When I was first hired to teach college-level Illustration, I set into a fury of trying to jam my brain full of foundational techniques from the ground up. With the keen and green desire to be an honest teacher, I borrowed books from animator friends and cracked open some of the dustier volumes from my bookshelf, easily for the first time since the day of purchasing. I combed through the chapters in dimly-lit cafés and carefully followed the exercises. I had by then garnished an at least localized reputation for my artistic merits. What success I had was enough to feel confident in that I could be considered self-taught. But while going on one day about how much I was learning about formal technique, an old friend expressed a concern that sat with me for years. He questioned how the new knowledge might affect my artwork. I knew what he meant, and appreciated the compliment. His admiration for my artwork was about my style as it was, and felt concern that technical improvement might hinder what was natural in my expression, flaws and all. I took it to heart, and was a bit torn.
<belongs in Brickwork> Having always seen a practical logic in the saying “learn the rules so you know how to break them”, I had taken it in stride that this applied to all life rules, including those pertaining to drawing techniques. But it does throw things into question when you ask what goal those rules are designed for.
I appeased <balanced out> the debate of formal technique versus an intuitive learning process in how I constructed my lesson plan. I assembled the course content from a mixed bag of applied technique and personal improvisation. On the formal end, I referred largely to drafting techniques taken from interior / exterior design manuals, perspective techniques from books on how-to-draw comics and a few traditional (old-timey) books about figure drawing from the animation-industry adored Andrew Loomis. But what I really aspired to do was try and figure out how to give this room of people, who as adults, had paid for these classes out of their own pocket and slogged into the studio after long workdays throughout the winter, the same groundwork that had motivated me to teach myself to draw. I was shooting darts in the dark on how to go about that, taking what I could recall from my childhood, teenage and adult experiences about how I’d developed this language within myself.
I had them purchase deliberately poor-quality notebooks, preferably with lined or graphed pages, from Dollarama or a drugstore, to relinquish any ego-distracting aspirations about public presentation right off the bat. Each week they were tasked to fill up those pages with doodles. It didn’t matter what the subject matter was or or many pages they used. All I expected from them was an effort to draw, anything and everything they desired, regardless of their skill level. If all they could draw was stickmen, that was perfectly fine. But towards the end of class each week I would sit down with each of them and pour over their doodles, designating my full attention while suggesting small, fun challenges that met them where they were at. Could you make those stickmen do a thing, like could they grow till they burst off the page and on the next, were reincarnated as stick-birds? I made these requests on the fly, to provide them with either something to work with or to reject and go their own way.
Over a few months of this doodle-booking practice, I would consistently witness a transformation taking place. It was, regardless of whether their technical drawing ability had improved, a growing confidence in each student’s individual style of self-expression. A musician can play with technical perfection (or as close to it as possible) while emoting nothing, just as a painter can replicate near-perfect realism while failing to express meaning to the viewer. Perfection and emotion, truth and perception, apples and oranges, vibrancy be damned. They can exist together but they’re not codependent. I don’t know that I succeeded at teaching them how to ‘draw’, but I started to sense that I was helping them understand themselves as artists. <drawing shoes example>
The day that a network of algorithms figures out how to express itself through a series of meandering doodles drawn from daily experience and in the process and instills a confidence its own unique visual language, is the day that the computer (or whatever it will be called) will come to know itself as an artist too.
The cartesian grid forms the compositional makeup of 3D rendered models, but it also translates in drawing terms to more or less the paper (2D) equivalent of linear perspective. Perspective not an easy thing to teach – how to roughly calculate the distance and scale between two or more objects in a scene, and the more resources I sought out to help me build a better delivery, the more it felt like I was just adding to the list of ways to skin a cat. The reason being, all these different explanations are derived from artists trying to both capture the essence of math while dumbing it down in the form of easily digestible visual metaphors. The math of perspective was hashed out by the princes of Renaissance art. Basically these guys transformed the Dark Ages trend of painting from flat and somewhat silly nonsense into rules that fell in the scope of science. Suddenly geometry became the underbelly of the lavish commissions that filled the gallery walls of Europe’s sovereign houses, and along with it a hotbed of scholarly exploration and discovery. It was but one instance of the intersect.
Math and art have been living out the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tumultuous love story throughout the history of human intellect like a reoccurring dream that can either be good or bad, depending on your level of anxiety or how late you ate before bedtime. When they work, it’s fireworks. The fusion of our greatest endowments. The high crests of civilization have seen the fruits of their union. When they don’t, they are duelling opponents in a battle for truth, catapulting with embarrassingly proud polarity into the camps of capital towers of technology and the decolonized rivers of critical theory.
This thesis sits in the juncture of the two camps while the parties in question negotiate their terms like a child waiting for the papers to be signed just to know while clutching the suitcase that holds their lego collection. It makes it both fascinating and mind-numbing to think about, never mind find the footing on which to take a stand. And here is where I find myself, struggling to find my place as the child of two houses, refusing to see dad as math and mom as art, but parents I love equally for the same reasons they were attracted one another in the first place. ///// <sexism rant> : But why does dad get to be math? Does it frustrate you too? Did you even bat an eye when you skimmed through that line, or did it throw off your momentum like a car ahead of you flashing left when merging right, begging you to hit the horn just to address the situation? Not because of imminent danger but rather the pull of an ethical compulsion to correct a troubling carelessness before it wears its way into the tired grooves of human behaviour? ///////

