Creativity, Art Practice, and Knowledge

• Breaking with convention. Breaking away from conventional expectations, whether visual, structural, or conceptual, is a key characteristic of creative thought. Events that hinder such breaking with convention are avoided, whereas positive influences are embraced.
• Immersion. The complexity of the creative process is served well by total immersion in the activity. Distractions are to be avoided.
• Holistic view. The full scope of a design problem is only fully embraced by taking a holistic, or systems, view. The designer needs to be able to take an overview position at any point and, in particular, to find multiple viewpoints of the data or emerging design important.
• Parallel channels. Keeping a number of different approaches and viewpoints active at the same time is a necessary part of generating new ideas.

The creative person needs to work in parallel channels. The creative process also includes idea generation and the evaluation of those ideas. All three activities frequently involve acquiring new methods or skills and using expert knowledge. Much of the collaboration that we observe in the artist’s discussions is concerned with new skills and expert knowledge. Digital artists are concerned with finding and creating the environments in which they can work productively. The early digital artists had little choice but to acquire the necessary computer expertise themselves if they were to be able to achieve anything at all. Their experiences were rarely collaborative in the sense we mean today where people of different skills and backgrounds combine their efforts to make the technology accessible for art practice.

As an example of the role of digital technology in the development of an artist’s expert knowledge, it is interesting to consider two artists whose contributions to computers in art has been very significant over many years.

The use of complex tools, such as computers, forms a significant part of the context in which the conditions for creativity exist.

Cohen’s artistic vision places high value on expert knowledge about art and its role in computer-generated art. Mohr’s vision involves exploring generative processes that are not accessible to human perception but are, nevertheless, able to be specified using the method he has chosen. The final artworks remain the province of his artistic decisions. For each artist, the particular points in the creative process when it is desirable to interact with the computer language and the outcomes it generates are different.