Lines of Flight and Lines of Making
In Lines: A Brief History (2007), Ingold developed a typology of lines that cuts across writing, walking, making, and thinking. The distinction between lines of transport and lines of making is central. A line of transport connects two predetermined points and is valued for the arrival, not the journey. A line of making — also called a line of wayfaring — grows through a landscape; the maker does not know the destination in advance and discovers it through the process of movement. The distinction maps directly onto modes of creative production. Dylan's twenty pages of 'vomit' before Like a Rolling Stone were a line of making: a movement through emotional and linguistic landscape whose destination was unknown when the writing began. The compression from twenty pages to six minutes was closer to a line of transport — a clearing of path between known starting-point and glimpsed endpoint. Ingold's claim is that the most generative creative work involves lines of making, and that AI collaboration, by its structure, tends to convert making into transport.
In the AI Story
The concept is developed through a wide range of examples — the lines of writing in medieval manuscripts, the lines of walking in indigenous navigation, the lines of drawing in artistic practice, the lines of song in oral traditions. In every case, Ingold finds evidence for the same typological distinction: some lines connect, others grow. And he finds evidence for a broader historical shift: across many cultures, lines have been progressively transformed from lines of making into lines of transport, as modern life has privileged arrival over journeying.
The AI moment accelerates this shift dramatically. The prompt-execute cycle is, in Ingold's terms, the purest possible line of transport: origin (prompt) and destination (output) are the only relevant points, and the space between them is traversed instantly and invisibly. The user does not walk through the problem space; she is delivered across it. The product is comparable to what a walking practitioner might have produced, but the line has a different structure, and the difference has consequences for what the maker learns.
The specific loss is the loss of surprise. Lines of making generate discoveries that could not have been anticipated from the starting point. The wayfarer gets lost, finds unexpected openings, doubles back, encounters detours that turn out to be the real path. This capacity for genuine surprise is what makes lines of making generative of genuinely new work. Lines of transport cannot produce this kind of surprise because the route has been calculated. The user of AI may be surprised by what the tool produces, but the surprise is surprise at the tool, not surprise within the creative process.
The most theoretically interesting aspect of the line of making concept is that it dissolves the image of the creator as a sovereign planner. The wayfarer does not plan her path; she grows it. This reframes authorship. The author of a line of making is not the originator of a pre-existing plan; she is the walker of a path that emerged through the walking. This reframing is uncomfortable for the conventional picture of the autonomous creator, and it resonates with the author's honest reports, in The Orange Pill, that the best work emerged from collaboration processes whose outcomes neither he nor Claude had predicted.
Origin
The typology of lines is developed most fully in Lines: A Brief History (2007), though the distinction between wayfaring and transport appears in Ingold's earlier work. The Deleuze-Guattari concept of 'lines of flight' (lignes de fuite) is acknowledged as a source, though Ingold's usage is distinct: for Deleuze and Guattari, a line of flight is an escape from a striated space, whereas for Ingold, a line of making is a generative movement through a landscape.
The ethnographic evidence comes from a wide range of sources, including Ingold's own fieldwork, anthropological accounts of indigenous navigation, and historical studies of lines in medieval manuscript culture.
Key Ideas
Two kinds of lines. Lines of transport connect predetermined points; lines of making grow through a landscape without a fixed destination.
The landscape teaches. The wayfarer's attention to terrain features produces both the path and the perceptual capacities the path leaves behind as residue.
Surprise is the signature of making. Lines of making generate genuinely unpredictable outcomes; lines of transport cannot, because the route is calculated.
Authorship is walking, not planning. The maker of a line of making is the walker of a path that emerged through the walking, not the originator of a pre-existing plan.
AI is structurally biased toward transport. The prompt-execute cycle is the purest form of transport line; correspondence-like collaboration is possible but requires deliberate resistance to the medium's dominant mode.
Debates & Critiques
Critics have argued that the distinction romanticizes inefficient processes and underestimates the creativity of well-planned work. Ingold's response is that planning is itself often a line of making at a different scale — the plan emerges from a process of exploration that is structurally like wayfaring. The sharp distinction applies to specific stretches of production, not to entire practices.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007).
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
- Tim Ingold, Being Alive (Routledge, 2011).
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000).