Creative Agents Research Articles

Художественные тексты в контексте культурологического образования (несколько замечаний о современной восточной литературе)

This research focuses on modern foreign literature which introduces readers to the socio-cultural field and widens the outlook of future professionals. Cultural knowledge allows to embrace both the values of the past and the best achievements of the present, which contributes to the formation of a well-rounded personality. Fiction is an important component of cultural knowledge thanks to its polyfunctional nature — it is a harmonious synthesis of science, technology and art, it facilitates personal growth and self-fulfillment. There are several strategies represented in foreign fiction. The article focuses on the following aspects vividly described in the 20th century literature: self-realization, self-development, self-discovery, the identification of “the other/ another” in social dimension, the relations between the person and the family, the person and the society as well as person to person relations. The evidence is taken from Eastern literature, which is less known to Russian readers. The article features examples that, in our opinion, highlight the socio-cultural issues that concern modern student audience. The article concludes that the world of fiction shapes a citizen and a highly cultured person. It develops heuristic thinking, esthetic taste and ideals and facilitates a more effective adaptation of a university graduate in market economy. Not only fiction as a whole, but also everyday realia provide for an integrated function of fiction in the educational process. As a whole, fiction forms students’ need for self-realization and self-assertion as an individual creative agent of culture, as a definite personality.

Why Does Copyright Ignore Performers? The Case of Flamenco in Spain

This article analyzes the gap between the perceived value of the performer's contributions to the musical work and the treatment that it receives in the market. It applies to the case of flamenco in Spain. The proposed methodology is based on three approaches: a study of intellectual property laws; interviews with experts to differentiate among creative and humdrum agents; and finally, double system surveys to determine the perceived valuation of the contributions of such agents. The conclusions show how the flamenco performer develops a creative labor; however, it is not protected by copyright or via royalties, commensurate with its importance.

Big Data and Creativity

Big data and machine learning techniques are increasingly applied to creative tasks, often with strong reactions of both awe and concern. But we have to be careful about where to attribute the creative agency. Is it really the machine that paints like van Gogh, or is it a human that uses a high-level tool to impart one pattern upon another, based on her aesthetic preferences? In this paper, the author analyses the problem of machine creativity, focusing on four central themes: the inherent convergence of machine learning and big data techniques, their dependence on assumptions and incomplete data, the possibility of explorative search as a new creative paradigm, and the related problem of the opacity of results from such methods. The Google Deep Dream project is brought in as an example to illustrate the discussion. Information and complexity are brought into the discussion as central concepts for both creative processes and the resulting artefacts, concluding that the complexity of the interaction between the creative agent and the environment during the creative process is a crucial parameter for meaningful creative output. Based on the exposed limitations in current technologies, the author concludes that the principal creative agency still lies in the developers and users of the tools, not in the data processing itself. Human effort and input still matters. But we can take a constructive approach, regarding big data techniques as tools one order of magnitude more complex than what was available before, allowing artists to work with abstractions previously unfeasible for computational work.

A Research through Design Framework from the Evaluation of a Meta-Design Platform for Open and Collaborative Design and Making Processes

AbstractThe democratisation of technologies, knowledge and activities have been changing the world of designers, blurring the boundaries between amateur and professional designers, especially within the connected phenomena of the Maker Movement and Indie Designers. Within this context, how can be collaborative design processes documented, analysed, managed, shared? This article investigates the role of meta-design digital tools for the facilitation of distributed systems of creative agents, formally trained and informal amateurs that collaboratively design and produce artefacts. It documents a research study organised for testing a digital meta-design platform with users and the researcher as meta-designer: the results provide insights for improving the platform but also for building a comprehensive research through design framework that connects meta-design research and practice for exploring the role and nature of meta-design and meta-designers in facilitating collaborative design processes starting from their description with digital ontologies.

‘I am the centre of fame’: doing celebrity, performing fame and navigating cultural hierarchies in Grace Jones’ I’ll Never Write my Memoirs

ABSTRACT This article outlines the concept of doing celebrity: whereby celebrity and pop stardom are presented as a deliberately constructed set of actions and behaviours, rather than an ontology. It does so by conceptualising celebrity as something one does, not something one is. The article examines Grace Jones’ 2015 memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, as an example which contravenes the claim – in both celebrity culture and autobiography – to offer up access to an authentic self. This article reveals an embrace of performativity over authenticity that Jones presents as part of a wider art practice. This self-representational move claims the masculinised status of creative agent and author of the star image, and seeks a level of cultural value otherwise often denied to the female pop star celebrity. The concept of doing celebrity, therefore, opens up new ways to consider the means available to public women to navigate the negative value judgements associated with female celebrity as a cultural field.

