[creativity 2.0]

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) muses on creativity:

[swarm theory and social media]

I'm in the final stages of editing a selection of articles to appear in an upcoming journal issue and one of the articles deals with swarm theory. Many readers here would recognise Howard Rhiengold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution or perhaps Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang who coined the term in 1989 (see the *trusty* resource wikipedia).

More recently there's the famous National Geographic article on swarm theory: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text/1 which does an excellent job (exciting and informational) of explaining the science behind swarms. Enter left stage, the ants:

"I used to think ants knew what they were doing. The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do?

Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. When it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don't have a clue. "If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you'll be impressed by how inept it is," says Deborah M. Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University.

How do we explain, then, the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? They must have learned something in 140 million years.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence."

And that, in a nutshell, is collective intelligence and why crowd sourcing can be beneficial (knowing the right questions to ask helps too) and why tools like twitter are great resources for getting tips (maybe even on finding the shortest path to food).

As the National Geographic writer, Peter Miller, says of the ant colony the same can be said for social media: "no one's in charge."

[credit crunch craft]

I've heard of re-purposing record album covers as wall art. I suppose you could also use the smaller cardboard covers that come with cassettes (if anyone still has these kicking around). But what do with the actual tapes that remain?

Well, Mary over at the Audiobooker Blog links to an interesting idea by iri5. iri5 has a set of "ghost in the machine" flickr photos which show some excellent examples of eco-craft. I feel some creativity coming on....

[literate cities]

Six key elements are analysed in this study to dechipher which city is the most literate (American cities only) in 2008. These include: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources and are then compared to the population rate (but only in cities greater than 250,000).

Somewhat oddly, the study does NOT include "reading test scores or how often people read, but what kinds of literary resources are available and used."

"Cities that ranked higher for having more bookstores also have a higher proportion of people buying books online, the analysis found, and cities with newspapers that have high per-capita circulation rates also have more people reading newspapers online. Likewise, cities that ranked higher for having well-used libraries also have more booksellers."

The author of the study, Dr. John Miller, makes a very interesting observation:

"While it is too early in this study to draw conclusions, it is nevertheless striking that newspaper readership rates in the US’s global economic competitors are significantly higher than in the US. Since literacy is generally regarded as a barometer of a nation’s social, cultural, and economic health, perhaps these findings are cause for national concern."

According to the USA Today report, "Preliminary results of a related study examining international literacy paint a less optimistic outlook for the USA. It notes that in per-capita paid newspaper circulation, the USA ranks only 31st in the world, far behind other countries, including Aruba, Liechtenstein and Japan."

[future of creative technologies conference]

14 days until The Future of Creative Technologies Conference - 20th of November at the IOCT, De Montfort University in Leicester.

The conference has an excellent line-up with three of the IOCT's visiting professors sharing their views in the afternoon (Dr Jim Hendler, Professor Howard Rheingold, Dr Lev Manovich) while the morning session lets delegates choose which of three workshops they'd like to participate in.

Places are almost fully booked .

If you'd like to come (it's free!) register online.

[job opportunity - creative industries research fellow]

Creative Industries Research Fellow

Policy & Research

Contract:
Three days a week (or equivalent), Six month initial contract with possibility to extend for further six months

Salary:
£40,000-£50,000 (pro-rata), plus benefits

Closing date:
5pm, 13 August 2008

Location:
London

Core Purpose of Role:
This role will involve researching and writing analytical pieces on the creative industries and helping Hasan Bakhshi, who leads NESTA's policy development and research on the creative industries, to manage NESTA's ambitious programme of research on the Arts & Innovation.

The position will suit an analyst who wants to combine a NESTA research fellowship with their academic research or freelance work on the creative industries, or someone who is seeking a secondment, as we can be flexible on the exact pattern of working hours in the week.

To apply:
To apply, please email or post your CV and covering letter to recruitment@nesta.org.uk, or Tanya Holland, NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London EC4A 1DE.

For further information and to review the Candidate Brief and Role Profile please visit our website at
http://www.nesta.org.uk/creative-industries-research-fellow/.

NB. Interviews will take place on Wednesday 20 August.

