Art, like Science, only succeeds insofar as it speaks for itself.
That is, it does not suffice to engage in mere representation: a naive pretense of correspondence, the original sin universally inherited from Mr. Popper's ninth grade science class, that pokes with its clumsy and stubby fingers at ostensibly actual things in themselves, compression algorithms going through the motions as they index and economize inert corpuscles, filing them away into dead organelles, burst vessels, punctured membranes, fluids that no longer flow, corpses of networks no longer connected and stocks no longer exchanging, coerced hallucinations of functions jumping from one set of imaginary points to another. Such textbook tinker-toys may be instrumental, but they are every bit as immaterial, incapable of cultivating any flesh of their own, rehashing fossilized configurations of signals and reflexes once the provenance of fully embodied intuitions, never rhyming, only repeating what's already been long since stripped of its potential contingencies.
Yes, science is cartography, the craftsmanship of navigation, but a map always possesses a physicality of its own, something you can hold, feel between your fingers, fold up and put away, give to a friend or leave somewhere in the corner; it may not be the territory, but neither is the terrain which it purports to represent. The map is the germ, grounded by some congruence with its subject matter. It may not contain every last detail or geometric contour of the ground to which it stakes a claim, paths may be highlighted or omitted in ways that differ from their naked appearance, their shape may not be exactly the same, nor may they be drawn precisely to scale, but it does all this in order to select and highlight specific relationships between them that make them legible to those who wish to travel them.
This congruence is not some idealized "likeness"—no set of axioms by Euclid or anyone else can tell you what "similarity" ultimately means—but a practical, and necessarily sensual, matter: to read a map is to use it, to use it is to extract the kernel, that which remains invariant to the idiosyncrasies of its construction, from its husk and unfold it into the ground beneath one's feet by stretching, rotating, translating and overlaying it atop its surroundings with each step taken, solidifying piecemeal a fledgling algebra of affordances onto an ever fluctuating palimpsest of affects. The map becomes a face of the territory by virtue of its function, beckoning visitors and inhabitants alike to traverse grooves old and new, to let oneself flow through paths of lesser resistance.
In a word, seduction.
To offer up new channels not previously conceived of, not to coerce motion or force mutation, but to set the stage by offering the opportunity to share a new biome: semiosis through immanent symbiosis. Each channel presents a different hermeneutic act, a distinct idea of some change a being could make to their umwelt, a signature through time inextricable from some change to earth or self.
These accidents accumulate through their repeated use, each repetition spawning yet another iteration of the map, metabolizing in tandem changes to both its own material substrate and the conventions that guide its use.
Most such repetitions are on their own little more than noise, transient statistical anomalies, but when a critical mass of these tics arises, the opportunity arises to judiciously utilize this nascent biomass and compose its varied cadences into a structure in their own right, the basis for a fundamentally new matter not (yet) entirely commensurable with extant vocabularies and rituals. Acts of creation such as this are as fraught with uncertainty as they are inexorable: someone will make the leap, but any particular stride will in some way differ from what was intended and may even fail outright.
Nevertheless, all knowledge proceeds this way: scientists may work day and night on mundane calibrations and optimizations that fit new observations into established theories, but this interminable slog is at the same time the staging ground for theories that completely break with them. Artists, just the same, toil endlessly wrangling with unwieldy materials and learning through the pain of trial and error how to imitate what they believe to have settled in their mind's eye. This ordinary unhappiness is not only the genesis of the repetition that gives rise to new concepts but just as importantly a process of annealing and tempering existing ones, hardening them to endless tides of amassed entropy.
In this sense, Art is no less a Science than any other; both are simply Labor, the renewal of Matter through irreducibly painstaking negotiation with the warp and woof of the matter at hand, maintenance through constantly replacing from seemingly nowhere all that which decays, evolution through the intrinsic difference between the river it itself already no longer is and that which it's now becoming. To do this correctly is plain and simple to do this as if one gives a fuck: one must not only look for the irregularities that break away from what's known and expected, but also against all odds find a way to put these pieces together (along with new pieces acquired breaking what's already at hand apart) into new forms, perhaps with some help from tattered fragments of previous assembly manuals, other long outdated but still potentially useful maps, should they be so lucky.
And yet however daunting, we all do this to some degree every day of our lives, and we've been doing it for a very (very) long time. Should one succeed, they may not even find any kind of Truth for themselves, but they'll nonetheless cultivate and share it through the creation of a medium, the ability to speak through an inherently novel trajectory that can only be understood by irreversibly enriching our shared coordinate systems and ultimately expanding through time the social and material basis, the collective reverie, of our very idea of space.