Fostering inclusion in school through creative and body-based learning

ABSTRACT In neoliberal times, accountability measures and high-stakes testing further contribute to differentiated outcomes for young people. The way that knowledge is conceptualised in tests regularly fails to recognise the embodied knowledge and abilities of many young people and instead students are positioned as passive receivers of knowledge. Students who are located in structural disadvantage continue to be least successful. This paper offers a critical counter-narrative to the didactic habit inherent in education through the mobilisation of creative and embodied practices as a transformational pedagogical approach. These pedagogies signal an epistemological and pedagogical shift toward mobilising bodies as agents of knowledge production and creativity as cultural capital. This paper reports on research that investigates primary school teachers and teaching artists using creative and body-based pedagogies, with a focus on enhancing student engagement in mathematics through strategies of ‘encounter’ (MacKenzie, Sarah. 2013. “Poetic Praxis: Engaging Body, Mind, and Soul in the Social Foundations Classroom.” Journal for Learning Through the Arts 9 (1): 1–27.). Findings highlight the cumulative affective responses and shifts in subjectivity for both students and teachers when working with the body’s ability to move, feel, respond and imagine. In conclusion we argue for the potential of creative and body-based learning to build classroom communities and practices of inclusion.

Identifying systemic creativity in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad

This article considers Vince Gilligan’s highly innovative Breaking Bad (2008–13) as the outcome of a collaborative creative process shaped by the interaction between Gilligan, as the principal creative agent, with the evolving domain and field of American television. The innovativeness of Gilligan’s series is conceptualized here by means of applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity, whereby Gilligan’s access to and impact on the domain of TV production is examined: he is seen as operating within the simultaneously constraining and enabling factors of the structures inherent to American television, its modes of production and viewership. This article elucidates how the innovativeness of Breaking Bad was the outcome of Gilligan’s adherence to and departure from particular traditions of form, format and structure inherent to the production of American TV drama – in conjunction with the radical transformations that the domain and field of American television were undergoing at the time.

Gender, new creativity and Carnatic music in London

ABSTRACTThis article examines creative projects amongst second-generation, British Tamil diasporic female musicians (focused on Sri Lankan examples) located within London’s Carnatic music scene. Several scholars have suggested that the twentieth-century Indian nationalist project constructed ideals of femininity that positioned women as bearers of tradition during colonial rule to uphold the inner core of Indian culture [Bakrania 2013; Chatterjee 1989], and which were also reflected in the restricted performance and creativity of Carnatic music for female musicians [Subramanian 2006; Weidman 2003]. This article focuses on second-generation musicians, who combine their Carnatic background and ‘South Indian’ sound with other everyday sounds in Britain. Their creative projects shift from an aesthetic that was responsive to colonialism in India to highlight female creativity and hybridity in decolonising processes. This article presents examples of how cultural expectations of women as bearers of tradition are decentred, repositioning them as creative agents in a transnational diaspora.

The Shifting Position of Animals in Landscape Theory

Landscape architecture is unique as a design practice in its engagement with living nonhumans as instrumental media. However, contemporary landscape architecture theory has struggled to integrate fauna as components of the designed landscape beyond calls to provide and preserve habitat and address the philosophical implications of such a gesture. Animals and other mobile entities, when recognized as integral components of landscapes rather than occasional inhabitants, challenge static notions of landscapes as passive spaces and instead invigorate them as lively events. Some early writings on landscape practice and theory, dating back to the picturesque movement, acknowledge the presence of animals in the landscape. More recently, some landscape designers have imagined new roles for animals. No longer are they passive objects or visitors or inhabitants, blindly providing ecosystem services. Increasingly, these designers have explored the role of animals as active agents shaping the landscape, in ways that reimagine interspecies relationships and subjectivities. Provocations for “animal-aided design” are emblematic of this novel take on the animal in the landscape. Using animacy as a tool for revealing various relational qualities of landscapes, this article joins with calls to attend to the liveliness of other beings as productive and creative agents.