[colouring significance/mapping meanings]

Gerry McKiernan has an interesting idea (sounds a bit like what Alan Liu suggested vis-a-vis wikipedia authority when he gave a talk at the IOCT last July). This kind of chromatographic writing happens in some southern Nigerian groups like the "Benin and Edo people." (See Cornell's online library for more info.) McKiernan's suggestion has some serious implications for tracking the publication of scholarly materials. Is there a kind of googlereader out there that reads for colour?

"I Propose That All Give Serious Consideration To Writing-In-Color(s) , With Each Color Representing A Respective Level of Significance Within A Text.

The Visible Spectrum Would Be The Basis For The Relative Levels Of Significance Of Given Text WHERE

Text of Least Importance Would Be Highlighted In RED;
Text of Intermediate Importance Highlighted In GREEN;
Text of Greatest Importance Highlighted in VIOLET, and
Text of In-Between Importance Highlighted in Appropriate Colors: ORANGE, BLUE, INDIGO
Initially, TEXT would be COLORED at the PARAGRAPH LEVEL By The Author(s).

Adjoining OR Disjunct Sections of Text Could Have The SAME COLOR.

Upon Publication, The Reader Would Have The Ability To ReCOLOR The TEXT ToReflect His/Her View On The Relative Significant Of Text In His/Her Opinion And/Or Relative To A Particular Purpose.

I also envision a feature by which The Reader would be able to colorlight individual terms and/or phrases.

Readers would also have the ability to assess the value of The Overall TEXT by LABELING THE TEXT with One Color (Color Digg).

The Higher The Color, The More Significant The Text."

NB - what if a reader is colour blind?

[creative writing & new media MA]

To celebrate the first two years of the Online Masters in Creative Writing and New Media there is going to be a salon event organised by digital writer in residence at the IOCT: Chris Joseph.

Works to be presented by:

Claudia Cragg, ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ccragg/
Terry Gibson, tgib567.blog.co.uk
Joanna Howard, http://dissertation.joannahoward.net/

Toni Le Busque, http://www.lebusque.com/
Kirsty McGill, http://www.manvers-street.com/
Chris Meade, http://www.chrismeadeoverleaf.com/
Alison Norrington, http://www.alisonnorrington.com/
Keredy Stott, www.myspace.com/northamptonbackonthemap
Michael Taylor. http://www.thecafe.gg/
Mags Treanor, http://www.deadcoolfunerals.blogspot.com/
Christine Wilks, http://www.crissxross.net/

To go along with the event I'm writing a curatorial essay explaining the context and giving an overview of the work created by the students...so far.

As part of my thinking about what the students have been crafting, I invited them to respond to a few questions. There have been some rather interesting responses like these from Renee Turner:

Jess: what are some main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work to be read/navigated online to one which is contained within physical borders and print? - this is very much a question to you as a *creator*

Renee: The book is an object ‘par excellence’. It’s an amazing medium in which the virtual has always resided; analogue stories have the capacity to expose us to previously unknown worlds and scenarios. While the book may have set perimeters, it is far from an exhausted medium. Its surface is rich, layered and as vast as the imagination. Just think of the likes of Borges or Coleridge whose writings illustrate that hypertext existed well before a digital era. Their work transports us to uncharted territories, illuminates new forms of articulation and exposes us to nonlinear modes of thinking. They test the limits of writing and language.

That said I love writing in digital environments. Gone are the days of publish and perish, now we can publish, learn and revise. Wow, what a revolution to be able to think out loud through writing. We can now dare to make mistakes and then re-write. Bloggers do this all of the time.

I also love the materiality of digital writing. To me, code, computational machines and screens are very physical. Unlike a blank page that can be empty and intimidating, there is something fascinating about sculpting narrative out of a set of technical restraints or through a set of filters. Whether it is php, CSS, javascript or html, writing is mediated, if not translated, and that means authors are forced to be writers and makers. I find the combination seductive. It is where writing meets dramaturgy.

[...]

Jess: How would you define a literate reader (someone who can easily navigate your NM creations)?

Renee: That is a very tough question to answer. Readers come with different levels of literacy. Some people are more sensually driven, moving their cursor from here to there for hotspots or links, while others look for legible text and clear-cut navigation. As a writer of or in digital environments, there is a balance to be struck between pushing the medium, testing interface conventions and being user/reader friendly.

