Creative Agents Research Articles

Waiting for Geotropic Forces: Bergsonian Duration and the Ecological Sympathies of Biodesign

Biodesign disrupts the traditional temporalities of expectation and demand in wider design economies because designers are not selecting from a range of prefabricated samples from which they manufacture a product. Instead, they are plunged into the durations of other organisms for the simple reason that they must wait for something to grow. Situated in this context, this article considers how we might conceptualize these events of “waiting” such that we intensify their importance for ecological thought. In the philosophy of Henri Bergson, events of waiting are important as a mode of intuiting a register of movement beyond human habits of perception, what he refers to as duration. In this article, I suggest that thinking events of waiting in biodesign via Bergson intervenes in debates surrounding posthuman creativity, not because it multiplies creative agents but because it cultivates a sympathy for temporal ecologies from which human perception is alienated.

Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow

Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow

Consciousness generates agent action.

Consciousness directs the actions of the agent for its own purposive gains. It re-organises a stimulus-response linear causality to deliver generative, creative agent action that evaluates the subsequent experience prospectively. This inversion of causality affords special properties of control that are not accounted for in integrated information theory (IIT), which is predicated on a linear, deterministic cause-effect model. IIT remains an incomplete, abstract, and disembodied theory without explanation of the psychobiology of consciousness that serves the vital agency the organism.

More than just a lust for life: a systems view of Iggy Pop’s creativity

This paper discusses how Iggy Pop’s creativity has been the outcome of a systemic process shaped by the interaction between Iggy Pop as the principal creative agent with the evolving domain and field of Rock music. Iggy Pop’s innovative impact on Rock music over fifty years is explained here by means of applying a systems view of creativity. Iggy Pop transformed the domain of Rock music by operating within the simultaneously constraining and enabling factors of the structure inherent to Rock music songwriting and production. This paper eventually elucidates how creativity and innovation in Iggy Pop’s body of work is the outcome of his adherence to as well as departure from traditions of form and structure inherent to Rock music songwriting and production.

Memory, Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's La carne

This article discusses the literary approaches used by Doris Lessing in Love, Again (1995), and Rosa Montero in her novel La Carne (2016), emphasising the parallels between these writers' interest in women’s ageing experiences and the role that both of these novels’ main characters play in the contemporary cultural scene. Of particular interest in this article is the experience of these female authors who write these novels between the 1990s and the two first decades of the 21st century, historical periods which were marked by major social and economic upheaval, I suggest that their respective productions problematise the notions of memory, affectivity and intimacy, and notably showcase the contributions made by women in the process of ageing as creative agents of social and cultural changes in contemporary Europe.

The Dialogue of Creativity: Teaching the Creative Process by Animating Student Work as a Collaborating Creative Agent

Material artifacts play an important role in many learning environments. Such artifacts can include sketches, manipulatives, 3D models, toys and games, or the scrap materials found in makerspaces. Some theorists have argued that material artifacts, even though they do not move or talk, should be considered to have autonomous agency and to interact as equals with human participants. But there have been few empirical studies that explore whether or how material artifacts are attributed agency by human participants. This paper contributes to this issue by analyzing interactions between professor and student in design studio classrooms, where the student’s created work is the central focus. I analyze the close coordination of talk—including syntactic constructions and verb aspect—with nonverbal action, including eye gaze, gesture, body orientation, and body position. In the first set of findings, I identify six interactional mechanisms that attribute agency to the work, in both verbal and nonverbal modalities. I demonstrate that through the use of these six laminated multimodal resources, the student’s creative work is socially constructed as an agentive participant. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of artifact agency in social practices. In the second set of findings, I show how professors enlist these six practices in discursive patterns that scaffold students in mastering the dialogue of creativity: a process that distributes creative agency between the student and their unfolding work. These dialogues model for students a creative process characterized by iteration, ambiguity, exploration, and emergence. I conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of teaching and learning for creativity.

