Post-creativity – beyond the human or much-too-human?

TY - CONF

T1 - Post-creativity – beyond the human or much-too-human?

AU - Stephensen, Jan Løhmann

PY - 2020/10/7

Y1 - 2020/10/7

N2 - n recent years, concrete attempts to explore “the potential for computers to be autonomous creators in their own right”, as it is stated in the call for papers for this year’s International Conference of Computational Creativity, has accelerated. Theories of posthumanism and similar post- anthropocentric schools (e.g. ANT, New Materialism) all seem well equipped to point out how the underlying assumption of these particular endeavours, regardless of how they are being labelled (‘computational’, ‘artificial’ or ‘algorithmic creativity, ‘creative AI’, etc.), seems to be somewhat faulty; namely: the idea of the autonomous Creator as that which is to be recreated or emulated. Applying German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz’ (Foucault-inspired) notion of ‘the creativity dispositif’ from his book The Invention of Creativity (2017), this paper will discuss whether these attempts merely represent a recent dissolution of the boundaries between the non-human (algorithms) and what often is being thought of as a quintessentially human practice, namely: creativity; or if they should rather take into account how creativity itself has been historically invented and reinvented through intimate entanglements with new technologies and cultural practices, and thus, has never been a purely human phenomenon at all.

AB - n recent years, concrete attempts to explore “the potential for computers to be autonomous creators in their own right”, as it is stated in the call for papers for this year’s International Conference of Computational Creativity, has accelerated. Theories of posthumanism and similar post- anthropocentric schools (e.g. ANT, New Materialism) all seem well equipped to point out how the underlying assumption of these particular endeavours, regardless of how they are being labelled (‘computational’, ‘artificial’ or ‘algorithmic creativity, ‘creative AI’, etc.), seems to be somewhat faulty; namely: the idea of the autonomous Creator as that which is to be recreated or emulated. Applying German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz’ (Foucault-inspired) notion of ‘the creativity dispositif’ from his book The Invention of Creativity (2017), this paper will discuss whether these attempts merely represent a recent dissolution of the boundaries between the non-human (algorithms) and what often is being thought of as a quintessentially human practice, namely: creativity; or if they should rather take into account how creativity itself has been historically invented and reinvented through intimate entanglements with new technologies and cultural practices, and thus, has never been a purely human phenomenon at all.

M3 - Paper

T2 - Posthumanism 20/20

Y2 - 7 October 2020 through 8 October 2020

ER -