If you’re anything like me in your relationship to technology, or for that matter, any attempt to overcome any sort of technical challenge, be it a dance move to navigating your way around a new city for the first time even by following the beaconed blue dot on your phone’s map, you may relate to certain pain-points in my approach. My initial fascination and curiosity for logic and all things technical stems from a childhood spent as my dad’s little buddy and eventually co-pilot on anything from various household repair projects to backyard pool pump maintenance and the dismantling and Frankensteining of curb-side computers and television sets that he brought home over the years. He trained me through the operations of ‘waking up’ the pool pump for the season, from its winter slumber in the dark closet tucked in the back corner of our garage. He claimed the intent was so that he could sleep in on weekend mornings in the late spring, instead of being woken by my affront of early-morning inquisitions that demanded, in the charm-whining voice culled just for daughters who have the luck of growing up with a fun dad, justification for why it was not yet the perfect day to be opening the pool. But I like to think there was more to the story; that his kid could inherit his unusual combined passion of art and technology. My dad’s Masters thesis was about e.e. Cummings and he published a book of poetry before he taught himself how to program – initially, before it would become the responsible career move of a family man, out of pure fascination – in the early 80s. He spent his workdays debugging software and his weekends playing Bach on his viola in the thick afternoon ray of sunshine that cast through my parents bedroom. When I hear <> I can still see the dust that sparkled in the air of that light.
He set my brother and I up with our own computer when I was around six or seven years old, and told me I could do whatever I wanted to ‘mess it up’ save for bashing the keyboard. In spite of this, I could never manage to penetrate the DOS screen beyond the repeated response “SYNTAX ERROR”, and any attempt he made to teach me the basics of programming were refuted by that very impatience that followed me into adulthood. That, along with the rebuttals about learning to speak his mother tongue, Hungarian, the childish mockery of his attempts to cook the meals of his culture, and quitting the violin lessons he would walk us to each week because it was getting too hard for my tiny fingers, would later become my biggest regrets.
I’ve always seen this as the divide between my dad’s mind and my own. We continue to share the same brand of off-brand sense of humour, a love of literature, history, and philosophical musings about technology. But his journey with math that ended by flunking out of grade 10, was renewed when he discovered programming. My own relationship with the subject remained a battle of anxiety since I was forced out in grade 11 by an impediment to grasp the concepts of trigonometry, one that I have yet to overcome.
As I entered the world of adults I began to recognize that my dad’s position in the annex between technology and the arts was one shared by many, often but not limited to those of Eastern European descent. In the years I spent working as a UX designer, I would be introduced to the art of programming for graphical interfaces by a recently-landed computer science student from Shanghai, and in the after-hours of the first startup I worked at, I’d find myself on the receiving end of impassioned lessons on a whiteboard about the poetry of database design by the Ukrainian CTO. I encountered the joy of designing animations for a company website with a 19-year old co-op engineering student who had won the first place medal in the Iranian math Olympiad, who took Salsa lessons after work and is now a master dancer.
It now seems apparent to me that it’s for this reason that I embraced Jaron Lanier’s writing like I was bumping into a long-lost friend after too long a time spent meandering through the endless woods of VR. Reading the first few chapters of his book, Dawn of the New Everything, where Lanier recounts an off-kilter childhood in New Mexico followed by the mystical early years of what was to become what is now known as Silicon Valley, I felt like I was getting a glimpse at the landscape my dad trudged through well before he became a father. Lanier was raised by a Viennese-Jewish mother, and a Ukrainian father, themselves living out the tale too-often told by those fleeing their geographical roots after narrowly escaping the fate of the many that fell by the blade of what evils tore those roots from the soil (the Holocaust and the Ukranian pogroms respectively). His mother, Lilly, was a classically-trained pianist of exorbitant talent, was the bread-earner of the family and did so by day-trading via phone calls to the New York Stock Exchange.

