M.021 The Gaze

The skill underneath the skill

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I was in Singapore recently. A fantastic city, no doubt, but every time I visit the same thing strikes me: there is no graffiti on the walls, and the curbs and ledges don’t have marks and bruises from skateboarding.

More interesting than the absence of these city imperfections, is the variance in who notices it. I noticed their absence immediately. Others don’t. Why?

The explanation seems simple. If you have some experience with either activity, you see a city in a different way than those who haven’t. A street artist sees the city as a large exhibition space, with objects and artefacts as potential props for art installations. A skateboarder sees the city as a skatepark full of potential elements to be skated.

In a way, both are like variants of Roddy Piper from the John Carpenter classic, “They Live”. The guy who finds a pair of glasses allowing him to see the world as it truly is: run by aliens who control the masses with subliminal, hidden messages. Only that the true world is full of skate spots and art opportunities, not aliens and instructions to obey.¹

In a recent substack, tech-writer Jasmine Sun describes another type of glasses in how programmers tend to see every problem as software-shaped. She argues that it’s much harder for non-technical people to build with AI, simply because they lack this “software vision”

There is much to like about that observation, but I think the real bottleneck preventing most from seeing AI opportunities is slightly different. Seeing every problem as software-shaped is one thing. Seeing which problems that are best suited for AI-solutions, is something else. This latter skill is shaped by more than the “software vision” and it’s understanding of the solution space. Its also shaped by your ability to see which problems that actually matter in a given domain.

In my head the key question then is how each of us can develop a gaze that allows us to clearly see valuable problems in our domains, and their potential AI solutions. This is an important nut to crack, because the problems worth solving sits with most of us, not with programmers.

The good news though, is that the gaze can be learned. And I think my own experience with skateboarding and street art might help illustrate how.

The skateboarder’s gaze

I started skateboarding when I was 8. Although I rarely skate these days, I have the house full of skateboards and still think like a skateboarder when I walk through an urban area.

I see a nice curb or rail, and look for marks from someone having skated it. I see a beautiful ledge next to some stairs with a good landing, and envision how different pro skaters would skate each element. And I see the elements that I could have skated myself (in my prime at least), and think about what tricks I would have tried.

This gaze has been built up from early age, from skateboarding myself and from watching others skate. And it seems to stick. I barely skate anymore, but the gaze is there. The glasses are still on.

If skateboarding was my only observation, I would conclude that the gaze takes a lifetime to build up.

But it doesn’t. The proof is the development of my other city lense: the street art gaze. Which came about much later in life, and relatively quicker.

The street artist’s gaze

Around 2005, I started noticing the first pieces of stencil graffiti around my hometown of Bergen. Including Banksy’s rats, subtly placed in a shabby area I often walked through (yes, that Banksy — he visited Bergen in 2000s), and the stencil graffiti of Bergen’s own Dolk (who has since turned to fine art).

It was graffiti, but different. It was art, but different. It communicated to a different audience than classic graffiti, it used a very different form language than fine art, and the pieces interacted with their environment in ways I had never seen before.

My curiosity took me online, where I learned that street art was a thing. A thing that encompassed much more than the stencil graffiti pieces I had seen in Bergen. It was also stickers. Creative installations. Pieces closer to performance art. It was art in the context of the street. And I wanted in.

From the outside, street art looked easy. Or so I thought until I tried to make something interesting myself. Then I realised that it wasn’t. Today, I think it was because I hadn’t yet developed the gaze.

Instead of giving up, I got even more curious on the scene, and more respectful of those who consistently cracked it. I followed it online, constantly thought about new ideas, and scouted for new pieces in the streets. When I was abroad, I found the aliens of Invader, the paste-ups of Blek le Rat, the stencils of Banksy. And countless pieces from artists I still don’t know.

And gradually, I felt my street art gaze improving. What used to be forced creative acts, became intuitive and effortless ideas connected to sites, walls and elements I saw around me. These street signs, could they tell stories? This trash can kind of looks like an alien? This metal plate on a public toilet without a keyhole, could that become art?