Therapeutic virtual reality in prison: Participatory design with incarcerated women

Upon release from prison, women face barriers in every step of their journey home, with most reentry services designed for men. With virtual reality (VR) headsets increasingly affordable and normalized as a mental health treatment modality, VR is being adopted by prisons around the United States. We argue that the risks and affordances of VR in this political context necessitate centering those with lived experience as creative agents to avoid designing media that re-traumatizes, reduces the complexities of reentry, and reproduces oppressive prisoner–guard dynamics. This article documents and analyzes the design process of a VR reentry program for a state prison to help incarcerated women practice responding to high-stress reentry situations, prior to their release. The resulting VR prototype draws on therapeutic VR work but takes a community-based participatory design approach. We conclude by discussing the institutional and cultural tensions of implementing a participatory design process in a US state prison system.

Creativity in Humans, Robots, Humbots

Abstract This paper examines three ways that robots can interface with creativity. In particular, social robots which are designed to interact with humans are examined. In the first mode, human creativity can be supported by social robots. In a second mode, social robots can be creative agents and humans serve to support robot’s productions. In the third and final mode, there is complementary action in creative work, which may be collaborative co-creation or a division of labor in creative projects. Illustrative examples are provided and key issues for further discussion are raised.

Consumers as creative agents: How required effort influences willingness to engage

AbstractConsumers often engage with brands by participating in activities such as co‐creating products and contributing ideas about product promotion. Such engagement enables consumers to be creative agents rather than mere end‐users. However, it also places a burden on them, as it inevitably requires effort on the consumer part. This study investigates the impact of expected effort level (low vs. high) on consumers' inclination toward engagement, and its underlying mechanisms. Three experiments find that higher expected effort leads to lower intention to engage. This effect is mediated by the perceived probability of success and perceived value of engagement, and the two mediators operate in tandem. Effort levels negatively affect the perceived probability of success, which exerts a positive impact on the perceived value of engagement and then on willingness to engage. We also examine the moderating effect of consumer mindsets and find that chronic and situational consumer mindsets work differently. Specifically, primed mindsets have a significant effect, but enduring mindsets do not. This study contributes to the literature on engagement and expectancy–value theory by exploring consumer effort in a context where effort aids in implementing creativity.

Sound, silence, resonance, and embodiment: choreographic synaesthesia

This article explores the potential of a new conceptualisation of dance spectatorship informed by theories of embodied and enactive cognition. The approach adopted here incorporates the bodily experience and the intellectual processing of information that the dance spectator goes through. This perspective enables a discussion on the intersection of referential elements, spectator’s knowledge and background, and formal properties of the work into the experience that provide a holistic view of the work of dance and its effects through the concept of synaesthesia. Meaning moves, sounds feel, images taste and smell. In order to build this understanding, this particular study makes use of an enquiry into experience and body-environment relationships to approach the multi-modal experience of watching dance. I explore the idea of cross-sensory embodied experience as the base for dance spectatorship. I propose that synaesthesia will be useful in modelling spectatorial experience of dance. Further to this, I contend that although maybe not fully consciously, it is possible that the creative agents—the choreographer-director in this case—already have an understanding of this potential. Through this they manipulate elements within their works until they experience something akin to cross-sensory engagement in themselves. This perspective hence also allows new forms of analysis and understandings of creative work in performance. Through this approach, the article discusses a combination of apparently separate elements and senses in performance, with focus on sound, silence, and resonance through the notion of synaesthesia. Discussion is illustrated and exemplified though analysis of choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works (2015), which not only expresses ideas, emotions, and sensations through the medium of dance, but demonstrates an understanding of dance as cross-sensory potentiality, able not only to deal with deep thematic elements, but also remain viscerally engaging. Embodied cognition, then, is proposed as the best framework to discuss the spectatorial experience of such work.

