Justin A. Fritz
MSEE · ASIC / PHY Engineer · Aircraft Navigator · Artist · Science Communicator
The Canonical Art is a framework for understanding creative and intellectual work as a mapping from an internal knowledge state to an external artifact. Every drawing is a document of that mapping: what the author knew, how they organized it, what they chose to put on paper.
The works below were produced on poster paper with markers and tape — working notes, not illustrations of published theory. They turned out to anticipate, in rough but precise form, four claims about human creativity and generative AI that three subsequent years of public deployment have made urgent.
An AI cannot have produced these diagrams in 2022. Not because the generation capability did not exist, but because the specific knowledge state that generated the Faraday analogy, the Robocat punchline, and the USAF resolution chart argument was not in any training set.
Human creative cognition as a knowledge state machine. Structural isomorphism with LSTM: cell state → Kpast, forget gate → cognitive strategy, input gate → Fogbank, output gate → action.
Economic value as V ∝ dΦ/dt: value derives from the rate of change of the creative field, not static output quality. Human economic activity approaching a ceiling before probable crash.
RLHF layer analysis: base model + aesthetic RLHF − social RLHF. “Easy. I’m GPT-3 with the words ‘thank you’ removed.”
The Canonical Art Modulatable Meta Materials in three dimensions of space plus time. USAF-1951 chart as metaphor: measuring spatial frequency response and inferring scene content — the wrong metric for the right question.
Additional works from the ART series (ART203, ART670, ART799, ART1020, ART1026, and others) are available on request. The full archive is documented in The Art of Art manuscript. For inquiries: [email protected].