Finding Dad in Every Pixel: A Creative DNA Story
I never expected researching ASCII art history would lead me to tears over a 1970s photo of my dad. But here we are. What started as curiosity about how Flora Stacey made a butterfly with a typewriter in 1898 became a meditation on creative DNA - how my father's "find beauty in the grid" workshop wisdom somehow travels through generations to become the algorithms I code today for Nike and Google campaigns.
Here's what stays with me: every creative breakthrough in history came from working with limits, not against them. The Bell Labs computer experts of the 1960s who shocked The New York Times. The ASCII communities created art using only the characters available. Japanese 2channel artists are creating poetry using special keyboard symbols. Even my own journey from playing with typefaces to building advanced matching systems. We all discovered the same truth: limits don't stop creativity; they create it.
The creative path is never what you expect, is it? Sometimes you look back at typewriter butterflies and find your father's hands. Sometimes you study how people see patterns in Milan and end up writing computer code. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in our endless digital world is to set limits. What limit became your creative superpower?Because I'm starting to think that's where all the magic lives - in the space between what we can't do and what we dream anyway. You can read the whole article: https://tsevis.com/when-machines-dream-in-letters