Refugia: Radical Solutions to Mass Displacement. Edited by Nicholas van Hear and Robin Cohen

Refugia provides a pragmatic utopian vision as a solution to end mass displacement for refugees and all forms of displaced people. The book suggests a design of a polity that is transnational in its entity and formation, with Refugians (citizens of Refugia) seen as creative agents who are imagining and co-building their own kind of polis. The book references the mainstream academic views of refugee and displacement politics, identity, and home-making practices as the authors frame their perspective on Refugia. With backgrounds in development studies, both authors have extensive research experience in forced migration. Refugia covers a wide range of research examples (historic and current) and practices from anthropological research, design, architecture, and planning that support and confirm the authors’ own thinking process regarding the need for unique, alternative, and novel ways of approaching the challenge of mass displacement. The book begins with an overview of Refugia 2030 (with a misspelled/grammatically wrong Arabic date) that explains the governance, economy, and overall character of this utopian vision.

The role of self-transcending knowledge in Senge’s understanding of learning organizations towards an interdisciplinary taxonomy of self-transcending knowledge

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of self-transcending knowledge as one of P. Senge’s common themes underpinning his five disciplines approach. It will be shown that the notions of vision, purpose and transcendence, especially self-transcendence are closely related to each other. However, the aspect of self-transcendence has not been covered well yet in the existing literature. That is why this paper is guided by the following research question: What does a consolidated, integrative and interdisciplinary concept of self-transcending knowledge look like, and what are its defining and unifying features and characteristics with respect to learning organizations?Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper draws on (both theoretical and empirical) interdisciplinary evidence from a wide variety of fields, such as organization studies, psychology, philosophy, learning organizations, cognitive science and innovation studies. Key authors from the field of self-transcending knowledge and their approaches will be discussed to develop a unified interdisciplinary concept of self-transcending knowledge and its possible applications, which will be demonstrated in a case study.FindingsSelf-transcending knowledge turns out to be central in the fields of learning (organizations) and innovation, as it deals with future-oriented knowledge that is “not yet”, that transcends the boundaries of existing knowledge. It is based on self-detachment, the notion of potentials and the insight that novel knowledge is not only the result of a creative agent (or organization) but also can be found and cocreated through an attentive search in an unfolding reality.Originality/valueExisting literature in the field of P. Senge’s five disciplines (and beyond) does not offer a comprehensive concept of self-transcending knowledge. This paper addresses this issue by bringing together approaches from a wide range of fields related to this concept; it develops an interdisciplinary and coherent notion and taxonomy of self-transcending knowledge and shows its impact for learning organizations and innovation.

Considerações sobre o conceito de site-specific no Teatro Brasileiro

Neste artigo visitamos um conjunto de definições sobre o uso e emprego do termo site-specific em montagens teatrais brasileiras contemporâneas. Para tanto, partimos de diversas definições iniciando pela alusão que as artes visuais fazem à expressão. Procuramos problematizar os aspectos do processo criativo considerando a palavra de agentes criativos, quando se expressam nos programas de seus espetáculos ou em entrevistas, a expressão da crítica especializada e os textos acadêmicos e universitários que procuram abordar os mais diferentes aspectos que envolvem o termo e a noção que o encerra.

Towards a Methodology for Field Work in Computational Creativity

This work proposes a methodology for conducting field work in computational creativity, referring to field work as the effort of actively making a system or its artifacts widely accessible outside the academic world. Field work aims to study how creative computer agents and/or their products influence society, and how the dynamics that arise from the interaction between people and those inventive machines or their artifacts can inform the design of computational creativity methods, systems and artefacts. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences making our systems ALYSIA and MEXICA broadly available. In the case of ALYSIA, the system itself was made accessible, whereas MEXICA’s artifacts (stories) were shared through a traditionally published book for a broad readership. We then propose a five step methodology for effectively conducting field work in Computational Creativity. The participation of the computational creativity community is essential to test and enrich this methodology.

