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Creativity & Cognition 4
Processes and Artefacts: Art, Technology and Science


Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
October 13-17th 2002
ACM SIGCHI Conference
Proceedings published by ACM, New York, 2002
ISBN 1-58113-465-7
creative.lboro.ac.uk/ccrs/CC02.htm

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
School of Art, Media and Design
University of Wales College, Newport
Caerleon, Newport NP18 3YH, UK

pepperell@ntlworld.com

The problem of how art and science might be integrated through the agency of technology has driven many conferences, research programmes and publications over recent decades, not least the Leonardo project itself. The Creativity & Cognition series of conferences, first convened in 1993, follows this tradition in seeking to span the intellectual canyon between artists and scientists. As the co-Chair, Ernest Edmonds, made clear in his opening address, the ambition of the conference has now moved from simply bringing "all of the stakeholders together" to formally recognising a distinct area of research.

I left the conference (unfortunately a day before the close) with a mixed sense of bewilderment and excitement. I was bewildered to think of the difficulties both artists and scientists face, not only in talking to each other, but in designing any productive joint enterprise — at least anything beyond the level of serendipitous individual collaborations. At the same time, I could not help but be excited by the flow of information and ideas, and the sheer fact that all the participants were investing in the potential of a closer mutual understanding.

The problem of measurement and creativity was a recurring theme at the conference, not just because it poses great methodological challenges to those who try it, but also because it exposes the underlying distinction between the artistic and the scientific approaches to understanding what creativity is. Crudely speaking, artists tend to synthesise, whereas scientists tend to analyse. At this conference, spawned from the institutional framework of computing and cognitive science, the working bias was firmly towards the analytic mode of inquiry, even if the intended spirit of the event was synthetic. And whereas artists might tend to take creativity for granted, assuming it is self-evident in the works they produce, scientists do not have that luxury. Instead, they are bound as far as possible to objectively convert the continuous chaos of creative activity into discrete data according to strict conventions and under the scrutiny of their peers. In such circumstances, removing traces of subjectivity from the methodology and conclusions becomes particularly challenging, especially when dealing with a subject like creativity, which is, arguably, a partly subjective quality.

Nigel Cross of the Open University, who had studied the creativity of some leading industrial designers, exemplified the problem in his paper. From close analysis of three cases, Nigel Cross derived a general model of the creative strategies used in the design process, which might suggest we are closer to some precise, systematic understanding of how such creative people operate. Yet, as he was the first to acknowledge in response to questions from the floor, the model might not in fact tell us the whole story, or even very much, about the actual processes through which designers arrive at their goals. For instance, he noted that in all three cases there was an exceptional tenacity and single-mindedness (in one case bordering on obsession) on the part of the designers in reaching their goals. Such qualities of mind and personality are extremely difficult to measure objectively, and do not appear in his general schema.

But while there are obvious difficulties for scientists in objectifying the messy world of creativity, there are also clearly problems for artists in trying to adapt their habitual ways of thinking to the constraints of digital technology. In a joint paper with Ernest Edmonds, co-Chair Linda Candy outlined the findings of the COSTART research project run by the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios at Loughborough. The research used case studies to investigate how artists and technologists might collaborate effectively. While some collaborations ran smoothly, they also found that both artists and technologists reported varying degrees of incompatibility and misunderstanding, especially about the constraints imposed in advance by the contingencies of systems design. This is something that many artists who have tried to adapt speculative ideas to the unforgiving demands of digital logic will recognise.

Of those artists who addressed the conference directly, Geoff Whale of Loughborough University answered the question "Why Use Computers to Make Drawings?" by offering some captivating examples in which computers and global positioning satellites had been used to construct conceptually and aesthetically interesting images (p. 65). Digital art was dealt with by Brent MacGregor of Edinburgh College of Art, Geoff Cox of Plymouth University and Mike King of London Guildhall mainly in terms of archiving and curation rather than in terms of the creative process itself.

Apart from the challenges and excitements of particular presentations, the value of a conference like this is the sense it gives of which way the intellectual winds are blowing. In this respect it was encouraging to hear so many papers addressing ‘embodied’, ‘situated’, ‘active’, ‘contextual’, and ‘collaborative’ models of cognition. For example, in his invited paper John Gero from the University of Sydney cited the work of Csikszentmihalyi who has proposed a systems view of creativity "as a model of the dynamic behaviour of creative systems that include interactions between the major components of a creative society" (p. 8). This more socially situated view, of what is sometimes seen as a purely mental property, was referenced by several other speakers, including Rob Saunders in his paper about an "artificially creative system" called "The Digital Clockwork Muse" (p. 80). This trend was of particular significance in light of the on-going debate about the extent to which cognitive science, and artificial intelligence in particular, should treat cognitive processes as brain-determined or environmentally dependent.

This valuable gathering certainly went a long way towards achieving the intellectual consolidation that Edmonds spoke of in his opening remarks. In spite of this consensus, however, a crucial and essential problem seemed to surface that may need to be firmly addressed if further progress is to be made; that is, "To what extent are scientific methodology and artistic practice compatible modes of inquiry?" Addressing this will require courage and patience, but on the basis of what was on offer at Loughborough this year, the pool of available and willing intellectual energy is up to the challenge. I have little doubt that many in the Leonardo community will want to make a contribution.

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Updated 2nd November 2002


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