Creativity
The following is
a summary of an article written by Bret Battey in 1994 for a
newsletter of Northwest CyberArtists.
The popular
understanding of the creative process is that it flows from idea to
realization, meaning that someone gets a creative idea, executes
it, and the process is finished, like so:
With this kind of
idea floating around, it is not hard to understand why so many
people do not see themselves as creative, or find creative tasks
emotionally bruising. Anyone who tries to create with an
expectation of a straight line from an idea to realization is set
up for failure.
It is important to
realize that there is rarely a single idea or a single realization
involved in a creative work. Creativity is, in fact, a feedback
process characterized by oscillating stages of action and
assessment. A more accurate portrayal of creation than the straight
line might look like this:
In this diagram, the
creative act occurs in the area between two poles: idea and
realisation. Between the idea and its realisation there is an area
which I have labelled "The Unknown". The tools for bridging the
unknown are action (attempting a realisation of your idea) and
observation (assessing your realisation in comparison to your
idea). Based on your assessment of your first attempt, you adjust
the idea and engage in action again to attempt a new realisation.
Action and observation oscillate, the idea and realisation are
adjusted and changed repeatedly until, ideally, the idea and the
realisation are brought into alignment.
In this process,
quite a bit of both your original idea and original realization can
be transformed or discarded. At the end, however, the gap between
the idea and a means of realizing it has been closed or narrowed.
Now, given the same basic idea for a new creative act, one would
find the unknown to be less of a chasm:
This is largely the
case in 'popular' or established art forms, where both the idea and
successful means of realization of that idea are within the
vernacular of the culture. However, the magnifying glass in the
above diagram serves as a reminder that for art forms in which the
gap between idea and realization is quite narrow, often high value
is placed on very fine details in the realization. The value here
is on virtuosity - on having the highly refined skills and
automatic knowledge needed to provide very tight turnaround between
and idea and realisation.
New art forms tend
to present a different picture:
Here, there tends to
be a wide gap between the idea and the realization, because the
idea itself is further from the cultural vernacular, and/or its
means of realization are more difficult to establish. Here the
value is not on virtuosity and precision as much as it is on the
intellect and stamina needed to identify and negotiate a broad
expanse of the unknown through many oscillations of action and
observation.
One pole or the
other can have greater weight. For example, in a case where someone
has donated a lot of equipment towards an art project, the
availability of the equipment might carry more weight than
the original idea, and the idea will conform to the implications of
the equipment:
On the other hand,
it is common in the experimental art world for the idea to have
greater weight than the realisation. In their extreme, conceptual
artists seek to remove the distinction between idea and realization
altogether. Consider, for example, Takehisa Kosugi's 1965 Fluxus
score Music for a Revolution: "Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years
from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later." The
mode of creation might be represented in the diagram below, where
realisation of the score would likely be terminal:
One can go to the
opposite extreme: start with a very vague idea, execute it with raw
intuition, then decide what the artwork is about. This is called
'publish or perish' or 'grantsmanship'. It is a common phenomenon
in cases where people are asked to write or talk about their
artwork after creating it:
Going back to more
conventional creative processes, sometimes the tension between the
idea and the realization is too strong. We analyze and
observe and think "It is NOT good." This looks something
like:
The inner, critical
voice is saying that there is no point in continuing given how far
the realization is from the idea. With no fortitude to cross The
Unknown, the creative process dies.
Sometimes, instead
of exerting the fortitude to cross what seems like a very large
chasm, we may choose to engage in a quantum shift of either
the idea or the means of realisation:
Here, for example,
rather than giving up because of the width of the gap, the idea was
shifted radically to bring it closer in line with the realization.
This can be a creative act in itself. Working with rather than
against malfunctions and errors in technology is a great
example.
Now, what happens if
you string together a number of creative acts and consider those as
realizations of another idea-as another, larger creative process?
You enter what cyberneticists and system theorists refer to a
'meta- change', that is, change that causes a change. By engaging
in meta-creation spanning many creative acts, you challenge and
adapt the life values by which you form the ideas and
evaluations described above
In other words, each
individual act of creation can serve a larger act of creation
rather than being an end in itself. In this context, one recognizes
each artwork in a larger context, and art can become an agent of
personal, and thereby societal, change. More established or
commercial art forms tend
to require less
meta- creation, because the ideas and means of execution are
largely externally defined. For those who have the option of being
free from external requirements, meta-creation is not an option
because ideas and criterion for evaluating realizations must be
personally defined.
