In honor of the last debate, a slideshow of a mural that recently went up a few blocks from my apartment:

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.

A week from today a project I’ve been working on for a while will be installed at a gallery in San Francisco. Please come by!

Please come celebrate the voice from the bottom of the lung to the tip of the tounge with Organum Playtest. The game, based on the Organum movie, is ready to listen and respond to your voice at New Langton Arts Gallery. The installation also features glass etchings with game stills and the original Organum story.

Please note that the exhibit opens on Tuesday, April 19 and remains open every day from 12 noon to 6 pm up to and including Saturday, April 23. Artists talks, an opening reception, and a vocal concert featuring Kid Beyond (Beatbox), Aurora Josephson (Opera), and Seth Augustus (Tuvan Throat Singing) all are scheduled for Saturday, April 23 from noon to about 9:30 PM. After this show, the installation will move to an exhibit in Vancouver in June.

For more information, take a look at the program notes or read about the event at the New Langton Arts website.

Boing Boing has a good round-up of tentacle porn-related links today. I studied ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) as an undergraduate, and we saw a lot of tentacle porn. I wrote a paper tracing the use of erotic violence in Japanese art from Yoshitoshi to Merzbow. I like that certain outlandish themes in Japanese art and entertainment have continued for hundreds of years from woodblock prints to computer-generated anime. Of course, no roundup of tentacle porn is complete without including a piece in my own backyard, at the Albany Bulb:

This week UC Berkeley is recognizing the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a series of lectures and re-enactments. You can check out the goings-on in Sproul Plaza yourself at demonstrate.

Ken Goldberg’s viewer-controlled robotic camera has attracted a lot of controversy on campus lately, which of course was exactly the point. Most people assume that the name of the project was selected to evoke the memory of the demonstrations that took place here 40 years ago. Personally, I believe that the term is used more in the spirit of a software demonstration: to show the power and promise of a particular technology. In this case, the audience is not a conference table full of VCs or a potential customers but the citizens of Berkeley, who are mostly asleep to the fact that they are constantly surveilled.

Anyway, check out the cam and remember the moment when power stopped trying to limit speech overtly and began studying how to limit it covertly…