Motherhood in Wordsworth: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Poetics

By definition, the Romantic ego is a male; the creator of language which helps him to establish “rites of passage toward poetic creativity and toward masculine empowerment.”1 The outlet for a male quest of self – possession in Romantic poetry is women. For the Romantic poets , the “true woman was emotional, dependent and gentle –a born flower”2 and “the Ideal mother was expected to be strong , self- reliant , protective and efficient caretaker in relation to children and home.”4 With emphasis on the individual in Romantic literature and ideology, mothers are depicted as good when they are natural or unnaturally bad. In the Romantic period then, women’s maternal function equals the “foundation of her social identity and of her sexual desire.”5 Consequently, “convinced that within the individual and autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible”, the Romantic poets “struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy.”6
 In a number of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) poems, this creative agent who possesses the powers of creation and imagination becomes a female character who is also often a mother. Nonetheless, when critics examine mothers in Wordsworth’s poetry, they also explore the child/poet’s relationship. Events in Wordsworth’s life surely influenced his attention to mothers. From a psycho-analytic perspective this interest might be an unconscious desire to resurrect the spirit of his dead mother Ann Wordsworth who died when the poet was almost eight. Thus in his poetry, the mother is the counterpart of the genuine faculty of the imagination of the poet and has a strong and felt presence within the poet’s poetic system.
 In The Prelude, Wordsworth acknowledges his mother’s deep influence on him. He associates her death with the break within his own poetic development; a sign that the poet relies upon in his creative power .It is through her that the young poet came first in contact with the genial current of the natural world. Nevertheless, without his mother, the male child’s connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger:

Performers as Creative Agents; or, Musicians Just Want To Have Fun

In this paper, I explore conceptions of creativity in musical performance in both popular and Western art musics. I examine Cyndi Lauper’s iconic performance of the song “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which transformed the meaning of Robert Hazard’s original demo of the same song. I then analyze performance choices relating to structural cadences in Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, K. 310; Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007; and Beethoven’s Sonata in ".fn_flat("A")." major, op. 110.

Engagement in Language Policies and Practices with and for Vietnamese Minority Student Youth

ABSTRACTDrawing on the recent call for repositioning youth as creative and responsible agents in language and education research (e. g., McCarty & Wyman, 2009) and the notion of engaged ethnography (e.g., Davis & Phyak, 2015), the researcher engaged 16 minority student youth in a remote mountainous province in Vietnam in interrogating the realities of the current language policies (LP) while working actively with them to give rise to effective and responsive LP transformations. Youth’s resistance to the current LP, their critical awareness of their linguistic wealth, and their comprehensive recommendations for LP improvements greatly affirm themselves as resourceful and responsible agents in decision-making and pedagogical revitalizations. This article calls for respecting and recognizing youth’s power, voices, and rights, and invites them to deconstruct educational policies to promote multilingualism and effective educational change. Towards this end, I discuss implications to promote youth engagement in language education policies and practices.

Children as visionary change agents in Danish school health promotion.

This paper describes children's perceptions and visions for a healthier social and physical environment in the setting of a primary school on the Danish island of Bornholm. Guided by an everyday-life perspective and applying participatory action research methods including social imagination and visual techniques within the framework of future creating workshops, the study engaged 50 children aged 6-9 years in creative processes of identifying health-related problem areas and solutions in their school setting. The study observed that the children were very capable of articulating their thoughts, ideas and visions for a better and healthier school environment. Identified problem areas and solutions differed widely and represented a broad perspective of health including social, physical, environmental and emotional aspects. The paper discusses advantages and challenges of involving children in decision-making processes and concludes that children are visionary and creative agents of change in health promotion projects provided that applied participatory methods are appealing to the children.

