We’re extending the deadline for our workshop at the Creativity & Cognition conference to 4/20. If you’re a creator who enjoys analyzing your own creative practice, a designer seeking to parameterize the design space for creative tools, or a researcher interested in the interplay of artistic process and scientific methodology, please submit! We have some funds available for struggling students, too.

Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination

UPDATE: Funding support (for conference fees & travel) is available for all accepted position statements.

Extended Deadline: CFP due April 20th, 2007.

Artists, philosophers, and scientists have been developing conceptual models of creativity for centuries. Yet developers of media art and technology are often accused of interfering with ‘the creative process’ when they rely on such formalisms to guide their designs. This workshop will look at creativity as a collection of conceptual models for the construction and dissemination of media arts, music, performance, and tools. We are interested in conceptualizations that explicitly or implicitly inform the system design and may be realized in part or whole in a system. These conceptualizations may have originated with philosophers (e.g. Hegel and Dewey), artists (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp), or scientists looking at cognitive, social, and computational aspects of creativity.

Furthermore, with new media, the distinctions between creator-centric and experiencer-centric creativity are blurring. Practically, this blurring results in an endlessly evolving stream of artifacts that are “finished” when their participatory roles are fulfilled. This raises questions about where the creative act begins and ends, and has implications for the design of tools to support creative work, as well as for the creative work itself, from art installations where the participants can shape the work’s meaning and purpose to new educational tools and environments that seek to introduce learners to creative collaboration. This conflation of the role of creator and experiencer forces us to reconsider models that cleanly separate the two and to seek out new models in which the “user” takes on a creative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.

This workshop presents the design of several contemporary creative models for new media in theory and in practice. The primary goal is to foster multidisciplinary communication and collaboration by discussing implementable models of creative acts. The workshop will provide an opportunity to present and discuss:

• New models and novel combinations of existing models
• Critiques of existing models
• Examples (successful or unsuccessful) of applications of creative models
• Applications and/or installations which embed or embody specific models for creativity
• Qualitative studies of creative processes

The focus will be on bridging creative theory and creative practice with practical applications for creative arts and technology, from installations to the tools that support them. Along the way, we hope to develop new models for understanding creative processes in which participants and creators are one and the same.