Theoretically there is no reason why creativity cannot be automated. The difference between a computer and a human in this regard is one of complexity. To automate creativity a computer programme or distributed programmes would have to be written which account for billions of years of evolution and development of human organisms in social and cultural settings. This is the determinant source of creativity, which developed rather late in this evolutionary process.

Current computers are simple and have only been developing for a few decades. To programme the billions of years of knowledge and cultural acquisition into advancing computers is a massive project which may itself take billions of years. It may be possible to make shortcuts by incorporating evolved materials such as living cell systems.

Generations of computers up till now have capacities to count quickly, sort, reorganise and store information. As programme libraries grow, functionality is reused and programming languages develop their own cultures, usually oriented to business processes and administration.

For computers to develop libraries of objects for creativity, they require extensive presuppositions to be stored in them and massive processing power to approach the innovative potential of human beings. The cultural criteria for creativity, as well as the logic of rule breaking  in a constructive way, need to be included in the logic of the software, just as they are in the logic of creative human beings and teams of them. “Great men” represent in fact team creativity in a social context. It is not individual.

Not all human beings are creative, in fact most express little of it. Some societies permit more creativity than others and facilitate innovative activity through their structures. Social organisation can hinder creativity or make it impossible, through repression or structural determinants. An innovative society consists of creative people supporting one another. Like current generations of computers, the average family in the suburbs spends its time processing routines. They just “combine what exists” with little or no creative spark and prevent the creativity of others.

It is not a question of  the uncaused origin of the new. It is, that the human at present has far more creative potential than the computer, if unused and undeveloped in most cases. Creativity will remain an exclusive domain of homo sapiens for some time. Bank tellers on the other hand are endangered.

A conference on “Creativity” is being held in Berlin from 26 to 30 September. The programme includes discussions which relate philosophy and creativity to the digital media:

• Can computers be creative? About the computer model of human intelligence.
• Creativity and art – using art as a paradigm of creativity

• creativity and brain research
• the virtual worlds of maths, natural science and other arts
• the role of creativity in the construction of meaning
• creativity in perception processes
• and the historical development of ideas related to the concept of creativity.

In an interview with Prof Günter Abel of the Technical University of Berlin (Telepolis – German), the limits of the computer model of human intelligence and creativity were outlined:

• creativity cannot be programmed
• computer research cannot explain creativity because it involves more than combining what already exists but generates completely new things.
• Creative processes cannot be captured in algorithms and formalisation

Abel sees the role of philosophy to develop a concept which goes beyond the intelligence model based on computers. It needs to explain how we build analogies, change systems of description, and bring together distant thoughts, as well as how we connect pictures and thoughts and create metaphors.

Abel defined the concept of creativity:

• In normal conversation we are creative in a banal way, but radical creativity breaks established rules and standards. He gives examples from music (Schönberg), art (Picasso, Braque), and physics (Einstein) of creativity casting aside the established norms which each of them had been schooled in, to reach a new stage of intellectual practice with new rules.
• The idea of creativity comes from the field of art and can be applied to other sciences. However, he does not believe in digital aesthetics. (With this term he means algorithms which can generate creativity. This is not the aesthetic application of programming where the creativity comes from the programmer rather than the program. He does not raise this issue).
• Creativity brings about changes and should serve life. Therefore it raises ethical questions about the changes it can effect.
• New rules become established as creativity makes breakthroughs. They establish a style. However creativity is “strange”. It follows no defined meta-rules.
• Although creativity cannot be programmed and follows no rules, is unpredictable and not derivative, the conditions for it can be facilitated and promoted. Through practising analogous thinking, thought experiments and problem solving, creativity can be trained. There is however a great deficit in this area.
• Creativity is individual and collective. The future of the individual and the knowledge-society depend on it.

A new exhibition  inspired by the cool forests and lakes of south-central Europe is now showing at:

dotAtelier exhibition space

“Art does not reproduce the visible. It renders visible.” (Paul Klee)

Visual art stands in a complex relationship to the visible. In part, the visual arts gain their inspiration from what can be seen. The artist selects from the visible world and presents a transformation of the selection. The product emerges from both its object and its means of expression. The means of expression can only create an abstraction from the object. It cannot contain the infinite density of information of material reality. The art work has to construct its own reality. It constructs a theoretical object in its own right. This construction takes its place in the reality we know. Transcendental reality cannot be reached by finite thought, as Kant established. Human beings live in approximations and constructions.

