perspective Work in Pictures?

2021 10

  1. The Skill Learning Curve
  2. How to Draw Pictures, Part 4: Line Thickness
  3. Why Does Line Drawing Work? A Realism Hypothesis
  4. Questions for Computational Creativity Research
  5. Art is Fundamentally Social
  6. To Buy or Not To Buy CryptoArt
  7. The Life-Cycle of AI Art Techniques
  8. Suggestions for Computer Vision Review Processes
  9. Understanding Visual Art as Computation: A Hypothetical Book Introduction
  10. How I Began to Appreciate Robot Painting

2020 22

  1. Why DeepDream Dreams of Doggies
  2. Learning from Painting, Part 6: Abstract Painting
  3. Learning from Painting, Part 5: Embracing Digital Painting
  4. Learning from Painting, Part 4: Time and Speed
  5. Learning from Painting, Part 3: Planning and Strategy
  6. Quantitative Evaluation Isn’t Everything
  7. Learning from Painting, Part 2: The Goal
  8. Learning from Painting, Part 1: Art is a Process
  9. Dreaming and Sampling
  10. Painting in Karies
  11. How to Draw Pictures, Part 3: Style
  12. How to Draw Pictures, Part 2: Suggestive Contours
  13. How to Draw Pictures, Part 1: Contours
  14. What if CVPR is a Graphics Conference?
  15. Bits on Academic Writing: Footnotes, Actually, Semantics
  16. Technical Paper Rebuttals Aren’t Just For “Factual Errors”
  17. What is Contemporary Art?
  18. What is “What is Art?”
  19. SIGGRAPH Should Add A Conference Paper Track
  20. Book Reviews on Understanding Art
  21. Apparent Ridges, Edges, and Perception of Line Drawing
  22. Why Edge Detection Doesn’t Explain Line Drawing