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.