Alan Bundy gives Maggie’s three types of creativity numbers, and I’ll use these below. In my own 2001 formalisation of Maggie’s theory (which refers to Alan’s 1994 publication) I show precisely how a creative system, conceptualised in these terms, can flip from the level of types 1 and 2 to type 3, through the device of reflection – essentially, representing itself. It also follows from the formalism that types 1 and 2 are instances of the same phenomenon: exploration of the conceptual space. One interesting question that this view leads me to ask is: what happens when the envelope of the conceptual space gets pushed, at the exploratory level? I’ve proposed several particular cases, and suggested how aberration (meaning exploratory creative effort that goes beyond expectation in some way) can drive creativity at the transformational level. (Wiggins, 2006a,b)

The musical example is a good one here. From Mozart through to Wagner and Strauß, Western tonal music became (more or less monotonically) more chromatic, until, at the end, its very tonality began to fray. This, although it was incremental, was definitely transformation creativity (and there are perceptual reasons why it works in the way it does – not enough time to discuss all that here). However, it is not transformational creativity that sets out to be a paradigm shift, because it is expressed in terms of the existing conceptual space of tonal music. Schoenberg’s altogether more radical step, of “completing” chromaticism by throwing out the tonality, is considered, deliberate transformational creativity, specifically aimed at overthrowing the rules of the formerly accepted conceptual space – a very modernist approach, which could probably only happen in the 20th century. I cover this example in more detail in my 2003 paper (Wiggins, 2003).

Formally, then, this is a fairly simple system: there is a search mechanism, and there is a specification of the space being searched. However, that system is only good for modelling an individual action alone in a fixed cultural space. Ultimately, any theory needs to take into account multiple agency, shared and private norms, and so on. That’s future work for me.

Nevertheless, the simple system allows us to focus on one very important aspect which is implicit in the discussion above: the role of consciousness. I’m quite sure that all the participants in the discussion have a position on the role of consciousness in creativity, but no-one has stated it explicitly. I think that in order to answer Mark’s point, contrasting BF-creativity and I-creativity, we need to bring consciousness into our model.

When we become aware of having an idea, we see it as more or less creative, and that is evidently part of Maggie’s “evaluation”. But, the way I see it, there is more to evaluation than this: in the part of the process of which we are NOT aware. One model of the process of inspiration is that an idea does not simply appear in the mind, but instead is constructed non-consciously, prior to the drawing of conscious attention to its existence. There is neurophysiological evidence that this is the case with minor everyday creativity in language generation: linguistic centres in the brain begin working well before subjective reports of awareness of the fact (e.g., Carota et al, 2009). Therefore, I-creativity may well be the upshot of BF-creativity at the non-conscious level, coupled with an equally non-conscious evaluation mechanism, which is capable of drawing conscious attention when a sufficiently good idea is produced. This point throws the BF- vs I- distinction into question, because the same mechanism can explain both, depending on where one places the veil between conscious awareness and non-conscious processing.

(Incidentally, I don’t think the Edison example really works as an exampled of BF-creativity. The creativity involved here was what produced the notion of the incandescent filament, and that was imagined or serendipitous – I’m not sure if Edison recorded which. The brute force part is a kind of optimisation strategy, trying to meet the specification defined by the prior creative act.)

In short, the models we’re currently working are only really scratching the surface, and we need to think beyond them, imagining how they fit into a larger picture, even though we can’t model that picture yet. However, I’m quite convinced that Maggie’s approach is a useful one, and I look forward, in future, to extending my own more mechanistic version further in some of the directions discussed above.

References

Carota, F., Posada, A., Harquel, S., Delpuech, C., Bertrand, O., and Sirigu, A. (2009). Neural Dynamics of the Intention to Speak. Cereb. Cortex, page bhp255.

Wiggins, G. A. (2003). Categorising creative systems. In Bento, C., Cardoso, A., and Gero, J., editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI’03 workshop on Creative S ystems. IJCAI.