To read more of my questions and Renee's insightful answers head over to her post.

[lord judd & creative technologies]

(image from Sue Thomas)


Yesterday a few of the researchers involved with the IOCT were invited to a meeting with Lord Judd. Our brief: to give him an overview of our research and our findings.


Sascha Westendorf and Keno Buss kicked things off with an overview of their DMU Creativity Assistant:

"a tool designed to help develop creative ideas in a transdisciplinary multimedia context, based upon the thesis that "creativity is an emergent property". The intention is to first understand the stages that creative people move through in their journeys of exploration, discovery, innovation, and composition. The well-established path from preparation to incubation to illumination and verification is a good starting point, but more elaborate models are needed to guide software design for individual and social creativity support, and to deal with the controversial question of how such creativity support tools can be evaluated."

Next came Heather Conboy, E-Learning Co-ordinator for Faculty of Humanties at DMU she's also researching her phd on the impact of online environments on creative writers (a bit about a previous talk here). Heather showed us some interesting statistics including this one: 95% of UK higher education institutions have VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments). I wondered what that meant for the other 5%? Are they ahead of the game and using non-institution based systems like open source platforms or do they have class blogs and teach in Second Life? Heather did explain that these stats are from 2006...I wonder what the deal is now?

Also along the lines of creative writers, Anietie Isong shared with us his research on African Writers. Anietie is specifically looking at:

• How the internet is influencing writing from Africa
• The writers' attitudes towards their writing
• Burgeoning styles employed in their writing

Lord Judd asked if all the African fiction was...well, fiction...Anietie says that though it is mainly fictional there are deep political and relgious themes.

I was really interested in Anietie's research and wonder how concepts like "postcolonial" literature will appear (or not?) in African new media writing? What is the play between the marginalised and the privledged - especially when thinking about access to computers, internet, IT learning? I also wonder how the role of "native" might change as Anietie explained that some African writers are writing from the West (UK and USA were some examples).

See some of Anietie's own poetry here and a short story here.


I concluded the presentation segment with an overview of my ph.d research:

After my presentation we opened up into a more general discussion. Lord Judd (I just cannot say "Frank"!) raised some anxieties and concerns with which we agreed. I think this surprised him. In general I'd say that we all agreed that balance is the key to using new media. Though how MPs are to negotiate all the communication they receive and then have to respond to...I don't know. When I suggested just checking e-mail/letters etc...in the morning I was told that is near impossible; something really important might require feedback and can't just be left until the next morning. Sue suggested we have filters like already junk messages go into spam folders...but maybe we need intelligent agents (like PAs!) to sift through messages first? I didn't realise that MPs received so much communication? That's when the discussion turned to literacies...the literacy of navigating all the information available but also the literacy on the side of the people who write to MPs...do they realise (are they literate?) that they need not write for every small thing and are they sure they are writing to the right person?


Quotes of the Day:
When I introduced myself to him as Jess, he responded with: "I'm Frank." (not "Lord Judd")
When told of my recent phd award he said: "So you're a *real* doctor" (!!!)
When beginning the discussion he exclaimed: "I am not a Luddite. I am NOT a Luddite."

********************************************

Thanks to Sue Thomas for organising the interesting tête - à - tête and thanks to Lord Judd for sharing his time.

NB If you'd like to keep up with Lord Judd's speaking arrangements, you can sign up to an e-mail alert here or subscribe to the rss feed here (who said MPs aren't digitally literate?!)

Sue has blogged about the day over at PART.

[Open Source Embroidery: Craft and Code at HTTP Gallery]

Ele Carpenter, a digital-textile artist who I interviewed for Furtherfield, is curating a super exhibition. It's a must-see:

Preview: Friday 16th May 6-9pm, 17th May – 15th June 2008

Open Fridays to Sundays 12-5pm

http://www.http.uk.net/

This exhibition explores the connections between the collaborative characteristics of needlework, craft and Open Source software. This project has brought together embroiderers, patch-workers, knitters, artists and computer programmers, to share their practice and make new work.

