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14.5 Conclusion
In the last example and elsewhere in this chapter I have linked a discussion of gener-
ative and adaptive creativity in social systems and individual humans to research in
arts-based computational creativity and its goals. Arts-based computational creativ-
ity is well underway as a serious research field, but it faces a truly grand challenge.
There is still some way to go to break down this challenge into manageable and
clearly defined goals, frustrated by the ill-defined nature of artistic evaluation. But a
pattern is emerging in which arts-based computationally creative systems can be cat-
egorised in terms of how they relate to the wider world of human artistic value, either
as prosthetic extensions of individual creative practices, as in the case of AARON
and many other uses of managed generatively creative processes, or as experiments
in adaptive creativity which are generally not presently capable of producing valued
artistic output, such as the DrawBots project and various models of social creative
processes. In the case of artificial generatively creative systems, the analysis pre-
sented here suggests that it is important to analyse such systems both as tools in
an adaptively creative process involving goal-driven individuals, and as elements in
a heterogeneous social network which itself exhibits generative creativity. In both
cases, it is valuable to consider what status such systems will possess in terms of
primary and secondary agency.
As long as adaptive and generative creativity can be recognised as distinct pro-
cesses, they can be addressed simultaneously in a single project. For example, the
ecosystemic approach mentioned in Sect. 14.4.1 attempts to straddle these areas of
interest by acting both as a generative tool, of direct utility to artists, and as a virtual
environment in which the potential for adaptive creativity by individual agents can
be explored. In this way, methods might be discovered for coupling the value sys-
tem that the artist is embedded in and the emergent value system within the artificial
ecosystem. The latter may be a simulation of the former, or a complementary gen-
erative system. Furthermore, since novel arts-based computational creativity tech-
nologies can be shared, modified and re-appropriated by different users, they already
have a social life of their own as secondary agents, even if they are not primary social
agents. As such they are adaptive in a memetic sense. Both this and the ecosystemic
approach may be able to offer powerful mechanisms for bootstrapping arts-based
computational creativity towards increasingly complex behaviours, greater artistic
success, and an increased appearance of primary agency, without modelling human
cognition.
Acknowledgements This chapter stems from ideas formed during my PhD with Geraint Wig-
gins at Goldsmiths, University of London, and further developed whilst working as a post-doctoral
researcher at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), with Jon McCormack (funded by the
Australian Research Council under Discovery Project grant DP0877320). I thank Jon, Alan Dorin,
Alice Eldridge and the other members of CEMA for two years of fascinating recursive discussions.
I am grateful to all of the attendees of the 2009 Dagstuhl symposium on Computational Cre-
ativity, in particular the organisers, Jon McCormack, Mark d'Inverno and Maggie Boden, for con-
tributing to a first-rate creative experience. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable
feedback.
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