Wiggins, G. A. (2006a). A preliminary framework for description, analysis and comparison of creative systems. Journal of K nowledge Based S ystems, 19(7):449–458.

Wiggins, G. A. (2006b). Searching for computational creativity. New Generation Computing, 24(3):209–222.

I’ll like to delve a bit on evolutionary considerations. Aaron has hinted at how evolutionary processes and adaptation to complex environmental needs drive creativity/creative solutions in organic evolution. I would like to go in slightly different direction- that of considering the creative process as a Darwinian process in itself.

I presume you would be familiar with Campbell’s Blind Variation and Selective Retention (BVSR) model to explain the creative process. In short its basic premise is that ideas are randomly combined (maybe unconsciously) and a selective value criterion applied that then selects a few while discarding others (and maybe only the finals selected few rise to consciousness).

This I think fits nicely with your notions of combinatorial creativity and surprise being one factor of creativity; while Being valuable being another criterion. I wish to expand the model further and draw a few more analogies.

Creative process may be broken into two parts- the novel idea/artifact generation process and the subsequent/parallel evaluation process that evaluates the idea/artifact for usefulness. The second process may run at society level or in an individuals head as presumably only novel (unconscious ) ideas that fit the individuals aesthetic/intellectual criterion will be allowed to surface to consciousness. Here it is pertinent to note that access to consciousness is a scarce resource and this puts selection process on the umpteen novel combinations/transformations/explorations that are unconsciously produced to be of value and having adaptive significance.

The first part of creative process that of novel idea/artifact generation can be broken into three parts- combinatorial creativity (combining familiar ideas to produce novel combinations)- this is like recombination of genes by sexual mating in subsequent offspring in organic evolution; exploratory creativity (exploring a conceptual space)- I see the conceptual space as nothing but ‘memes’ making up a particular conceptual space and the conceptual space (classical style of music for example)is defined by the frequency of ‘memes in that meme pool’. Now recombining the memes is already one way to achieve creativity/adaptation. However just like mutation of genes and subsequent selection/genetic drift changes the frequency of genes in the genetic pool of a species/population, so does the mutations in memes change the conceptual space over time. This is akin to exploring the possible space of that conceptual space to get the best possible fit with the selection criterion of that environment/conceptual space. The third type of creativity- transformational (transforming a given conceptual pace to a new one- having the impossible idea)- is like speciation as per my model. When the meme pool becomes such that two different styles are co-existent in that meme pool such that interactions or recombinations between them become less and less probable- we have the arrival of a new conceptual space or the splitting of original conceptual space into two.

The second part of the creative process is selecting the right ideas/artifacts. Here again two poles of intellectual and aesthetic criterion can be applied. While the former merits an adherence to the value of TRUTH and coherence with external world; the latter depends on an adherence to the value of BEAUTY and internal self coherence. Of course truth and beauty are not the only criterion for selecting ideas/artifacts but they represent prototype criterion.

Of course I approach these topics from varied other angles like the relationship of this creative adaptivity to personality traits/emotions, but will love to hear Boden’s Views on this from a purely creativity perspective.

Yes, P-creativity (as well as learning) is going to be needed if the environmental/behavioural combinatorics are astronomical. As for crearivitty in arts vs. science, it seems to me that the same broad principles of creativity are at work in both cases, with respect to the **origination** of new ideas–although of course there will be detailed differences from cases to case. But the **evaluation** pf the new idea is very different indeed in the two cases. E.g. an artwork doesn’t necessarily have to ‘match’ the external world in any detail (although many do: think of fifteenth.sixteenth century Dutch interiors and still lifes).

You’re right: motivation is hugely important.

There’s very good reason to believe that creativity is crucial in sexual selection: see the FASCINATING book by Geoffrey Miller, THE MATING MIND. (If anyone picks it up and finds the first few chapters–on comparative anatomy and on palaeontology– dull and/or difficult, just skip them. They are in fact highly relevant to Geoffrey’s main argument, but they’re not essential and may put some readers off.

