Analogies

Analogies is a book of visual correspondence between Gordon Cameron and Kate Joyce. Kate is an independent photographer. She lives in Santa Fe, NM. Gordon is a software engineer and works at a video game company. He lives in Berkeley, CA. They met on an airplane.We are interested in the pleasures of puzzles, humor, photography as a language and the elasticity of human cognition.Early in their friendship Joyce and Cameron left words behind and spontaneously began communicating through a volley of pictures and visual rhyme. A practice not uncommon in this day and age-but, through their five-year exchange they learned that the complex and fundamental domain of analogy-creation appears vital and endless.How does-humor, a puzzle, communication, vision, or a friendship-work? There are no right answers, but we know them when we see them. With a forward by Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Mitchell has authored and edited six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).A subcontext of Analogies is the contrast between human thought and computer "thought" at a time when teaching computers means the rapidly expanding automation of vision and production of massive datasets.Cameron and Joyce created a succession of hundreds of analogies through thousands of photographs since 2016. Included in this edition is a large and representative selection of the whole.