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Such a liberal definition allows agency to be attributed even to fixed, inert objects
such as coins, clarinets, and cups (d'Inverno and Luck
2004
)—in fact, many objects
which are more inert than the class that we are interested in.
We will restrict our discussion of agency to those entities which demonstrate
behaviour that can be classified as generative; that is, with the productive capacity to
autonomously produce musical output. By partnering with an interactive, generative
system, we enter into a form of distributed agency, incorporating multiple distinct
productive drives. Yet having agency alone does not ensure aesthetic interest; for
that, we need creativity. In the human-computer partnerships we are concerned with
in this chapter, creativity inheres within the distributed system as a whole.
7.2 Computational Aides for Algorithmic Inspiration
There is an extensive ancestry around strategies to provoke and direct creative ac-
tion. A commonplace example is the varied pursuit of
inspiration
. A dressmaker,
bereft of creative direction, might browse the shelves of the haberdashery for ideas
in the form of patterns, fabrics and accessories. A web designer may surf through
collections of layouts or graphic images; indeed, at the time of writing, popular so-
cial bookmarking site Delicious
2
lists over 4,500,000 web pages tagged with the
keyword “inspiration”. Such creative foraging is so ubiquitous across the creative
industries that countless published collections are available—within design, fash-
ion, architecture and advertising—whose sole purpose is the provision of creative
nourishment.
In making the switch to outside sources of inspiration such as these, we are aug-
menting our internal cognitive search and delegating our ideational activity to the
external world. This can be considered as another case of the extended mind (Clark
and Chalmers
1998
)—or, rather, the extended imagination.
Many approaches, of course, demonstrate a more explicit intentionality than sim-
ply disengaged browsing. Csikszentmihalyi (
1992
), for example, recounts an ethno-
graphical report of the Shushwap Native American practice of uprooting and re-
locating its village every 25-30 years. In doing so, they introduced novel, chaotic
challenges to their living practice, ensuring a continual enrichment of cultural cy-
cles.
More recently, the Surrealist writers sought to subvert the conscious mechanisms
of decision-making by encouraging “automatic” drawing: the accumulation of pen
strokes produced without rational control, whose result was claimed to express the
subconscious or paranormal.
The chance operations of the Black Mountain College and the indeterminate
works of the Fluxus group formally introduced aleatoric processes as a means of
creative inspiration and delegation. The forefather of both schools is composer John