In a more specifically theatrical register, perhaps closer to the Pask-Littlewood Fun Palace orientation, groups like Konic Theatre in Barcelona (http://koniclab.info) have been working for the last decade on facilitating audience participation with interactive devices, and individuals like Chris Salter (www.chrissalter.com/project), notably with projects like TGarden and Chronopolis, have been developing “theatre” based or related work to see how people can generate aesthetically meaningful events from within responsive media environments. There’s a lot going on – and much of it in my opinion can be pretty tedious if it’s too caught up in tool development processes; sometimes however the creative miracle happens and the mix of affordances, human and technical (openness and playfulness first and foremost, though of course constraints are flipside affordances in the creative world), and that serendipitous thing called timing, patterns of encounter, whatever (Victor Turner would talk about “intersubjective illumination”) generates something meaningful and memorable.

In short, YES! There has been and is exploration of distributed HCI in theatre or something akin to it, and it can – rarely of course – produce the gleam of deeply creative endeavour.

We inhabit a richly articulated environment, with potential for astronomical combinatorics.

It wasn’t thus for all our forerunners, such as microbes in chemical soups, where the only variations possible that could affect individual control decisions are changes in concentrations, concentration gradients, flow rates, and illumination, and perhaps amounts of neutral matter (e.g. sand particles) in the soup. The comparative simplicity, and paucity of information in such environments made it feasible for natural selection to produce pre-compiled answers to all the possible control problems that could arise.

But many increases in complexity, in environments and in the organisms themselves, provided increased demands on the control mechanisms, which, as we’ll see, tended to shift the burden of decision making from the genome to capabilities and knowledge developed or acquired by the individual.

Many different changes in the environment could increase the diversity of decision contexts for
primeval soup-dwellers, including the presence of persistent structures on a relatively large scale — for instance a large rock with different required nutrients on different parts of the surface.

For some feeders, randomly slithering or crawling around the surface and constantly grazing might suffice.

However, if different nutrients are needed at different times, and the direction towards a required nutrient cannot be detected in local chemical gradients, and the food cannot be sensed at a distance, then our microbe needs the ability to take in and store information about how places are related, so that it can choose appropriate routes to the food it needs, when the need arises, starting in different locations.

Some robots can do things like that — moving around and building re-usable maps of terrain or
buildings (i.e. using SLAM mechanisms: for Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping).

If the food is also mobile, and it attempts to escape being eaten by detecting an approaching grazer and moving away, or if there are competing grazers, then decisions about direction and speed of motion towards food become more complex. For instance if several competitors are
already close to a source of the currently required nutrient then it may be better for a grazer to head for a more distant source of the required food, where there are no competitors.

Of course, whereas previously the grazers could use local sensors and SLAM capabilities, they now need to be able sense what is happening at a distance and use that information when deciding which food source to head for. The greater the distance at which they can perceive things the more varied the combinations of information items on which to base decisions.

If the food evolves a defensive shell so that a grazer can no longer simply approach and consume, but also needs to remove the shell, that would favour the evolution of beaks, teeth or claws that are capable of holding and breaking open the food.

But now a hungry creature has more complex control decisions than merely selecting directions and speeds of movement to get to immediately consumable food: it also needs to control the motions of beak, teeth or claws in relation to individual food items. That can involve selecting a direction of approach if there are intervening hard obstacles and more detailed control of motion if the shell has recognisable weak points that need to be attacked. (Try searching the web for videos of parrots eating walnuts.)

Such weapons that provide manipulation capabilities can also acquire other uses, e.g. damaging
competitors for the same food, or removing obstacles that prevent access to the food.

In many situations, this will increase the variety of options for action available to individuals and the variety of sequences in which actions are performed. E.g. in which order should one (a) move towards food, (b) look for competitors for the food, (c) move toward competitors, (d) threaten or attack competitors, (e) start eating food, (f) decide whether to retreat, …. and more.