HTML Patchwork in
progress

The centre-piece of the exhibition at HTTP Gallery is the HTML Patchwork developed in response to the popularity of quilting in Sheffield, the result of a participatory project initiated by Ele Carpenter in partnership with Access Space. The patchwork is built on open principles of collective production and skill-share where each person contributes a part to the whole. The final work is a collectively stitched patchwork quilt of HTML web-safe colours with embroidered codes, and a wiki website, where the makers of each patch identify themselves and write about their sewing process. Each patch is
personalised by the sewer, often including embroidered web addresses.

telinit Ø: time for bed, Lisa Wallbank, 2007
Knitted Blog (detail),
Suzanne Hardy, 2006-

In an interview with Jess Laccetti, Ele Carpenter said about the project: "The same arguments about Open Source vs Free Software can be applied to embroidery. The needlework crafts also have to negotiate the principles of 'freedom' to create, modify and distribute, within the cultural and economic constraints of capitalism. The Open Source Embroidery project simply attempts to provide a social and practical way of discussing the issues and trying out the practice. Free Software, Open Source, amateur and professional embroiderers and programmers are welcome to contribute to the project."

Hexart GDlib Script Error, digital print on canvas, James Wallbank,
2007
Weaving network cable in progress, Paul Grimmer, 2007

The project was developed by Ele Carpenter when working as an artist in residence at Access Space in Sheffield and Isis Arts in Newcastle upon Tyne. Access Space is an open access media lab using recycled computers and open source software. Anyone can drop in and use the lab to develop their creative projects.

The exhibition at HTTP Gallery in Harringay, North London, includes works by 11 artists and makers alongside the collectively made HTML Patchwork quilt and wiki. Other works in the exhibition include Susanne Hardy’s Knit-a-Blog, a collective knitting project made by contributors from across the UK and USA, Iain Clarke’s PHP Embroidery, which explores the open source PHP programming language as a form of self-generating weaving, as well as artworks by Paul Grimmer, Tricia Grindrod, Jake Harries & Keith o’Faoláin, John Keenan, Trevor Pitt, Clare Ruddock, James Wallbank, and Lisa Wallbank.

The HTML Patchwork has been created by people at: Access Space, Art through Textiles, The Patchwork Garden, The Fat Quarters, Stocksbridge Knit n Chat, Totley Quilters, Isis Arts, and the Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada.

Events at HTTP

Preview
Your chance to meet Ele Carpenter, the curator as well of some of the other exhibiting artists, to enjoy a few drinks and conversations about the exhibition.

Open Knitting and Embroidery
evenings
Dates and times TBC

Bring your knits, your embroidery and your friends for tea, biscuits and conversation amongst the artworks.

These events are open to the public and entrance is free, however advanced booking is necessary.

Contact:
Lauren Wright,
HTTP Gallery
lauren@furtherfield.org

HTTP
Gallery
http://www.http.uk.net/
Unit A2,
Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1LD
+44(0)79 8129
2734
Click here for map
and location details

Further info:
www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk
www.eleweekend.blogspot.com
www.access-space.org

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.

[exploring a million penguins - order and chaos in a wiki novel]

@ the IOCT on 23 April 2008

presenter: Bruce Mason

In February 2007, DMU and Penguin Publishing collaborated to host the world’s first wiki novel - “A Million Penguins” - using the same software that runs Wikipedia. Over a five week period nearly 1,500 people signed up to edit the novel, over 11,000 edits were made and it was viewed over 500,000 times leading the CEO over Penguin Publishing to muse that it was maybe the “most written novel in history.”

In this seminar, Bruce Mason will outline the results of a research project held at the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) which investigated the social behaviour that unfolded during the writing of “A Million Penguins.” What kinds of collaboration, conflict and compromise occurred and what did it tell us about future online writing possibilities? Did a sense of community arise or did we see nothing but chaos and vandalism?

The seminar will not require any particular knowledge of wikis or online writing.

About the presenter
Bruce Mason is an IOCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialising in social research and web2.0 activities. He previously worked at DMU with Professor Sue Thomas on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Project (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/) that investigated the potential for folksonomy in academic research.

