Conceptual art

In a discussion about how you could place a value on a piece of art, I've been introduced to "conceptual art". This is when the artistic process is of far higher importance than the end-product itself; in fact the end-product becomes almost irrelevant - merely a side-effect of the process being executed.

Sol LeWitt defined Conceptual Art in "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", Artforum, June 1967, as:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

If assessing how creative a piece of conceptual art is, solely by evaluating the product, then there are two negative consequences:

1. The primary intentions of the artist are ignored (the artist is more focussed on how the art is made than what the result is).
2. The level of creativity presented will probably be underestimated, especially if the art results in producing something that might seem commonplace outside the context of that art installation.
   

For example Tracey Emin's unmade bed, no matter what your opinion of it as a piece of art, was intended to have greater significance than just to picture a dirty bed.

Another example is Duchamp's Fountain (1917): an exhibit of a urinal, entitled 'Fountain', by Marcel Duchamp. With this piece, Duchamp intended the focus to be on how it was interpreted as the choice for this artwork, rather than the physical object itself.

Duchamp submitted the Fountain to an art exhibition for the Society of Independent Artists, where every submission would be accepted and exhibited. Duchamp's submission sparked a debate with the judging panel (of which Duchamp was himself a member!) as to whether this was in fact a piece of art. Eventually the Fountain was included in the exhibition but hidden from sight and Duchamp resigned from the Society board.

Since then though, the Fountain has been judged the most influential modern art work of all time. Who was right, the 500 art experts who made this judgement or the panel who rejected the Fountain as not being a piece of art?

While I don't intend this post to express that the creative process is far more important than the creative product, for me this is interesting evidence as to why process is as important as product.

There is an interesting discussion on the philosophy of conceptual art at Schellekens, Elisabeth, "Conceptual Art", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

A ground truth for creativity (or lack of)

My officemate and I had quite an interesting discussion yesterday as to whether there is a 'right' or a 'wrong' answer to give, when you assess how creative something is.

Different people come up with different assessments, based on a whole range of factors such as their expertise in that domain, their knowledge of the process by which creative products are produced, personal opinion and bias according to their tastes, and the amount of time and effort which they give to the assessment.

Part of my work involves a computational system which produces so-called creative behaviour and then assesses how creative that behaviour is, as part of feedback into refining the creative process. (I shall discuss this work in more depth in a future post, when it is further developed.)

How do I test whether the system 'works', i.e. whether its behaviour could be deemed creative and its self-assessment of its own creativity is accurate? There is no ground-truth for creativity; in fact this lack of ground-truth is the central research problem I am addressing! To test its performance against other creativity measurements is to test one theory against another rather than testing the model against real life.

So lets test the model against real life - compare its judgements of creativity to judgements made by people. If there is a large crossover and agreement between machine and people, then the machine is making a good job of approximating human assessment of creativity: the only guide we have to follow at present.

Next problem: what if my system is proven to perform well against some 'right answer', coming up with a satisfactory evaluation of the creativity present in the system - does this mean my system is also 'right'? I would say no, it is not coming up with a universally correct assessment: because no such universally correct assessment exists. We can approximate what a number of people would collectively decide about a system or item's creativity, and aim to match the consensus of opinion. More often than not, however, someone will disagree...

Retiring the 'someone please fund my phd' label

Got two years funding for my phd :) from my department at Sussex. 

The news came totally out of the blue, just as I was preparing to start the round of funding applications again. Wonderful news!

Word frequencies: some fun

Having just written a paper on how the frequency of a word in a document can give us an idea of the semantics of that document, I thought it would be fun to run my paper through word cloud software, to summarise it by frequency... here is the result (courtesy of http://www.wordle.net)

Definitions of creativity: common words used

This word cloud is the result of an analysis of definitions of creativity. It highlights the words used most commonly by people when defining what creativity is, in short dictionary-style definitions.

I took 23 online definitions of creativity (retrieved via a Google search, either in the form of a dictionary entry or as a brief definition of creativity). These definitions were merged together in one text file and fed through the online analysis tool at www.wordle.net, resulting in the word cloud pictured.

Besides the obvious appearance of words such as 'creativity', words which appear prominently include new, originality, ability, imaginative, process, produce, ideas and so on. The results show which words we commonly use to describe what creativity is. This gives us a good idea of what factors to examine further when deciding whether something is creative or not.

This work was based on brief definitions of creativity of one or a few sentences long, maximum one paragraph.

Creativity and Cognition conference 2009, Berkeley, California

Here's my 1-page summary of my research, which I am presenting in California in October. The work I'm presenting is starting to develop again nicely, with some case studies which I'll probably blog about in the next few posts.

back on track...

Its been a strange month or so, trying to reassess where I am and whats happening with my phd.

In good news, my submission to the graduate symposium for the Creativity and Cognition Conference got accepted, along with some fairly substantial funding to go to California in October.

I'm rescaling what I am doing slightly, examining a particular domain as a test case for assessing creativity, then using this practical work to consider creativity more widely (although this consideration may not be practically realised in this PhD work).

One of my major problems with the assessment criteria suggested by Graeme Ritchie (2007, 2001) is that while it appears to be a methodology for assessing creativity, in practice it is too unspecified to produce meaningful results. As Ritchie is proposing a framework for anything creative, by definition he has to keep the framework generic and cannot define particular parts of the framework (such as: various measurements of the level of novelty in this program's output must be above the threshold of {theta} in order to satisfy certain criteria - so what is {theta}?)

My work suffered from the same criticism: by being very generalisable, it ended up saying almost nothing? It needed more surrounding context to ground it.

So now I'm concentrating on musical creativity again, specifically in jazz improvisation as its an area that interests me within music and there are a number of jazz generation systems of interest, which I am looking up:

• Philip Johnson Laird's work
• GenJam by Al Biles
• Paul Hodgson's various jazz generation systems (described in his 2006 DPhil thesis)
  
• Jeff Pressing
• etc: I'm sure I'm missing lots out...
  

At the same time, I'm going to continue thinking about what is important for something to be considered creative.

Rather than looking for an over-arching and complete classification system for creativity though, I am looking for the important themes that are incorporated in creativity. With a few different practical projects on how to find these themes, added to my own intuitions on what is important, I'll identify a small set, test that set to see how it matches to human assessments of creativity, then re-juggle the set as necessary.

Graeme Ritchie's assessment methodology will be a starting point for me, although I think that what I end up with will be quite different from his suggestions.

I have to bear in mind that what turns out to be important for judging jazz generation systems may well be less important for other domains of creativity (in fact this is almost certainly going to be the case). But I shall cross that bridge when I come to it, rather than worrying about it too much in advance.

References
G. Ritchie. Assessing creativity. In Proceedings of AISB Symposium on AI and Creativity in Arts and Science, 2001.
G. Ritchie. Some empirical criteria for attributing creativity to a computer program. Minds and Machines, 17:67–99, 2007.