Evolution has at least the options of either producing innate control systems that produce behaviours that successfully achieve consumption of food, or developing some sort of learning mechanism that enables the best control decisions to be associated with various sensed conditions to be learnt by each individual. The former is feasible if conditions remain static for a long time, so that relatively fixed (though not necessarily simple) designs can be evolved. If the world changes too fast, evolution will not be able to catch up, and species whose individual members can learn will have an advantage.

There are many more scenarios that can be imagined, which are not necessarily entirely fanciful
— in view of the enormous diversity of life forms we find on earth. Some scenarios involve the food evolving to live on dry land out of reach of its aquatic consumers. If the aquatic food source runs out then evolution could favour variants of the grazers that develop the ability to move onto dry land to meet their needs.

If the food organisms then develop stalks supporting the edible portions out of reach of the grazers, the result could be evolution of jumping, or climbing abilities, or long necks, or long limbs supporting the manipulators, or abilities to build climbing supports or to throw things to bring down food.

All changes in morphology of the food-seekers are worthless without corresponding changes in
control mechanisms — requiring more and more varied kinds of information in more and more
complex situations to be used in acquiring food.

Some of the foods may develop camouflage, by evolving towards an external appearance that
resembles that of other inedible objects. In that case the feeders may have to develop more
sophisticated perceptual abilities, perhaps taking account not only of the appearance of the edible items but also their location and perhaps how they respond to various tests, such as the sound produced when they are tapped with something hard. Alternatively, instead of directly evolving those abilities, evolution can produce mechanisms that learn in an individual’s lifetime how to do it.

However, if individuals are not born or hatched with all the competences they will need, then they will take some time to learn, during which they require help from adults — protection,
feeding, and opportunities to learn. This will add to the information processing demands on the
adults, who then need to detect and cope with not only the environmental situations that are relevant to potential harm and benefit to themselves but also those that can affect their offspring. They need to be able to detect vicarious affordances. This adds to the learning requirements of the offspring, if they have to learn to look after their offspring.

The point of all this is that as the environment poses new challenges, evolution can produce responses that involve various combinations of change of behaviour using the original morphology, and change of morphology allowing new behaviours and requiring new control mechanisms, which can indirectly lead to yet more changes requiring even more complex behaviours and more complex control systems.

The idea of an “evolutionary arms race” is not new. My examples are presented only in order to
emphasise the increasing demands on control mechanisms and the need for increasingly sophisticated information-processing systems involved in such control.

These are not easy for biologists to study because internal information processing mechanisms and behaviours and not accessible to normal methods of observation and measurement. They also do not leave fossil records.

There is much more that can be said about the changing requirements for (a) forms of representation in which information is acquired, stored manipulated, interpreted and used; (b) the changing ontologies required as more complex types of information about states and processes in the environment are acquired and used; (c) the changing architectures in which more and more varied information-processing competences are combined, a process that itself requires more control decisions e.g. about which competences to activate and how to deal with conflicting control decisions generated internally; (d) the changing trade-offs between evolutionary changes in the genome and the processes of learning and development, partly under the control of the environment, in individuals.

I return to my starting observation: We inhabit a richly articulated environment, with potential for astronomical combinatorics. When the wind blows there are many possible combinations of strength, direction, temperature, humidity, whether the motion is linear or curved (as in tornadoes), and many different kinds of airborne objects possible, e.g. sand, leaves, twigs, discarded rubbish, smoke, pollen, fumes from chemical plants, etc.

When you stand in a forest surrounded by trees, bushes and other objects there are many
possible directions in which you can move which will vary your relationships to other things in
significantly different ways: bumping into a tree-trunk, bumping into a blade of grass and bumping into a wasp nest will have very different effects.

Even if you remain still and do nothing, other people, other animals and things moved by wind or water can produce changing relationships that you may need to take into account.

For an animal with mobile anipulators there are even more possibilities that can be combined in different ways with the possible changes and movements in the environment.

Some numbers

If there are a hundred different things in your environment each of which can change or remain
as it is, then the possible number of distinct combinations is 1267650600228229401496703205376.
(i.e. 2 to the power 100).