A Class Act: An interview with Julie Hesmondhalgh on casting, representation and inclusion in British television drama

In this interview, actor Julie Hesmondhalgh reflects on her rich body of work in British TV drama, connecting her own career trajectory with a consideration of wider industry developments in casting and representation, diversity and inclusion. With extended reference to Coronation Street (1960–) and Doctor Who (1963–1989, 2005–), Hesmondhalgh discusses how far UK TV drama production has come in tackling systemic inequalities and exclusions, while also stressing the progress still required, particularly in relation to capturing the complexities of class identity. More broadly, the insights offered within this piece illustrate the value of industry interviews as a methodological approach for TV studies, in revealing the experiences and perspectives of key creative agents within the production process.

Subjection and Resistance: Landscapes, Gardens, Myths and Vestigial Presences in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames. This aesthetic foregrounds the expansive possibilities of nature and other life forms in the wake of empire and global modernity. By an engagement with these tools, the creative writer deconstructs the limits of colonial ecological damage and modern-day agricultural devastation, while simultaneously affirming the Caribbean landscape as an active and creative agent within articulations of community and belonging. Through a blend of eco-criticism as examined by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Wilson Harris's formulations of the "living landscapes" and Caribbean mythologies, this essay seeks to interrogate the manner in which Caribbean poet, Olive Senior, consciously deploys the literary imagination as a platform to plant seeds of reform and activism in the trail of environmental destruction. Senior accomplishes this through notions of mythic time and space that are unfettered by monolithic ideologies and linearity. This signposts an effort to posit a reliance on a spirit-infused universe—a deeply felt ideology which is pivotal to acts of environmental healing and societal recuperation.

El estatus de arte del CG-art desde un modo de existencia de tipo-natural

La introducción de las redes generativas antagónicas en el mundo del arte ha revitalizado la clásica pregunta: ¿puede una máquina crear arte? Estos algoritmos requieren una mínima intervención humana para funcionar, por lo que sus creaciones se consideran CG-art. En esta clase particular de arte los computadores no son una herramienta al servicio humano, sino un agente creativo autónomo. Por otro lado, estudios cognitivos recientes han demostrado que las personas son escépticas ante la idea de que una máquina pueda crear arte. Este artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar que el CG-art no puede excluirse arbitrariamente del dominio artístico. Para ello se utiliza la distinción hecha por Dickie entre teorías del arte de tipo natural y cultural. Luego, utilizando el concepto función de estatus de Searle, se propone considerar al arte como un fenómeno independiente del lenguaje. Complementando ambos enfoques sostengo que, la teoría idónea para explicar el fenómeno del CG-art es del tipo natural. Esto implica que la sociedad no puede negar el carácter de arte a estas creaciones algorítmicas. Así, la idea de que las máquinas pueden crear arte es fortalecida.
 Palabras clave: CG-art, teoría de arte, filosofía social, Searle, función de estatus

Organizational Misfits as Creative Agents of Change: The Case of Pracademics

The experience of ‘misfit’ between individuals’ professional identities and work roles or work contexts is common in inter-role or inter-professional career transitions. Responses to identity threat arising from such misfit have often been framed in terms of attempts to minimize their negative consequences and maladaptive outcomes at the individual level. Less attention has been paid to the organizational outcomes of career actors’ efforts to overcome misfit and their role as creative agents of change. This study examines how problematic identity dynamics associated with misfit motivate the shift towards the development of positive identities and induce change-oriented agency. It builds on theory of positive identity construction and the notion of identity work as a form of embedded agency. The empirical study looks at a group of ‘pracademics’ whose career trajectories deviate from the prototypical patterns in academia. It examines the identity work strategies that these people undertake to overcome misfit and construct a positive sense of their professional selves in career transitions. The analysis reveals the dynamic interplay between positive identity construction and micro- acts of creative agency. It distinguishes two identity work strategies: ‘hybridization’ and ‘positive distinctiveness’, which provide different pathways to identity positivity and disrupt knowledge boundaries and established work practices in different ways. The study contributes to the positive organizational scholarship literature and advances our understanding of identity work as an agentic and inherently creative human endeavour.