Lilly had been a prodigy concert pianist as a girl, born to a successful Jewish family in Vienna. Her father was a professor and a rabbi; an associate of Martin Buber’s. They lived in a nice house, had comfortable lives. My grandparents were determined to wait out the threatening politics of their day. They were convinced there was a limit to how low people would sink.
Lilly was a precocious and resourceful teenager, and while it would normally be the last thing you’d care about, it turned out to be crucial that she was very light-skinned and blond. She was able to talk her way out of a pop-up concentration camp by passing as Aryan, and then to forge paperwork to get her father released just before he would have been murdered.
Maneuvers like this were only possible in the earliest days of the Holocaust, before genocidal procedures were optimized. In the end, most of my mother’s family was murdered by the Nazis.
Some got out, eventually to New York City. At first, Lilly made a living as a seamstress; soon she had her own lingerie brand. She studied painting, and was still young enough to train as a dancer. She earned her own money to pursue these dreams. In photographs, she looked like a movie star.
…
My mother made our money over the phone, trading stocks in New York, back when no one did that. She wasn’t a tycoon, not even close; we were middle class, but non in the upper reaches of the middle. We could eat at a drive-up hamburger joint every week.
Players are usually either well-off or wannabes on Wall Street, or any other wide-open platform, but my mother found a do-well-enough niche. Could she have done better? Maybe she was afraid of standing out, being seen.

A windfall that came from a successful trade went towards the purchase of their first family car, and resulted in her traumatic, untimely death when the wheels spun out on the highway. After Lilly’s death, Lanier’s father, Ellery, takes on persona with echoes of Robin Williams in the story that follows, where after losing their remaining assets in a house fire, he and his young son lived in tents on bare plot of land while he worked toward becoming a teacher, eventually saving up enough money to give his kid carte blanche on the designing of a new home from the ground up. This would become the geodesic dome they built themselves, that sounds a bit like living on a spacecraft, and his dad lived out his days there long after Lanier flew the coop. Lanier writes about his father:

Before I was born, he had undertaken a wide range of careers simultaneously, just as I have. He studied architecture at Cooper Union and built skyscrapers with his father, who was also an architect. He also had a shop designing window displays at Macy’s and he and Lilly (Lanier’s mother) had shown their paintings – cubist – at a few notable shows.
Ellery had a mystical bent. He had lived with Gurdjieff in Paris and Huxley in California and studied with various Hindu and Buddhist teachers.
Hand in hand with his interest in mysticism, which he distinguished from superstition, Ellery liked confronting hokum. He was a minor radio personality in the 1950s, a semiregular paneleist on one of the very first radio call-in shows, hosted by the pioneering broadcaster Long John Nebel, who was known for his interest in the paranormal.
….
Ellery took to teaching sixth-grade kids in the rough little barrio in the center of Las Cruces, New Mexico, as if it were an art form. He had tough kids build carboard spaceships to inhabit all day long. They launched model rockets and used sand to explore the ideas behind calculus. He was known as pelón to the kids, for Ellery was shiny bald, like a polished gem.
Whenever I go back to visit Las Cruces, people come up to me, and with that distinct New Mexico Chicano accent, say things like, “Your dad Ellery changed my life. My older brother is in jail, but I’m a NASA engineer.”

I don’t know enough about New Mexico to consider how much or little coincidence was involved in how the culture of technological genius and mystical reverence for the intergalactic unknown shaped the atmosphere of Lanier’s early years. His parents had met as artists in New York City, in itself reason enough to speculate as to whom or what had sparked the suggestion of New Mexico in their minds. At the time it was the last stretch of the frontier remaining before the parking lots of Walmart paved American ideology into a corner. That two eccentrics should meet in the cultural hub of the country and retreat to the desert to start a family, the reason being a desire to evade the demands of a burgeoning corporate culture that fed the middle class of post WW2 America doesn’t seem to fully suffice <AWKWARD>. They must have had intentions about the intellectual atmosphere that would permeate the particles of sand their kids would pack into towers and turrets.