The Actress-Manager and the Movies: Resolving the Double Life of Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt is one of the most globally celebrated actress-managers of the late nineteenth century. Bernhardt’s fame, however, is rarely associated with silent film. This article explores the coincidence between Sarah Bernhardt’s role as a theatrical manager in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and her pioneering work in the nascent film industry. I argue that Bernhardt was not only a performer and manager in the theatre, but a creative agent in modern media industries. Questions about the relationship between Bernhardt and early film allow us to discuss the formation of female business experience in the theatre and its subsequent movement into a cinematographic culture that would dominate and define twentieth-century culture and commerce. Even if Bernhardt is regarded as a ‘lone entrepreneur’ and therefore extraneous to broader national discussions of theatrical industrialisation, it is important to understand the impact she has as a media celebrity who used film in order to expand her own twentieth-century global marketability.

Doing the Will of the Father: Jesus’ Freedom and the Beatific Vision

Popular conceptions of ‘doing God’s will’ often draw upon images of some pre-existing plan, which we need to follow even though its details are not clear to us. Equally similarly popular conceptions of Jesus’ knowing, informed by his beatific vision, entail Jesus knowing his life-plan as mapped out by God from the beginning, with him simply having to do what has been pre-ordained. What is not clear for us is taken to be transparent for him. This position robs the human Jesus of any creativity or originality, since his only degree of freedom is to do what has been pre-determined. This paper will compare two approaches, one by Thomas Joseph White in his work on Christology, the other by Bernard Lonergan, in his recently published and translated work on Christology. The question which drives the investigation is whether and in what ways Jesus is the creative agent of his life’s mission.

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy

The New Brutalism: Agency, Embodiment and Performance in Daniel Craig's 007

:The casting and spectacular body of Daniel Craig has had a major impact on the reinvention of Bond as a more brutal (and brutalized) character and on the films' representations of masculinity and power. This article examines Craig's acting, and in doing so, repositions Craig as an active creative agent in the construction of Bond, as well as an embodiment of Bond. Craig's Bond may reject sophistication and ornamentation but Craig does not give an unsophisticated performance. In Craig's economical performance, continuities can be observed between his technique and the architectural movement, the New Brutalism. In this sense, the article redefines Craig as “object” and “architect,” exploring what is shown in Craig's Bond and how the actor achieves this.

Musical creativity and the embodied mind

The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader socio-material milieu they are situated in. This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. We suggest that this approach may help us better understand creativity in terms of how interacting individuals and social groups bring forth worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity. We also explore how dynamical systems theory (DST) may offer useful tools for research and theory that align closely with the 4E perspective. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and suggest possibilities for future research.

La traduction littéraire ou l'art de « faire refleurir les déserts du sens »

Literary translation is essentially a creative process of rewriting. The translator is the author of the translation text, even if he is not the author of the original text. A translation is never a clone of the original. In translating, we do not say the same thing differently, we say something else differently, as Henri Meschonnic put it. Concepts borrowed from the field of history of translation, like historicism, passive retranslation and active retranslation are used to go against those who still erroneously think that the meaning of a literary text lies only in its words, and claim that “we translate words because there is nothing else to translate”. Against this linguistic and literary approach, the poetics approach takes into account the fact that, between the author and the reader, the translator is an active and creative agent in the process. Translating is always a “ménage à trois”.

‘Art is not just about entertainment’: the social activism and cultural production of Chicago’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)

As cities compete for a ‘global city’ designation to attract capital, urban policy discourses emphasise fostering ‘creative industries’ and attracting a ‘creative class’. In these discourses, glaring inequalities are often overlooked and religious actors and marginalized communities as creative agents addressing urban problems are conspicuously absent.Exploring IMAN’s work, this paper illustrates that the ‘global city’ presents a strategic space where disempowered actors amplify their impact. In post-9/11 America, Muslim Americans seem to be under siege caught as they are between Islamophobes and terrorists, the state security apparatus, and intra-community divisions. This context has also given rise to creative interventions by Muslim Americans inspired by piety, assertive identities and a passion for social justice. IMAN’s faith-based mission envisions transformative changes in Chicago’s South side. In its ‘Takin’ it to the Streets’ biennial art and social justice ‘urban international’ festival and its monthly Community Café, art becomes a creative endeavour and a vehicle for ‘powerfully, radically re-imagining the world’. The re-imagining begins with transforming Marquette Park into a creative space for multicultural celebration. Here, jazz, hip-hop, French and Palestinian B-boys encounter Sufi Pakistani music; poetry and comedy entertain and inspire; and religious and civic leaders mobilise attendees to ‘Heal the “Hood”’.