Skip to main content

Creative Agency: A Clearer Goal for Artificial Life in the Arts

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5778))

Abstract

One of the goals of artificial life in the arts is to develop systems that exhibit creativity. We argue that creativity per se is a confusing goal for artificial life systems because of the complexity of the relationship between the system, its designers and users, and the creative domain. We analyse this confusion in terms of factors affecting individual human motivation in the arts, and the methods used to measure the success of artificial creative systems. We argue that an attempt to understand creative agency as a common thread in nature, human culture, human individuals and computational systems is a necessary step towards a better understanding of computational creativity. We define creative agency with respect to existing theories of creativity and consider human creative agency in terms of human social behaviour. We then propose how creative agency can be used to analyse the creativity of computational systems in artistic domains.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Cariani, P.: Emergence and Artificial Life. In: Artificial Life II, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. 10, pp. 775–797. Addison-Wesley, Redwood City (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Saari, D.G., Saari, A.L.: Toward a mathematical modelling of creativity. In: Andersson, A.E., Sahlin, N.-E. (eds.) The Complexity of Creativity, pp. 79–103. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands (1997)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Boden, M.: The Creative Mind. George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd. (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Blackmore, S.J.: The Meme Machine. OUP, New York (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Clark, A.: Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J.: The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. OUP, New York (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Csikszentmihalyi, M.: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Collins, New York (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Gray, J.: Straw dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals, vol. 246. Granta Books, London (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Wiggins, G.A.: Towards a more precise characterisation of creativity in AI. In: Weber, R., von Wangenheim, C.G. (eds.) Case-Based Reasoning: Papers from the Workshop Programme at ICCBR 2001, pp. 113–120. Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Centre for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Washington, DC (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Thornton, C.: How thinking inside the box can become thinking outside the box. In: Cardoso, A., Wiggins, G.A. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, pp. 113–119. University of London, Goldsmiths (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kuhn, T.S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1996)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  12. McCorduck, P.: AARON’s Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen. W. H. Freeman and Co., New York (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Takagi, H.: Interactive evolutionary computation: Fusion of the capabilities of ec optimization and human evaluation. Proceedings of the IEEE 89, 1275–1296 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Dahlstedt, P.: A mutasynth in parameter space: interactive composition through evolution. Organised Sound 6(2), 121–124 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Bird, J., Stokes, D.: Evolving minimally creative robots. In: Colton, S., Pease, A. (eds.) Proceedings of The Third Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity (ECAI 2006), pp. 1–5 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Romero, J., Machado, P., Santos, A.: On the socialization of evolutionary art. In: Giacobini, M., Brabazon, A., Cagnoni, S., Caro, G.A.D., Ekárt, A., Esparcia-Alcázar, A., Farooq, M., Fink, A., Machado, P., McCormack, J., O’Neill, M., Neri, F., Preuss, M., Rothlauf, F., Tarantino, E., Yang, S. (eds.) EvoWorkshops 2009. LNCS, vol. 5484, pp. 557–566. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Saunders, R., Gero, J.S.: Artificial creativity: Emergent notions of creativity in artificial societies of curious agents. In: Proceedings of Second Iteration (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Miranda, E.R., Kirby, S., Todd, P.M.: On computational models of the evolution of music: From the origins of musical taste to the emergence of grammars. Contemporary Music Review 22(3), 91–111 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Werner, G., Todd, P.M.: Too many love songs: sexual selection and the evolution of communication. In: Husbands, P., Harvey, I. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, pp. 434–443. MIT Press/Bradford Books, Cambridge, MA (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  20. di Scipio, A.: Sound is the interface: from interactive to ecosystemic signal processing. Organised Sound 8(3), 269–277 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. McCormack, J.: Eden: An evolutionary sonic ecosystem. In: Kelemen, J., Sosík, P. (eds.) ECAL 2001. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2159, pp. 133–142. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bown, O., McCormack, J. (2011). Creative Agency: A Clearer Goal for Artificial Life in the Arts. In: Kampis, G., Karsai, I., Szathmáry, E. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. Darwin Meets von Neumann. ECAL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5778. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_32

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_32

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21313-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21314-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics