The Creativity Continuum

April 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Quote:

Creativity is usually figured as a highly unusual episode in human behaviour, a rupture or breakthrough in an otherwise seamless, continuous, relatively predictable stream of thought and action. Most theoretical models of individual creativity match this intuition, containing such elements as ‘illumination’ in which hidden processes somehow intervene in our normal cognition and provide, for example, the creative answer to a problem, the idea for an artwork, the outline of a new invention or theory.

This paper will argue (after Perkins) that this image of creativity as separate from the everyday processes of living and working is incorrect and is driven more by a romantic ideal of ‘the possessed individual’ than close observation of creative acts themselves. It will be demonstrated, rather, that creativity is, in fact, simply the name we give to one part of a continuum of perception and awareness.

Perkins, D. N. (1981). The mind’s best work. Cambridge, Mass.; London, Harvard University Press.

Unquote

This is more like it. The presentation was concise and well illustrated with examples.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Creativity, Illumination, Perkins, David | No Comments »

Performing the Now

April 24th, 2006 Fred McVittie

I know I said I wouldn’t be reporting on any more ‘BBC2′ type activity for a while, but I found myself at this presentation, which on paper looks suspiciously like more flapdoodle (vanilla flavoured rather than quantum). However, the presenter was disarmingly normal and seemed quite distant from the ideas he was presenting, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

All activity has extension both in time and space but the experienced and evaluated now of that activity is its performance. Phelan (1993) seems to take the view that performance is an act of disappearance, but if we are to grant this then we have to acknowledge that it is also, necessarily, an act of continuous and ongoing appearance. But even the terms appearance and disappearance are not totally applicable to the performance moment, as this moment is best seen not as a sluice gate through which time passes, carrying the future toward the past, but rather as a still point in which time is experienced out of existence, a standing wave in space-time. Performance, then, is the moment of coming-into-being. It corresponds in creativity studies with the moment of illumination (critiqued by Perkins). In consciousness studies it corresponds with the ‘now’ of consciousness (heightened and extended in the long now of ‘the zone’, and the exactly here, precisely now of zen and other enlightenment practices). In physics this might be analogised with the process by which energy and matter are transformed by accelerating particles of that matter to a speed where everywhere is present in the continuous now.

Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London, Routledge.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Flapdoodle, Perkins, David, Phelan, Peggy, Physics, Story, Time | No Comments »