Progression
Epistemology
describes how our knowledge goes from nothing to something. Hence,
any account of reality requires an account of epistemology. At the
level of the individual, science and religion are epistemologically
similar. A scientific education, like a religious education is an
education into a tradition. In science, like religion, authority is
the justification for much of what is taught and in science the
role of experiments is not demonstrative but illustrative. The
individual's scientific knowledge depends on a web of trust
permeating the scientific community which rests on scientific
discovery as a progression of authorities. This is also the
situation with regard to religious education and belief. The
community and not the individual is in each case the natural unit
of knowledge.
Humanity has
progressed over hundreds of thousands of years, but until about the
seventeenth century, progress was a rare event. There were
novelties but a person would not expect a whole sequence of
improvements in his lifetime. Since then scientific progress has
been continual, and in the advanced parts of the world, there has
also been continued technological progress. Therefore, people no
longer expect the world to remain the same as it
is.
One important ideal
that inspired science was that of being true to nature, rather than
to groundless opinions and superstitions, especially about divine
interventions and the supernatural. This attitude became a common
mode of thought in the Renaissance, which put the entire range of
past ideas about the world, nature and human life under a
magnifying glass, as it were, to see if they held up on closer
analysis. In so doing, science also eventually helped create and
establish the right to knowledge and free flow of information that
characterises modern civilisation. We can consequently examine and
evaluate ideas in a climate of opinion relatively free from fear,
repression, dangerous conflict or dogmatism. This itself is no
small achievement and the role of science in the history of the
20th century strongly suggests that it has in general helped to
sustain what Karl Popper called 'the open society', even
though it was also well integrated into the totalitarian systems of
the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. However, whether
science itself embodies democratic values and whether its
researches and other enterprises are directed democratically
inclined is quite another matter. Great expansion has obviously
occurred in the sciences and their related activities and social
institutions. How much of this expansion really represents
desirable progress and genuine enlightenment is the crucial
question.
It is very
well-known that there has been tremendous progress in the
theoretical explanations, predictive abilities and manipulatory
techniques and instrumentation in the natural sciences in modern
times. All in all, it seems, knowledge of nature progresses on a
broad front, especially in the basal sciences like physics,
chemistry and biology. These are the most precise sciences and,
since they yield many extremely accurate predictions, are regarded
with good reason as producing certain knowledge, or at least the
very best next thing.
The natural sciences
like geo-history, climatology and paleontology, which are not
primarily experimental, have also made great advances in explaining
and predicting events. Medical science, as distinct from medical
practice, is an area where the understanding and control of the
human body has made huge strides in many respects in the last few
hundred years and very much more so in the 20th
century.
This being said, one
must insist straight away that the huge advances made in our
knowledge of the natural world should not be allowed to obscure the
fact that there are very many gaps in that knowledge, many depths
yet not fully sounded and also many phenomena of which the sciences
have little knowledge, sometimes none whatever. Experts in all the
above-mentioned sciences and in medicine still support as
indubitable a number of central theories and prejudices that are
under powerful and cogent attack from various quarters. As we shall
see, short-sighted dogmas are still upheld by the inertia of
scientific opinion, invested prestige and actual mediocrity or
narrowness of intellectual scope. Scientific advances have not been
without serious costs, both as to a wider understanding of the
human entity and in terms of many unwanted side-effects on health,
the quality of life and the environment.
From its
breakthrough in the Renaissance, physical science has been
supported by those who saw it as an instrument of material and
social change through technological knowledge. This accounts for
most of the popularity it enjoys. Francis Bacon was referring to
the empirical scientific spirit when he proclaimed that "Knowledge
is power". It is power indeed, probably beyond Bacon's most far-
flung imaginings... both physical, economical and social power,
never forgetting military power. These are both reasons for science
being supported and invested in by the various leaders in
society.
Science made
possible the demonstration of it's best hypotheses in repeated
experiments. Its prestige arose from this, combined with the
control of nature that gradually provided industrial technology
with their advancements in material goods and useful inventions.
Emergent European natural science studied nature, the physical
environment of man, including the human body. Everyone knows how
this has led to the improvement of physical conditions generally,
including working conditions, health and human
productivity.
Very likely, the
greatest rate of progress for the average person occurred around
the end of the 19th century when safe water supplies, telephones,
automobiles, electric lighting, and home refrigeration came in
short order.
