The 3rd Creativity Workshop (Organised by the Creative Strategy Working Group in association with inQbate and the CETL in creativity) 'Catching the sparks: Methods for researching creativity' managed to fit an awful lot into an impressively short space of time (3.5 hours). Flickr photos up here.
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Welcome: Steve Burman, Dean, School of Humanities
A very brief intro, stressing how nice it was that there was such a mix of areas represented at this workshop.
Visiting speaker: Geraint Wiggins, Professor of Computational Creativity, Goldsmiths: “Computational Creativity”
Behaviour deemed 'Creative' if performed by a human, through computational means. This covers the spectrum from human-like artefact behaviour to understanding creativity through simulation. Definition is therefore 'creative behaviour' not the more tricky 'creativity'.
Old chestnut - Programmer creative not computer. Response: Machine Learning, not directly programmed.
Associative memory may be the key to human creativity; stored by content not by address.
Scientists are creative just in a different domain, in a different way, with different criteria for success.
Introduces CHORAL (old KBS from 1985) which first year music and computing students are asked to simulate. CHORAL harmonises in the style of J S Bach. Interestingly I chose wrong when asked to differentiate between the computer generated harmonisation and the Bach. The actual problem with the system is that it produces melodies which are 'too Bachy' and 'full of Bachness'.
The proposal is to try to generate a similar system through machine learning, but this would raise interesting issues in criteria for judging.
ChrisT (who is heading up the new Music Informatics course) commented that the talk about 'creativity' was giving him horrible flashbacks to talk years ago about 'intelligence' (The term being so hard to pin down that it was defined in terms of behaviour of that form) and was concerned that there may end up being another 30 years of agonising over the term.
I also learned that Crazy Frog was, in part, generated algorithmically. Shudder.
Mary Agnes Krell (Media, Sussex): “Mobile Media Methodologies” (practice based research)
Mary Agnes talked about her MA students who look at mobile media.
Students look at:
- Persuasiveness of mobile media
- Vannevar Bush
- Practice Based Research
- International Connections
She talked through mobile media schemes in other institutions and projects that her students had worked on (such as Jon Winet's Goal for the World Cup).
As part of the course they actively explore:
- MacStumbling
- GeoCaching and Scavenger Hunts
- MoBlogging
- Creative Content for Portable Screens
- Routledge Texts.
I want to do that course now, but will settle for finding out more about it.
Sue Roe (CCE, Sussex): “Researching Biography : Exploring and Inventing Methodologies'
Sue asked 'What is Biographical work? Is it scholarly, empirical, creative, theoretical?
She argued that it was not consciously theoretical. The biographer is constrained by facts. Theorists ask 'so many questions'. Things should be brought into juxtaposition, but only when you have all the facts. In her view you can't address theory and biography at the same time. Biographical work, to her, is closer to art. The unconscious is doing the work. Looking at the telling of the story vs. linear argument.
Open floor discussion
The floor discussion was an interesting trip into the difference between rigour in the humanities vs. the sciences (authority vs. process). It was argued that the sciences also judge validity in terms of creativity in a sense; Einstein with 'beauty' and quantum mechanics with aesthetics. The discussion kept returning to differences in 'evaluation'.
Ginger Break…
Fantastic idea. Ginger-themed tea break. There was ginger beer, giner wine, root ginger, gingerbread, ginger cake, ginger biscuits, ginger chocolate. Mmm.
Kim Lasky (Hums, Sussex): "Wedding: a prose poem on critical and creative writing" (practice based research)
Framelock - unspoken frameworks (see Irving Goffman)
Collaboration of intellect and imagination.
"I learn by going where I have to go."
Jess Moriarty (Languages, Brighton): “A Creative Writing retreat for academic staff” (problem based research)
In charge of creative writing workshops for academics - aiming to rekindle joy for writing in academics for whom writing has stopped being a passion or a pleasure.
We were asked to write a poem celebrating ourselves:
- Repeat your name
- Positive
- Even be ridiculous
- Celebrate yourself (On being a great lecturer: 'Do not be fooled by their sleepy eyes')
I will not share, but suffice to say it was great fun.
Justine Johnstone (SPRU, Sussex): “Researching ICT & Creativity: some methodological questions”
Asked whether creativity research can help us in ICT?
Robert Whittle (LifeSci, Sussex): “Science-art collaboration: some methodological musings”
A musing presentation on the benefits to science and art of collaboration. Often a one-way benefit - to the arts and not to science. He suggested art practitioners can help as feedback mechanisms to scientists - by using the trading of metaphors and drawing-out. For example he notices that scientists draw all the time but then just throw their diagramming away.* Another example of mutual collaborations would be Physics and The Novel by Alan Wall and Gron Tudor-Jones. A third example was his suprise when an artist (as part of meta-art) asked him which bits of the fruit-fly that he studied he liked, which led to an interesting collaboration.
Open floor discussion
Agreement that sci-art often not an equally beneficial collaboration. Interesting discussion around diagrams in science. Are they used to achieve agreement, externalising for development of a concept only, and just thrown away? Should they be kept? Performative vs. descriptive? Emotional relationship? What is the metaphor of a diagram? Should the artist be brought in as a diagram collector?
Concluding
The talk was interestingly summed up by the esteemed Maggie, and we shall all look forward to the next workshop (where the tea-break theme will be peppermint).
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* Nice example being the dojo scribblings this week.
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