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human adaptive creativity. But if artistic creativity in cultural systems and humans
involves the kinds of interaction between generative and adaptive processes dis-
cussed above, then a useful goal for arts-based computational creativity is to better
understand this interaction in models and in experiments with interaction in artistic
social behaviour, including studying the role of value as a medium of interaction be-
tween different systems. Through this understanding we can find ways to hybridise
generative and adaptive creative processes. Two useful avenues of research are as
follows.
14.4.1 Generative Creative Systems Can Be Externally Useful
Arthur (
2009
) describes technology in terms of phenomena: aspects of the world re-
vealed through experimental interaction. In this view, innovation occurs through the
exploitation of phenomena in the service of human goals. By revealing new phe-
nomena, generative creative processes make new innovations feasible. We exploit
the properties of materials, which can be produced through a generative process
of chemical interaction. Cosmological and geological processes have produced nu-
merous useful materials without purpose, and have not produced others. Likewise,
although the products of natural evolution can be seen as having evolved to fulfil a
purpose, we may exploit those products in ways that have nothing to do with their
evolutionary origins: using a bird's feather as a writing implement, for example. In-
vention goes from feasible to easy to obvious when the generative process not only
makes a material but makes it abundant, as in this example. This is often described
in terms of the
affordances
offered by some structure. A celebrated form of hu-
man creativity involves re-appropriating existing things for new uses. The fact that
things can regularly be re-appropriated indicates the efficacy of generative creative
processes.
Pharmaceutical companies search the rich ecosystems of uncharted rainforest for
novel species that might offer medicinal utility. Rather than being a coincidence that
natural evolution generates things that are useful to humans without having evolved
for this purpose, this seems to be more likely to reflect a simple principle that things
useful for one purpose can be useful for others. Similarly, such companies search for
new synthetic drugs by brute force, testing each candidate for a number of effects
(not one specific goal). At the extreme, the side effects of a drug are noted in case
there are novel effects that could be of use: putting solutions before problems.
As before, those who prefer to see natural evolution as more of an adaptively cre-
ative process, may prefer to see the above as a case of the transferability of adaptive
creativity from one domain (what it evolved for) to another. This is discussed in the
following section.
The same reasoning can be applied to the potential for artificial generative cre-
ative systems to produce artistic material. The
Creative Ecosystems
project at the
Centre for Electronic Media Art (McCormack and Bown
2009
,Bown
2009
) has ex-
plored the creative potential of ecosystem models, even if those models are closed
