DEMYSTIFYING CREATIVITY.pdf

This article questions the anthropocentrism of existing treatments of creative work, creative industries and creative identities, and then considers various strategies for overcoming this bias in novel empirical analyses of creativity. Our aim is to begin to account for the nonhuman, 'more-than-human', bodies, actors and forces that participate in creative work. In pursuing this aim, we do not intend to eliminate the human subject from analysis of creative practice; rather we will provide a more 'symmetrical' account of creativity, alert to both the human and nonhuman constituents of creative practice. We draw from Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the assemblage to develop this account. Based on this discussion, we will define the creative assemblage as a more or less temporary mixture of heterogeneous material, affective and semiotic forces, within which particular capacities for creativity emerge, alongside the creative practices these capacities express. Within this assemblage, creativity and creative practice are less the innate attributes of individual bodies, and more a function of particular encounters and alliances between human and nonhuman bodies. We ground this discussion in qualitative research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, among creative professionals working in diverse fields. Based on this research, we propose a 'diagram' of one local assemblage of creativity and the human and nonhuman alliances it relies on. We close by briefly reflecting on the implications of our analysis for debates regarding the diversity of creative work and the character of creative labour. So much of creativity, of being creative, is about community and the value of being with other people. That's really the pleasure of creating. Like how many people, and how many ideas and materials or techniques can you bring into it [creative practice] before, during and afterwards you know? But it's not easy. When I was in a set of studios where I was expecting to find a community and actually I think largely

Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI …, 2007

2014

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific way: drawing on DeLanda’s work on social and organizational forms; and Law’s ‘method assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional Sydney.

Alonso, Christian (ed.): Transversal Ethico-Aesthetics: Félix Guattari and the Heterogenesis of Being. REGAC Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art, 8 (1), Barcelona, 2022

To analyse an artwork using the philosophical theory of the assemblage is to expand one’s view of how artworks can be interpreted. In the various and often wildly differing concepts of new materialism, the assemblage acts as a way of describing the agency of matter in general. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who provided various definitions of the assemblage, the new materialist perspectives emphasize, for example, the active linking of heterogeneous parts and a dynamic conjunction of semi-autonomous formations that articulate new affiliations of entities and discourses. In this essay, Xinhao Cheng’s multimedia installation The Naming of a River, 2014 to 2018, is described as an assemblage, thereby significantly widening how it is interpreted as the artwork. Cheng describes the manifolds of time-space-dimensions in his simultaneously scientific and deeply personal artistic research project on the Panlong River. In the context of an assembled assemblage theory, formed by combining new materialist perspectives, The Naming of a River can be thought of as existing in an innumerable manifold of different versions. With each new connection made, the entire artwork changes completely. The relations exist not only between the material artefacts of the installation and the artist, but also between the institution, the recipients, and the river. The artwork is a self-productive setting that transcends spaces and times, an interpretation derived from approaches by Manuel DeLanda and Karen Barad. In this process, our understanding of what an artwork can be is significantly challenged.

Creativity is a key element of cultural production but has been under-theorised in sociology.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2017

The purpose of this article is to explore how the basic conception of 'emergence' informs the study of creativity as a socio-material practice. Initially, the article explicates how creative processes, products and performances involve not only tangible, but also intangible and social elements. Secondly, the theoretical conception of creativity as socio-material and the general philosophical notion of emergence are introduced. Inspired by the idea that a 'whole' is other than the sum of its 'parts' and by examples primarily from the world of music, the article argues that the relationship between subject and objectthe main analytical focus of studies on creativity as a socio-material practiceis fundamentally embedded in an emergent process. The article concludes by highlighting how emergence theory acknowledges the performance or product as an intangible material for creative processes of musicians, and that studies of the socio-materiality of creative practices clearly involving tangible, intangible and social elements must refer to the emergent process through which the creative product or performance evolves meaning. The theoretical framework suggested is relevant for researchers interested in exploring how materials, social settings and physical environments are involved in creative processes.