THEATRE AND PERSONA: CELEBRITY AND TRANSGRESSION

Theatre, with its focus on live performance and the particular interest it places on the performer as creative agent, undoubtedly brings a distinctive set of enriching perspectives to the field of persona studies, which has often acknowledged its debt to performance studies and theories of performativity (see, for instance, Marshall & Barbour 2015). Despite some notable forays into the area of persona and (live) artistic performance made by scholars in this journal (see, for instance, Piper 2015; Colby 2015; D’Cruz 2015), work that specifically addresses the multi-faceted uses and disuses of persona in theatre and its often radically transgressive potential is still conspicuously under-represented in a vibrant and swiftly expanding field. As guest editors of this special issue for Persona Studies, we are delighted to make a substantial intervention in bringing some of the theories and practices of theatre studies to persona studies. Likewise, the lens of persona studies concentrates analysts of theatre on interrogations that are fundamental to the discipline and to advancements in the notoriously difficult articulation of acting and the embodied performance of self and other.

Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics by Andrew Davison

Reviewed by: Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics by Andrew Davison Rudi Te Velde Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics. By Andrew Davison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 423. $34.99 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-1087-0404-5. This wonderful book is the fruit of the growing interest among theologians in the notion of participation and the participatory way of thought, not only as found in an exemplary way in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but more broadly as characteristic of a Christian (biblical and patristic) understanding of God’s creative and saving presence in the world. It is a form of theology that dares to speak freely in a metaphysical register without feeling cornered somehow by the secular presuppositions of modern philosophy. The book shows signs of being influenced by the Radical Orthodoxy movement, with its predilection for Platonic participation. Even though the book does not assume that movement’s full force of a critical and polemical stance towards modern secular culture, it does oppose modern varieties of nominalism, with its individualist ontology, voluntarism, and the modern split between the human subject and the world. The general approach is positive, aiming at setting out a broad Christian vision of the world that has the notion of participation at its heart. The book’s closest parallel, explicitly mentioned as a source of inspiration, [End Page 326] is Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation (2011), which has introduced many readers to a participatory account of theology. The author proves himself to be an excellent teacher who in a clear and simple language draws a persuasive and well-informed picture of the Christian participatory view of the world in its relation to God. To the author, participation means first and foremost that the world is approached in terms of sharing and receiving, or of communion. The spirit of participation is recognizable, for instance, in the question posed by the apostle Paul: “What have you got that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7). The double message of participation is that a creature is nothing apart from God’s gift, while at the same time, by God’s gift, it truly exists and has being. The book’s subtitle is “A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics.” The perspective may be called distinctively theological, even in the sense that the relevant sources used to elaborate the participatory way of thought include biblical texts. The author acknowledges that Plato is the philosophical father of participatory thinking, and that the presence of participation in the writings of the Church Fathers (not least Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and in the Latin west, Augustine) is due to the comprehensive influence of Platonist metaphysics in the period of late Antiquity. The most prominent source in this book is, undoubtedly, Thomas Aquinas, “the master of the participatory perspective” (7). The author does not intend his book to be a scholarly study about participation in Aquinas; nonetheless it is Aquinas with his broad and consistent participatory vision in the whole of theology who provides the author’s main point of reference. The book is divided into four parts. The first part—“Participation and Causation”—treats of creation, the notion that everything comes from and depends upon God. Creation is approached from the angle of the Aristotelian four causes: God is the efficient cause, the creative agent by which everything is made; he is the (extrinsic) formal cause in the sense that creatures are made “after God’s likeness” and have a characteristic form corresponding with the idea in God; he is the final cause in the sense that creatures are made for the sake of God and have their fulfilment in God; and God is not the matter out of which things are made, but rather creatures are made out of nothing (ex nihilo). In this way, the author describes a threefold pattern of God’s creative causality, which is then linked explicitly with the Trinitarian life in God which is the exemplary model of participatory relatedness and communion. Part 2 is devoted to language—“The Language of Participation and Language as Participation.” It begins...