Art renders visible by constructing. It makes aspects of the world special, attracting consciousness to them. The way that this is done creates a quality of perceptions for artists and the observers of their works.

For the artist, the phenomena of the world can inspire ideal forms or chaotic shapes and colours which cannot be seen in nature. They are rendered visible.

Programming is also a construction of realities. It is not driven by objects to be reconstructed from a world outside, but is a creative process which constructs a virtual world in its own right. As an artistic medium, the virtual world of programming informs the non-virtual world and interacts with it. It renders aspects of it visible. Through dynamic virtual objects, the users of virtual space have wider horizons and denser information rendered for them.

Object-oriented methodology has no end to its objects. In business applications the objects map business processes. In programming as art, the objects can render visible whatever the artist constructs.

The communicative artworks of past cultures where people lived in intense contact with stone, taking the form of rock paintings and engravings, hint to a continuity between art and written language. Rock art functioned to retain oral stories and illustrate them, but without the inhabitants of the stone, the stories cannot be reliably interpreted. Great imagination is required.

Written language however emerged instead out of bureaucratic creativity. “It is one of the few examples of significant innovation issuing from bureaucratic organisation.” Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal “A Concise Economic History of the World“ OUP 2003.

In Mesopotamian civilisation, written language emerged as cuneiform to record the payment of tribute to the priests who organised agricultural production. Later writing spread to Egypt where the symbols took the form of artistic characters. These hieroglyphics aimed to convey their meaning more graphically than did the strokes of cuneiform, but artistic beauty gradually faded away, with writing reverting to more functional abstract symbols. Art continued to develop as a separate specialisation for communication of another type. It became a means to render things visible. “Art does not reproduce the visible. It renders visible.” (Paul Klee)

Does copyright of art works only apply to the ones in frames to be hung on walls or to carved objects standing in public and private places? To what extent is the ownership of art works which are multimedia happenings protected? 

The law is necessarily behind the pace of change in the cultural scene. In a discussion about law, art and technology on Lawrence Lessing, various aspects of this theme are raised.

Following on from the themes "Is programming art?" and attempts to create a fusion of digital media and artistic practice, the acceptance of a new branch of art demands definition of who actually owns the rights to use the works and to what extent copying them can be seen as a breach of the rights of a creative digital artist. How can existing copyright images and sounds be used? Does decontextualisation create a new entity? What is the meaning of 20% of a multimedia creative event?

When artists write code, their code may be protected by law, or may be open-sourced under Creative Commons. However, the value of the artistic creativity, the results of disciplined learning, may not be recognised if it does not take a conventional form. The synthesis of art and code hacking is not yet unambiguously defined in this regard.

When a photographer takes a photo of something, that thing may have some rights if it is a famous person, an artwork, or a public icon. Otherwise the rights belong to the photographer. If that photo is the reproduced as an animation, broken up into part images and combined with other media in a different spatial context, it is a different work. It is a creative product of a different artist. Or is it?

In an article on art and computer programming in Telepolis (German) “The artist as programmer”, the work of the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne is examined. An uneasy relationship between art and technology existed when Georg Trogemann began to teach IT to art students in the 1990s. His previous IT colleagues were sceptical. His students were equally suspicious of the new medium. The relationship has developed well since then.

Media art could not have come about without programming languages. Java is the preferred language and source code for Java applications is available.

The Academy's Georg Trogemann in his book “Code@art” (Springer 2005) conceives of programming as the basic technique of work and culture in our time. Art has the task of playfully pointing at the meaning of code and making it transparent.

One example of this relates to the requirement for software developers to control the predictability of software used in game development. Media-art can play with this by including unpredictability and chance in software development. Users can play in an open scenario.

The discussion “Is programming art?” (John Littler) raised the relationship of artists to their tools. In a practical way as well as theoretically, The Academy of Media Arts has united art and programming and defined what the relationship of the artist using the media of programming is. As well as adopting the techniques of the present as artistic materials as Bauhaus called for, they aim to give meaning to the medium of software through artistic software development.

The Academy works with web and interface design as well as 3D Animation and the development of computer games, especially for theatres, exhibitions and dance projects.