About A Million Penguins
A Million Penguins is a collaborative online novel, a wiki which was open to anyone in the world to write and edit. The project ran from 1st Feb to 7th March 2007, was organised by Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com) of De Montfort University and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin, with Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort and an editorial team of students enrolled on De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

[candy + code @ the ICA]

Shamefully I arrived home quite late lastnight and then had to pack for today's trip up to York (Inanimate Alice is up for a Learning on Screen Award and the Faculty of Humanities is paying for me to go up there AND enjoy the 2-day conference!)...so I didn't really have *time* to blog. Is that a better excuse than the dog ate my blog post?

I'll catch up and post all the notes I made on the three incredible artists: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Dr Barbara Rauch and Nicola Naismith? They were all working on different things yet there were loads of crossovers. I was able to ask a few questions too during the final panel session but amazingly, we ended up going over and we had to be kicked out into the ICA bar (darn!). :)

I also want to *shout out* to Helen Sloan director of SCAN who is interested in social media and mapping business networks!

Thanks to Dr. Jane Harris for organising the event and to Lucy for all her help e-mailing updates and organising ppts etc...

Hopfully the National Science Learning Centre will have wireless...

[transliteracy workshop today]

Today is the day!

Following on from last year's transliteracy unconference we're holding a transliteracy workshop. Last year the vote was to have a day where we could put into practise our ideas of transliteracy in order to *make* transliterate objects.

We have piles of string, coloured papers, digital cameras, computers, scanners, robot lego, old answering machines, playstation and more.

As a reminder, the definition of transliteracy (so far) that we're using is:

"The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks."

The aim of making transliterate objects will help us understand *why* something is transliterate as right now we seem to have an innate idea of what transliteracy is but how to we begin to describe it in words, images, sounds etc...?

more on the PART blog.

[copyright and creativity]

The study, "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video" by the Center for Social Media lists nine current ways of *using* information..."re-appropriation practises." It reminded me that copyright and fair use guidelines need to be taught alongside any of the digital literature, transliteracy or new media writing/reading that I expose my students to. As Danah Boyd says: "It's a really really really screwy system that pits little people against big corporations, stifling innovation and creativity. Yet, in order to change it, people have to understand what is taking place, what is at stake, and how to rethink the situation. This is the goal of this study."

TYPES OF USES OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS IN ONLINE VIDEOS
• Parody and satire
• Negative or critical commentary
• Positive commentary
• Quoting to trigger discussion
• Illustration or example
• Incidental use
• Personal reportage or diaries
• Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials
• Pastiche or collage

(page 6)

Interestingly, this isn't about *copying* existing information, but commenting on it:

"This participatory spirit explains the transformativeness that marks so much quoted copyrighted material. Most online video makers incorporating copyrighted works (as opposed to those simply copying them) do not seek to replicate the services provided to them by mainstream media providers. They are sampling in order to comment, critique, illustrate, express. They are salvaging, rescuing, celebrating, heralding, bonding. They are expressing vital connections both to popular cultural expressions and also to others who share their passions and the meanings that they have created around those expressions."

(page 7)

[creativity conversations at the ioct: bruce mason and peter shillingsburg]

"The creative process: views from practice and analysis."

Bruce Mason (New media advocate)
Peter Shillingsburg (Textual scholar)

Peter

"New knowledge is the result of a rational extension of the boundaries of established knowledge through acts of innovative combination, controlled violation of conventions, and recognition of the potentitals of the unexpected, including accidents."

(from Stephen Brown paraphrasing Margaret Boden)



For an innovation to be distinguished from chaos it must not exceed our tolerance for the unexplained thus will be a failed attempt. So there comes the notion that there is a discipline that underlies creativity - a controlled violation (recognising the potential of the accidental).


Art that can be labelled as significant or great usually has two characteristics:
command of langauge
does something not done before

"The old dog barked backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."

(Robert Frost)

The first sentence has 22 stop sounds (so takes much longer to read than the second sentence). The second line only has 4 hard stop sounds and none is juxtaposed to the other. It has 8 liquids which run on smoothly without interruptions. In this case creativity is the skillful placement.

But what of *serendipity*?

Housman

"Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon ... I would go for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss ... the pit of the stomach."

