Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It may well be the case that the project should be taken up again, now under more
favourable conditions, and different awareness for generative design .
3.5 The Fourth and Last Narration: On Creativity
This chapter finds its origins in a Dagstuhl Seminar in the summer of 2009. Schloss
Dagstuhl is a beautiful location hidden in the Southwest of Germany, in the province
of Saarland. Saarland is one of the European areas where over centuries people from
different nations have mixed. After World War II, Saarland belonged to France for
some time until a public vote was taken (in 1955) about where people preferred
to live, in West Germany or France. Was their majority decision in favour of the
German side an act of collective creativity?
Mathematicians in Germany and beyond have had a wonderful institution ever
since 1944, the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach . It is located at
Oberwolfach in the Black Forest. Mathematicians known internationally for their
interest in a specialised field, meet there to pursue their work. They come in inter-
national groups, with an open agenda leaving lots of time for spontaneous arrange-
ments of discussion, group work, and presentations.
The German Gesellschaft für Informatik , after having established itself as a pow-
erful, active, and growing scientific association in the field of computing, became
envious of the mathematicians and decided that they also wanted to have such a
well-kept, challenging and inviting site for scientific meetings of high quality. Soon
enough, they succeeded. Was this creativity or organisation?
So Dagstuhl became a place for scientists and others, from computer science and
neighbouring disciplines, to gather in a beautiful environment and work on issues
of a specialised nature. They are supposed to come up with findings that should
advance theory and practice of information technology in the broadest sense.
A week at a Dagstuhl seminar is a great chance to engage in something that we
usually find no opportunity to do. The topic at this particular occasion was compu-
tational creativity—a topic of growing, if only vague interest these days.
Inspired by some of the debates at the seminar, I have tried in this chapter, to
recall a few aspects from the early history of algorithmic art as a case from the
fringes of computing that we would usually consider a case for creativity. We usually
assume that for art to emerge, creativity must happen. So if we see any reason to do
research into the relation between creativity and computers, a study of computer art
seems to be a promising case.
People are, of course, curious to learn about human creativity in general. A spe-
cial interest in the impact of computing on creativity must have its roots in the huge
machine. As already indicated, I see the computer as a semiotic machine. The sub-
ject matter of computational processes must always already belong to the field of
semiotics. The subject matter computers work on is of a relational character more
than it is “thing-like”.
This important characteristic of all computing processes exactly establishes a
parallel between computable processes and aesthetic processes. But to the extent
Search WWH ::




Custom Search