And from that point on, something shifted. The glasses were on. What I saw around me in a city, and everything I had learnt about street art started to effortlessly interact with my own creativity.

All this culminated in 2007 when I posted some images online of one of my projects. It kind of blew up, spread to countless blogs and news sites, and resulting in thousands of visitors from around the world to my shitty blogspot-page. Later some of the images even landed in a few books and magazines.

But more than being my small claim to fame in that world, it marked that I had gone from being a consumer of street art, to becoming a producer. From admiring the creative solutions of others, to producing my own. From struggling with finding good problem solution matches, to finding them more and more often myself. And the key was that I had a better gaze in place.

The AI gaze

So how does all this translate to AI?

If I look at my own journey of building and working with AI, I see a strikingly similar pattern to that of my street art story.

With AI, everything also started with curiosity and a deep fascination for what others were building. For me, start was early nocode tools, and curiously following AI-breakthroughs from the outside. I read about use cases and technological advances. And I watched demos online.

Eventually I started to try things out myself. Tested tools, built small projects and ran small experiments. And just as with my first street art attempts, I quickly learned that getting real value from both nocode tools and AI was much harder than it seemed from the outside.

I started to look at successful applications just as much to understand my own failures, as I did for pure fascination or admiration. And just as for street art, I started to pick up different things from the work of others. Features or details that before I didn’t notice, would suddenly stand out as important.

And then, gradually, just as for street art, AI-related ideas started arriving on their own. I noticed problem-solution matches I hadn’t seen before, even if they had been just under my nose. And I felt my creativity naturally connecting to both problems I saw around me and the space of potential AI-related solutions. A new pair of glasses were on.

Street art and AI. Different domains. Similar processes.

Besides the gaze being key to making progress in both domains, its interesting how my journeys from consumer to producer were more the result of perceptual shifts, than having acquired any new technical skills. When the gazes finally clicked into place and opened the floodgates of new ideas, my art skills and my technical skills were both pretty much the same lame as before. I couldn’t and still can’t draw. I couldn’t and still can’t code.

The key was more that my newfound gaze allowed new connections to naturally form in my associative networks. You can be as creative as you want in one area, but transferring this to another requires your associative network to have nodes from the new domain. The gaze is what happens when enough relevant nodes have accumulated for the connections to start firing on their own.

For people with deep knowledge of the problems in their field, they need to gather enough AI experiences to develop the gaze. For the AI engineer with deep knowledge of the solutions, it goes the other way. Seeing the world as software shaped problems is one thing. Noticing the important problems in need of an AI solution in a particular field is something else. To see that, the AI engineer needs to fill their network with nodes from the domain at hand.

How to see?

When looking at others who excel at something, its easy to focus on their craft and skills. What we tend to overlook is the importance of the gaze. The skill underneath the skill. The thing that lets someone see what others can’t.

To a certain degree, a well developed gaze can probably compensate for lack of skills. Its true value, however, is as a complement to other relevant skills. Which probably explains why my fling with street art didn’t turn into something bigger. I lacked those other relevant skills.

But the key take-away is that the gaze cannot easily be downloaded from an app store, a skill repository, or quickly learned through an online course.

Across fields, its something that needs to be built up over time. Through curiously exploring what others have done, reflecting on why something works and why it doesn’t, through active tinkering, testing and experimenting, and through doing all of this patiently over time.

A technically good skateboarder never earns the cred from fellow skateboarders before they demonstrate their gaze with creative runs in a city.

A technically skilled artist never become a truly good street artist without creating pieces in the context of their surroundings. Without the gaze, its art placed in the streets. Not street art.

And a technically competent AI user will never consistently find the problems worth solving, until they’ve developed the gaze that lets them see problems others walk right past.

1. Ironically, the subliminal messages in “They live” birthed one of the most famous street artists and street art project. Shepard Fairey and Obey.