If your learning procedures allow you to experience each of those possible combinations, and you try one every second, then the time required would be approximately 40196900000000000000000 years (dividing the number of combinations by the number of seconds in a year).

If each of the changeable items has more than two options the numbers will be even larger. If we consider not just instantaneous changes, but sequences of changes over a period of a few seconds the numbers of possible sequences of changes will be even larger.

An implication of all this is that neither evolutionary time scales, nor individual learning times available in the life of an individual can cope with exhaustive learning.

Some reduction in the number of learning episodes required can be achieved by ‘chunking’, i.e.
grouping together things that do not differ very much. But even that will not tame the combinatorics, as has long been evident in the case of language (as Chomsky, among others, pointed out).

I am completely certain that you have never previously encountered the sequence of words in the
paragraph you are now reading, unless you deliberately reread it. But that novelty does not stop you understanding what I am saying. You have ways of WORKING OUT the meaning, on the basis of your understanding of individual words and phrases and the ways they have been put together.

Similar things can be said about many actions a child performs: some of them are trial and error behaviours, or copying behaviours, but many are novel solutions to problems (novel as far as the child is concerned) where the child is able to work out what will happen by combining previously acquired knowledge and reasoning about it — for example when a child works out for the first time that the edge of a rigid circular object can be used as a screwdriver, or who invents a new practical joke to play on a sibling, or who first devises an efficient strategy for nesting cups, after finding that randomly choosing a ‘next’ cup leads to frequent wasteful back-tracking.

One such strategy is to start with the largest cup, then always seek the largest remaining cup to insert next. You probably worked that out for yourself long ago, without even being aware that you had done so.

All this is a brief introduction to the study of the many ways in which biological evolution was under pressure to provided humans and other animals with information-processing mechanisms that are capable of acquiring many different kinds of information and then developing novel ways of using that information to solve any of millions of different problems without having to learn solutions by trial and error, without having to be taught, and without having to imitate behaviour of others. I.e. they are P-creative solutions.

I conjecture that these highly practical forms of creativity, which are obviously important in crafts, engineering, science, and many everyday activities at home or at work, are closely related to the mechanisms that also produce artistic forms of creativity. But for that we have to go into the complex topic of where motives come from, and how alternatives are evaluated, about which I have said nothing so far.

One of the problems of AI researchers is that too often they start off with an inadequate
understanding of the problems and believe that solutions are only a few years away. We need an educational system that not only teaches techniques and solutions, but also an understanding of problems and their difficulty — which can come from a broader multi-disciplinary education. That could speed up progress. It might even be a creative solution to an educational problem.

Of course, none of this will impress people who don’t WANT to believe that machines can be creative. They just need to learn to think more creatively.

I have more on these topics in presentations here.

Thanks for reminding us of the richness of the new forms of social (distributed) creativity enabled by human-computer interactions. Yes, these are hugely exciting. The possibilities are literally infinite, because of the general-purpose nature of digital computers. The actual results will be limited by our own creative powers, of course, including the creativity of the software-writers as well as the participants. Already, many of these interactions are transformational, as you say. And I’m sure more will come.

Do you foresee (or is it already here??) a time when some people act as professional performers/prompters, where they both contribute to or mould the emerging HC interactions and also prompt, or guide, or encourage the non-professional participants (a.k.a. the ‘audience’) to engage interactively in certain (hopefully, imaginative) ways?

A bit like a jazz-gig where the improvising musicians encourage (not just invite) the audience to join in ….

Has distributed HCI been exploited much, or at all, in experimental theatre?

(Shades of Gordon Pask’s vision of a cybernetic theatre, at Joan Littlewood’s Round House?)

SUE:

Well, it seems to me that when artists say they experience creative insight as instinct rather than idea, they are saying what I referred to above as the phenomenon of intuition”. The word “instinct” is apt, here, insofar as it suggests the absence of conscious thought–and maybe also, in at least some cases, the driving motivation that one may experience while thinking/acting creatively.

