Special Issue: Post-Anthropocentric Creativity Editorial

This paper began a panel session on the nature of Creativity and Technology - in this case within the Digital Domain - and was a stochastic exploration of Right Brain/Left Brain behaviour in the construction of images. This closely followed the ideas of both David Hockney as described in his book, Secret Knowledge and Professor Ian McGilchrist as described in his book, ‘The Master and his Emissary’. I also touched upon Thomas Crow’s discussion about the effects of the Frankfurt School in its promotion of interpretive though as a means of evaluating art which he developed in his book: The Intelligence of Art.

Proceedings of the 5th conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '05, 2005

The workshop will explore in depth the nature of freedom and constraint in the creative process in digital fine art from the perspective of embodied mind. The problem is crucial to our understanding of the creative process in fine art. The aims and objectives of the workshop are to bring into visibility critical insights into the creative process, thereby potentially empowering digital artists.

The themes of this keynote lecture were presented through a set of images, questions and commentary. This paper is therefore offered, not as an academic paper, but annotations on elements of the visual presentation. A reading list of texts which informed the lecture is included. The focus of the keynote lecture was my personal experiences as a teacher educator and researcher in drawing attention to the lack of space for creativity in the school-based curriculum, and how the initial sense of disquiet and disturbance was translated into thinking and action in our practice in the School of Education. The presentation followed the trail, from early days of wonder and questioning, supported by a small community of like-minded people; to a research project with student teachers working in schools. The common thread through these experiences was the focus on the affordances of digital technologies for creative processes and activity. The text and images are licensed with Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/).

The story of human creativity is indivisible from the history and evolution of tools and technologies. Whilst by no means an exclusively human endeavour, the capacity for tool making is nevertheless regarded as a defining feature of human achievement and, in utilitarian terms, arguably the most recognisable indicator of human creativity. Technology is inaugurating fundamentally new patterns of human experience, understanding and meaning. With a generation emerging with increasingly ubiquitous screen-based media experience and exposure to information on a scale unprecedented in human history, new questions emerge about creative capacity, craft, imagination, and the technical knowledge necessary to create. The nature of artistic expression when virtualised, and the parallel role of technology as both the tool and the medium, also present challenges of interpretation and understanding. At the forefront of innovation for all of recorded human history, the arts continue to play a significant role in interrogating the possibilities and the implications of new technology for creative practice, human expression and cultural interpretation. Beyond mere documentation of events, art continues to be simultaneously redefined by technology as practices as well as operating as active cultural spaces in which new realities are investigated and meanings negotiated.

Aesthetic Computing, 2006

Itinera 28, 2024

The profound transformations introduced by contemporary digital technologies demand a deeper engagement with digital aesthetics, extending beyond the scope of new media aesthetics. From AI to extended realities, these media reshape human perception, enabling novel human-machine interactions and participatory experiences, creating “environments” marked by fluidity, modularity, and immateriality that challenge established aesthetic frameworks. Consequently, these technologies of sensibility call for a digital aesthetics capable of capturing the innovative dynamics of creative processes and new artistic experimentations. This issue seeks to outline a provisional map of potential pathways and research directions, prompting a critical rethinking of traditional aesthetic categories to address the transformative, immersive nature of these digital environments.

Springer Series on Cultural Computing

The relationship between the real world and the internet is explored. The real and the virtual are separate but intersecting and overlapping worlds as far as audiences are concerned. What is the effect of a work created on the internet on the real world, and vice-versa? The rise of the internet and its effect on creativity is examined. Technology has changed the production and distribution of artworks to audiences. Repositories such as art galleries and museums can exist as virtual entities and enable audiences to view, and interact with, artifacts and artworks. Such repositories can change the ways in which audiences view and perceive artworks.

My intentions on writing this essay are to create a post-structuralist framework for informing my own practice as a digital artist, filmmaker and musician. As digital space is commonly perceived as a purely symbolic space (non-material, and by extension thereby providing non-destructive transformations), it is often interpreted as being a space that provides the artist with more creative freedom, and this led me to start by exploring a nominal definition of creative freedom. Using Deleuzian terminology I go on to describe the conditions on, and the constraints that are existent on, the creative process. I then make an attempt to identify any peculiar differences that exist for an artist working within digital space, and any differences that manifest themselves in digital art forms.

For more than two decades a strong influence of digitalization has brought structural changes in immediacy and proximity to the arts and new formal propositions in production through open access to various media and the acceleration of information. Concepts stating a medial turn have already attracted attention to these changes in perception and the understanding of art evolving from digital culture. The purpose of this essay, initially written for a lecture following the question in what way art might evolve in the future, is to give an insight into participatory and experimental art production, exemplifying a contemporary understanding and handling of media and art. In order to do this I have chosen to review the audio-visual performances and projects of Los Angeles based artist duo Lucky Dragons, Luke Fishbeck and Sara Anderson (Sara Rara), who, though working with a digitally highly evolved set, have developed a playful and decidedly humanistic body of work. A mixture of multi media experiments involving digital processing of analogue recordings, sonic transmissions of graphic images and participatory moments in the creation of synthesized sounds define central elements in the work of these two creative minds. Collaborating since 2000, Luke Fishbeck’s and Sara Anderson’s artistic novelty is to provide creative space for the audience - blurring the lines between audio and visual material through digital processing - and to question classical paths of distribution and author- and ownership by releasing all pictorial works resulting from collective practice through a creative-commons-license. These structural elements grow from digital culture and are communicated through sonic experience and participation. Addressing in particular the idea of post-digitalism in my approach, an idea that had first been brought up by Nicholas Negroponte in the article Beyond Digital, published as early as in 1998 in the magazine Wired , my interest lies in the development that this movement has taken, labeled as un-territorial, equal, fluid and global, in the discourse of media reflection, the implementation of digital process into everyday life and the creative conversation of errors.