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7.3.5.3
Visual Art
The enactive nature of creativity in visual art is demonstrated well by the fi ndings
showing that expert artists often step away from their paintings to gain a new per-
spective (Yokochi and Okada
2005
). Here, enaction would claim that expert artists
have acquired percept-action pairings that constitute experiential knowledge:
Altering the fl ow of sensory information can reveal additional possibilities for
action. The percept-action coupling is moving the body (actions) and gaining differ-
ent viewpoints (percepts). There is no preset specifi c goal driving the artist's deci-
sion to step back, and there is not a “step-back-and-think script” the artist executes
at predefi ned times. Instead, there might be some open questions about how to inter-
act with different regions of the artwork and a vague intention to address those
concerns. Stepping back helps think about how interacting with those areas might
affect the overall vague intention. The “creative” behavior of stepping back is actu-
ally an emergent by-product of how cognition and creativity work. The fact that the
artist stepped back (her behavior) is therefore not as important as why she stepped
back, i.e., how she knew that stepping back was the right thing to do. An expert is
an expert precisely because she knows how to direct her attention and manipulate
the fl ow of sensory information through interactions with the environment to explore
and evaluate possibilities for further action.
The domain-independent examples above provide evidence that creativity does
not only come from executing planned steps and actions but emerges through
improvisational micro interactions between the human and the surrounding envi-
ronments, including other humans, tools, and, most importantly, the continuous
results generated during the percept-action feedback loop. We consider these inter-
action processes as an improvised interaction processes. Humans often experience
the results from unplanned micro interactions that match or mismatch their expecta-
tions, which will then become perceptual logic for future interactions. We argue that
this enactive feature of cognition is fundamental to understanding how to under-
stand human creativity and also build computer colleagues.
7.3.6
Enactive Model of Creativity
The argument here is that the traditional cognitive science theories used by AI are
inadequate to explain the entirety of human creativity (and cognition more broadly)
and should thus be supplemented, augmented, or potentially replaced entirely with
an enactive conceptualization of cognition. In the enactive view, cognition (includ-
ing creativity) is inherently composed of a continuous interaction with the environ-
ment and other agents in that environment to adapt and thrive (Stewart et al.
2010
);
it is improvisational and ever changing based on the demands and opportunities of
the moment. The enactive view encapsulates the embodied, situated, distributed
cognition perspectives that have recently gained popularity (Suchman
1986
;
Hutchins
1995
). From this view, cognition is not inherently goal-based planning