Tree Bellicose Graph

"Jaun supine team tree bellicose livid tug adder inner past her honor heel slide. Day word deep tree Bellicose Graph. Dare wuzzy Girt Bag Bellicose Graph, dare wuzzy Muddles Eyes Bellicose Graph, enter wuzzy Ladle Beady Bellicose Graph. Bees hide dare past her render Russian reaver. Juan moaning, dado seeded acrostic past her tweet digress honor udder sight. Bat furs day head topaz oeqvre breech Honda witch dare livid day bag hoary bull trowel."

source

Bruce




Can a group be creative? (think of a million penguins)

In blogosphere there seems to be a consensus that a million penguins was a failure. BUT when wikis fail it is because no one writes anything or it is riddled with spam.

Stats in 5 weeks of a million penguins

• 1500 contributors
• over 11,000 edits
• 75,000 visitors to the site
• 280,000+ page views
  

So, maybe it failed because crowds cannot write well.

Or, maybe it was because there were no rules, everything was left up to the users. There was nothing saying what writers couldn't do.

But we have plenty of evidence of crowds writing. Aarne-Thompson 333

type - AT 0333 the wolf or other monster devous human beings until all of them are rescued alive from his belly
1)wolf's feast
2) rescue

motifs - 1) Wolf poses as "grandmother" and kills child, What makes your ears so big? Animal swallows man (not fatally)
2)Victims rescued from swallower's belly.

So this might be related to a digital tradition:

Wiki transmission
what about edit histories as transmission?
what kinds of wiki edits succeed and what fail?

Traces of Digital Authors


Oral culture leaves relatively few snapshots of texts
Digital culture leaves billions
Gibson's blog shows his latest novel Spook country coming together

but a reader of Gibson's new novel noticed that it sounded familiar...it was from Gibson's blog:

"So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times."

Bruce's note that you need to work within constraints so tried to create a tardis in second life but SL doesn't allow something to be different (spatially) on the inside and outside. So, a workaround was allowing one to teleport to somewhere else (bigger) from within the tardis.

Peter: Henry James and embedded clauses and deferred, Falkner and long sentences, relative duration of time to live life and then talk about it (Shandy!). So telling good stories, creation, is verbal so you need a good command of language. We build our worlds and transport ourselves with words (Coleridge).

[creativity conversation]

Following my presentation on "Reader 2.0" for the Creative Writing and New Media Masters run by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger, the creativity Conversation held it's 8th session.


Speakers: Andrew Hugill (Composer, writer, and Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies)
Mohammad Ibrahim (Technology fusion, artificial life, and design methodologies)

Some notes (live-blogged)

"Why do we abandon or switch ideas, methods and views whilst being creative?"

Mohammad Ibrahim:




Strategies for Switching (intuitive or naturalistic)
Naturalistic/Action based
Intuitive
Process Oriented
Evolving Design Space


Current Research:
There is some work on switching between strategies
Lots of work and debate on identifying and switching between stages/phases
Very relevant for rational approach
Personal view - waste of time for the intuitive approach


Conclusion:
Apart from "initial scan brief" no real pattern
Hence naturalistic approach in the dominant one
No clear clusters of activities into phases/stages - the second scale
Clustered activities into phases - but no real agreement on order of activities in each phase (here are some activities, can you give us the order in which you do these activities? - they couldn't)
SO: Different intuitive approaches to evaluating a design space (trying to understand what the project is about rather than figuring out what they have to do)

Question on strategy: need to teach both strategies to students but the "experts" will develop their own strategies

Can we make a safe place where students can be creative, where engineering students can work with art and design students?




Andrew Hugill



Sees creativity as a process
Can you not change your mind in the process of creation? Why do we change our minds or rather, why don't we.
Rimbaud wrote the best poetry and then radically changed his views and became a banker - interesting exacmple of someone rejecting creativity

Three key words:
clinamen - from Epicurus, every so often an atom makes a slight swerve in its course and collides with another atom thus creating matter so clinamen is that swerve or bias
syzygy - from astronomy, when suddenly you get three bodies (unexpectedly) in alignment - things fall into place (eclipse)
anomaly - when something appears that doesn't fit

"The Act of Creation", A ha, Ah, and the Ha-ha (Arthur Koestler - adjusted, thanks Andy)

Andrew's own experiment into creativity with a musical composition, created a process and followed it through rigorously (though this process is not audible in the final musical product). However, when copying some music he made an error but this ended up adding to the creative aspect of this piece.