Theory & Psychology, 2019

… the demand to be creative is more unpredictable than other demands, since it is contingent on the fickle whims of the audience. Andreas Reckwitz (Kindle location 7603) Contemporary western society is now organized on principles quite different from those which brought us modernity. Expectations for ongoing creativity and affectivity have overtaken expectations for dispassionate, predictable, productivity central to the functioning of modern factories and bureaucratic institutions. Recognizing these expectations and how we got to them is the genealogical project of The Invention of Creativity, and its author, Andreas Reckwitz, a German sociologist. Creativity, of course, is not a recent "invention"; but its functioning as a primary organizing and animating principle for western society is portrayed as the case, by Reckwitz. This is a challenging yet rewarding book for those interested in well-argued links between macro-and micronotions of social constructionist theorizing, to how these might apply in social and psychological ways to our contemporary circumstances. For readers familiar with Foucault's genealogical projects (e.g., Birth of the Clinic, 1974; Madness and Civilization, 1988), Reckwitz's volume provides a related hermeneutic focus on being historically downstream from the cultural effects of particular ideas and practices. The social constructionist element of such genealogies is how much they rely on and develop from somewhat arbitrary and changing cultural meanings and values. The emotionally sterile rationality associated with the modernity premised on enlightenment science, for Reckwitz, never erased human needs for the affective spaces and experiences marginalized to spheres of life often associated with religion and art. In this book, Reckwitz turns particularly to art and creativity, tracing how it increasingly took centre stage to bring us what animates and organizes our personal experiences and contemporary western life. Central to Reckwitz's thesis is a story of how cultural aestheticization (i.e., how western culture came to put aesthetic values, activities, and experiences as primary) shifted

The Artist's Creative Process: A Winnicottian view, 2018

The existing body of psychoanalytic literature relating to the process of making visual art does not include formal studies of first-hand reports from contemporary artists. This thesis addresses that gap through the creation of a new series of artworks and through a qualitative study of artists’ accounts of the states of mind they experience as they work. It aims to provide new evidence relating to the artist’s creative process and to question the extent to which psychoanalytic theory in the Winnicottian tradition can account for artists’ experiences. My methodology was two-fold: I kept a written record of my own states of mind as I created six video, installation and animation artworks; I also conducted thirty in-depth interviews with professional fine artists. The testimony of the artists and myself was interrogated using psychoanalytic theory from the Winnicottian and British Object Relations tradition. Winnicottian theory was chosen because it offers a particular understanding of the inter-relationship between inner and outer worlds and the thesis considers the artist’s process in these terms. Drawing on Winnicottian theory, the thesis presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’ and the spaces between. The research reveals aspects of artists’ experiences that are not fully accounted for by the existing literature. To address these gaps, the thesis proposes the introduction of several new terms: ‘pre-sense’ for an as-yet undefined first intimation of the possibility of a new artwork relating to a particular aspect of the outside world; ‘internal frame’ for a space within the artist’s mind, specific to a particular medium, which the artist ‘enters’ when starting work; and ‘extended self’ and ‘observer self’ for two co-existent self-states that constitute the artist’s working state of mind.

Journal of Sociology doi:10.1177/1440783313498945 , 2013

The emergence of a ‘new sociology of art’ that seeks a more nuanced understanding of the agency of art objects and the temporal trajectories surrounding artistic production, requires a review of sociology’s uneasy engagement with creativity. This paper applies an anti-humanist ontology to assert that creativity is profoundly sociologically interesting, and key to the production of human culture, from science and technology to the arts to social forms and institutions. Analysis of auto-ethnographic data on the production of a painting of Australian mallée woodland establishes three propositions for an anti-humanist sociology of creativity: that creative production is part of an open-ended flow of affect between assembled human and non-human elements; that affective flows produce creative capacities to act, feel and desire in bodies; and that products of creativity such as artworks are themselves affects and consequently contribute to the production of social life, the world and human history.