The least bit of artistic knowledge-making is that the artist is, in making the thing, making a map of what is possible and how the physical world relates to the metaphorical, imaginative, and interior worlds of people. And the other extreme is that in trying to make something perhaps grand, the artist is stretching what people know about the world. […] Artists discover the properties of the world.

— Richard P. Gabriel, The Art of Lisp & Writing, Dreamsongs, 2006