There’s a very good book on creativity by David Perkins, called THE MIND’S BEST WORK (Harvard U. Press, around 1980 I think), where he argues that the main difference between exceptionally creative people and the rest of us is not better cognitive skills on their part but more intense motivation.

And another book, by Perkins’ colleague Howard Gardner, called CREATING MINDS (1993), seems to bear this out. He looks at seven very different twentieth-century creators (Freud, Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Einstein, Gandhi. T.S.Eliot, and Picasso), and asks what they were like as people. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were all utter b****rds”, horrendously selfish and virtually impossible to live with. But this was largely due to the fact that their ideas, in each case, were so very transformational that they were held to by crazy and/or offensive to virtually everyone around them. To have the self-confidence to persevere, nonetheless, and the will to do so despite many obstacles (both intrinsic to the task and socially generated by the group), requires a very special sort of personality–not a pleasant one to live with.

I liked your example of Grayson Perry, and also your quote about “making strange”. Yes, human minds are so enormously rich, and our cultures so rich and fluid also, that there is infinite potential for the sorts of (largely idiosyncratic) associations you mention to arise—-especially where natural language is involved. That’s why I believe that there will never be a computer model of creativity that will match human creativity in the general case. And notice: that’s not saying “There will never be a computer Shakespeare”, but rather “There will never be a human-level Shakespeare-reader.” (“Human-level”, here, assumes a certain linguistic and cultural background, of course; but you and I are reasonably insightful Shakespeare-readers, without being Shakespeare!)

Your quotation from Shelley is interesting. But, as you say, it’s description of the (phenomenology of the) creative experience. What interests me, also, is the explanation of that.

RANULPH:

Yes, some constructivists do indeed avoid denying thee existence of an independent external world. Ernst von Glasersfeld is a good example of this. But others dismiss this notion as an intellectually–and even politically– oppressive grand recit.

However, there’s no knock-down argument either to prove or to disprove that sort of extreme (ontic, not just cognitive) constructivism.

Solipsism: you may well ask! I don’t see how an ontic constructivist could avoid it….except that they would regard social/cultural discourse (sic) as an especially important/valuable type of discourse.

Thank you for your comment. I think that my point is that it is sometimes interesting to ask now what something is, but where/how we come across it.

Just a tiny point of information:

I fear that you, like so many, confuse constructivism with solipsism/idealism. Constructivists don’t, as far as I know, deny an external world (mind independent reality), but they don’t confirm it either. They just say that they cannot know, and that this not knowing should be taken seriously, not dismissed. They also say that, taking it seriously allows one to be a realist or an idealist, as one likes, but realising it’s a choice and a convenience, not a truth. This also means that the choice that is convenient can change.

So I don’t object to the external world: only to the belief that we can know it objectively, as a truth!

Constructivists also believe in the test of viability. Does my explanation hold? is the question.

There are other points: I agree that the system, as I was pointing to it, may be at any level. That’s an easy one. The others might need a bit more work. Maybe I need to go back to more notes I made on your original (I really don’t want to get into a squabble). However, I’ve a busy night and day tomorrow, but hope to get back to you after that.

Ranulph

By the way, why are people always so dismissive of solipsism?

Your applications of Gardenfors’ conceptual spaces are interesting. But I think there’s a pun hidden here. As you say, he is concerned with **concepts**. And so are you. An d so am I, **when** i talk about combinational creativity. But combinational creativity is not the only type. Your definition of creativity as (only) recombnational fits well, I think, with a focus on concepts. But a set of generative stylistic constraints is not the same thing s a concept.

I agree that computers can sometimes help us extend our own creativity, in ways that we couldn’t have managed without them. Some examples are seen in computer art (see the final chapters in my forthcoming book CREATIVITY AND ART). Other examples are seen in science–for instance, in visualizing/synthesizing new chemical molecules for pharmaceuticals, etc. (This is often done using evolutionary programming.)

