“A very common reaction to computer art is to withhold acceptance in principle, to refuse to regard it as authoritative under any circumstances because, inevitably, it lacks authenticity.”
In this article, Margaret A. Boden asks whether the notion of authenticity can be applied to any/all types of computer art. Among other things, she describes some of the problems faced by David Cope when people refused to accept his Emmy-program’s compositions as “music”.
The Color of Quarks is an artistic project exploring the representational problems of modern physics by scrutinizing its employment of metaphors. Currently consisting of an audible essay and the following thesis, the work examines the metaphorical act as it manifests itself in the natural sciences, not solely as semantic fillers, but as creative constructs transcending the faculty of language. The essay also proposes a conception that what is typically referred to as binary oppositions; the hard and the soft sciences, often romanticized as The Brain and The Heart, do have more in common than what the involved parts may want to acknowledge.
Cognitive psychologist Mark A. Runco is a leading creativity researcher whose empirical work focuses on idea generation and divergent thinking. Nearly 30 years ago, he founded the Creativity Research Journal, which he still edits, and in 2014, he founded the new journal Business Creativity and the Creative Economy. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of Creativity in 1999 and 2011. In this exclusive interview he discusses creativity and metaphorical thinking.
“Human creativity is something of a mystery, not to say a paradox. One new idea may be creative, while another is merely new. What’s the difference? And how is creativity possible? Creative ideas are unpredictable. Sometimes, they even seem to be impossible — and yet they happen. How can that be explained? Could a scientific psychology help us to understand how creativity is possible?”
When ‘The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms’ was first published, Margaret A. Boden’s bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. In this book she uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts.
This article formed the introduction to the book and is republished for the Interalia Magazine with the kind permission of Margaret A. Boden.
In his important book, ‘Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art’ (published in 2014), Arthur I Miller discusses the ‘fusion’ of art and science, telling the story of how artists, scientists and technologists are working together to create a new art movement, which he calls ‘artsci’. In this exclusive interview he discusses ideas that will be the subject of his forthcoming book, exploring creativity and metaphor in art and science – “I have always believed that creativity can be unravelled…..”
In 1976, Julian Jaynes proposed that the language of poetry and prophecy originated in the right, “god-side” of the brain. Current neuroscientific evidence confirms the role of the right hemisphere in poetry, a sensed presence, and paranormal claims as well as in mental imbalance. Left-hemispheric dominance for language is the norm. An atypically enhanced right hemisphere, whether attained through genetic predisposition, left-hemispheric damage, epilepsy, childhood or later traumas, can create hypersensitivities along with special skills. Dissociative Others may arise unbidden or be coaxed out through occult practices. Based on nearly twenty years of scientific and literary research, this book enters the atypical minds of poetic geniuses Blake, Keats, Hugo, Rilke, Yeats, Merrill, Plath and Hughes by way of the visible signs in their lives, beliefs, and shared practices.
Einstein famously objected that ‘God does not play dice’. In this stimulating book, ‘Time, Light and the Dice of Creation’, Philip Franses invites us to travel through a journey, and a life, full of surprise and ambiguity, from paradoxes in physics to the meaning of time and the mythology of creation. Exploring current models in science, he asks: does light travel in time? Or is it time that travels in light? How can emptiness hold potential? Can chance create order? What does our own experience mean in all this? In this exclusive interview, he discusses his book, his life and the journey to meaning.
David Rosenthal is a philosopher at Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, particularly about consciousness, mental qualities, and the self. Rosenthal’s work extends into the related area of cognitive science and he is Coordinator of the Graduate Center’s Interdisciplinary Concentration in Cognitive Science.
The Science of Consciousness (TSC) conferences (formerly Toward a Science of Consciousness ) are the pre-eminent world gatherings on all approaches to the profound and fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe.
Tantra Song is a singular and revelatory collection of rare Tantric paintings made anonymously by adepts in Rajasthan and used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The paintings’ magnetic, vibratory beauty—as well as their deep affinity with 20th century abstract art—inspires acute attention and boundless contemplation.