There was a social anomaly in that part of New Mexico: a population of superb engineers and scientists employed by White Sands Missile Range. They were everywhere. It was a relief to discover the culture of technical people, which was welcoming to an awkward kid like me.
One of our near neighbors was a lovely, slight old man named Clyde Tombaugh, who had discovered the planet Pluto in his youth. When I knew him, he directed research in optical sensing at White Sands.
I learned how to grind lenses and mirrors from Clyde, and I still think of him when I work on virtual reality headset optics today. He built impressive backyard telescopes, and he let me play with them. I will never forget a globular cluster he showered me – a vividly three-dimensional form, a physical object like me, a cousin to me, as real in front of me as anything else in the world. I gained a sense of belonging in the universe.

My own father, Martin, was born and raised in Budapest with his younger sister Agnes, till they had to flee the Soviets. Their parents had met shortly after having survived detainment in concentration camps, where they both lost the bulk of their family. Those who hadn’t been killed or perished joined the mass exodus to Israel, where branches of my family live on today with no knowledge of our existence. Our only connection lies in the family name, Rein, which after the war had been like many who chose not to retreat to the promised sanctity of the so-called holy land, had been changed for the sake of hiding in public. The name Reyto, a North-American adaptation of the original disguise of “Rejto”, has no direct lineage and has thus never ceased to provoke a curious pause from those feeling it out for the first time. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to say “Arrr…eee…. not Ay… it’s arrrr eeeeee… Y … tee… ohh”. I grew out of the visualization trick I’d used in making new friends in my teens and early 20s, “just picture a toe, who’s name is Ray”, in an attempt to avoid such cringing mispronunciations as Reedo, Rachel, or the worst: Right-oh”.
My grandfather was a business man who’s own father was a failed writer. I say failed because he had traded prosperity for his craft, apart from the occasional published piece in a newspaper, his novels would have vanished if not for my dad’s efforts to translate them into English for the benefit of no one other than himself and me. When the Soviets invaded Budapest in ’56, my grandfather refused to conform to the new workplace protocols of the regime, resulting in his being beaten to a near pulp over the course of one long night. When he did make it home, my dad’s family hid in their apartment building’s basement for a few days, until through connections made by my grandpa’s good name, were able to retreat by train in the middle of the night.
After a long plight that took place mostly by foot through the winter (everyone was kicked off the train once beyond the city limits), they finally reached the Austrian border, where they were given amnesty and cots to sleep on in a large warehouse that harboured hundreds of refugees. My dad who was Eight years-old, and his memory of this time is of air tinged with citrus from the oranges they were given and the fumes of exhaled cigarette smoke. He described it as the happiest scent of his life, that blend. In the winter of grade Eight I once stood in a parking lot near my school, peeling an orange as someone stood smoking next to me, and it was like being transported into this refugee story that I had requested before bedtime so often as a kid that I chose it as the topic for public-speaking assignments because I could ad-lib it on the spot.
They made finally made it to Toronto, again on account of a connection of my grandpa’s, where my dad’s small family remained with no connection to relatives other than an aunt and second cousin who stayed in Budapest. They had a Christmas tree every year, and apart from the Synagogue funerals that would later take place for everyone but my dad, the last family member standing, there was no nod of acknowledgement of their Jewish lineage.

Maybe I was so drawn to Lanier’s story because I felt a kinship to him. His parents, especially his mother, struck me as so familiar in the stories that make up my own life. Even the stock trading. The Ukrainian mother of my boyfriend throughout my 20s, he who passed away earlier this year that I refer to in these writings, had fed her kids and kept a roof over their heads in part by calling in trades by the telephone in their kitchen. She would spend her days in the living room, ascribing diligent notes with crisp penmanship in neatly ledgered columns in a notebook while tracking the numbers in the NYSE Index. At the time it seemed on par with communicating with aliens.
The tragedy Lanier’s mother’s early death is a theme that followed him throughout his life, one that rang familiar to me when watching my dad speak at my grandmother’s funeral. Halfway through the eulogy, he paused in a long silence, before letting out a piercing, gut-wrenching wail. My cousin and I, who sat together among our family in the front row, grasped for and clutched each others hands in that moment. We never spoke about it, but there was no reason to. We were in our late 20s then but instantly young children, hearing in that wail the pain of loss in my grandmother’s soul. Her daughter Agnes, my dad’s sister and my cousin’s mom, had been torn from our lives by cancer shortly after turning 40. My grandma’s beloved father had died suddenly when she was 10, the mass murdering of her extended family throughout the war, all that she had witnessed in the holocaust, and the death of her husband in his 50s were all pains that were seldom spoken of. My father’s wail echoed them all.