I’m suspicious of your sequence “Conceptual obsolescence and replacement”, because this doesn’t seem to take account of the **continuity** between the old concept/style and the new concept/style. Even the most radically transformational creativity has some continuity with previous thinking. Indeed, that’s what enables us to understand and appreciate it–although that understanding may take many years to develop, if the transformation is truly radical. (Lots of historical examples of this, in both science and art.)

RANULPH:

Yes, feedback is hugely important. It’s what’s going on in the valuation phase, at least when the creative person is doing their own valuing, and adjusting their work/ideas accordingly. And it’s what’s going on also in stigmergy—e.g. noticing the newly-uncovered veins in a piece of marble and altering the shape of the sculpture-in-process to take advantage of them. (Of course, one could also take steps to **avoid** the veins, but unless that leads to a significantly different creation, we don ‘t normally think of it as an example of stigmergy.) An excellent book on this topic is Andrew Harrison’s MAKING AND THINKING–published in 1978, I think.

As for creativity being ascribed to the whole system, not to its parts, I agree–but the “system” can be thought of at the social level or at the level of the individual mind. I normally focus on the individual mind. Whether or not one takes explicit account of the social-cultural interactions, the functioning of the creative individual mind needs to be explained. Yes, it’s a dynamical feedbacjk system. But just what strictures, conventions, concepts, criteria ….. is it following and forming? I agree that one can find out very little about the answer to that question by introspection: as Ranulph says, the creator doesn’t consciously experience these things, or if s/he does, not in full detail. To try to explain the underlying processing (some of which may be open to consciousness, but much of which is not) isn’t the same thing as describing the conscious phenomenology of creative persons. (Which varies, anyway! And it varies **partly** because of their formal/informal **theories**, or **hunches**, about the nature of creativity. Introspection is just as theory-driven as perception of the external world.

Ranulph, as a committed constructivist, won’t like my reference to “the external world” …. so I’d better shut up!!

Professor Boden’s rational analysis of creativity and conceptual space brings brilliant philosophical thinking to bear on creative practice. In my experience most artists are quick to agree that creativity isn’t a special ‘faculty’, though most would be equally likely to say that they experience creative insight as instinct rather than idea. How would an artist define instinct? – Often by describing a sensual response, telling a story or describing a particular occasion. The moment of origination is often experienced as feeling rather than thought – but for the artist, what follows? – Most likely the desire to juxtapose the original impulse with other, related activities rather than any desire to follow the moment of intuition with sequential thought.
Grayson Perry tells the story, in his memoirs, of his father ‘bringing home a ball-bearing for me when he was working in Hoffman’s ball-bearing factory … It was heavy, shiny and perfect. My dad told me they made ball bearings by dropping blobs of molten metal through the air into cold water and, while in mid air, they formed into perfect spheres.’ I can see the shining metal spheres now, when I look at Perry’s art works – the shiny, silvery surfaces of his urns, beneath the overlaid inscriptions of graphic narratives. But it is I, the viewer, who am making that connection, the artist himself doesn’t make it. Instead, he proceeds to unmake it. The story continues, ‘My father’s shed was full of objects like ball-bearings : parts of engines, fixings, lengths of metal and cogs …’ Attention appears to wander as the response progresses from wonder and a vision of perfection or completion, straight back to the artist’s driving fascination for the unmade.
Creavitity for the artist does not just create surprises; creativity is surprising; something ordinary needs to become unfamiliar, in a process the Russian Modernist poets called ‘making strange’. In artistic practice, hypothesis invariably signals paradox. Perry’s shiny surface is experienced as both ‘for me’ and alien; perfect and essentially incomprehensible – that is, wondrous, rather than explicable. In my examples, the desire to make a work of art seems contingent on, rather than a result of, conceptual thinking, originating somehow in a realm anterior to conceptual space – as Shelly implies in his description of the artist’s imagination, ‘which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.’ The moment of origination is transitory; the drive that follows is towards making and completion. But perhaps that, too, can be rationalized …
Dr. Sue Roe,
May, 2010