creative process

This work presents an artistic process based on a dream that took place in the capital of Czechoslovakia, a region unknown to the dreamer, which happened at the beginning of the quarantine period due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first stage of this creative process started with the confirmation of coincidences between real-life Prague and the dreamed Prague. The similarities, discovered mainly through the search algorithms that led to Google maps, touristic blogs, Wikipedia, and other websites allowed the collection of data for the memories would not be lost and could be used as tools for the creative process. That fact so unique and different from other experienced dream phenomena aroused a series of sensations and reflections on the possibility of incorporating the unforeseen and irrational element as a means of promoting academic inquiry and artistic research. It was also an encouragement at the critical moment of confinement and pessimism.

In Antiquity, as the work of Artemidoro confirms, the dream had a cosmic dimension related to the mystical tradition and the collectivity. However, the psychoanalytic conception, influential in Western society since the first decades of the twentieth century, contributed to fixing the perception of dreaming as a private event that concerns only the individual dimension. On the other hand, neuroscience favors a biological approach to dreaming, even though Sidarta Ribeiro is a dissonant voice in this environment. The Brazilian neuroscientist relates dreams and memory since we dream as a way of remembering what we are and what we do. According to him, we also dream to prepare ourselves for the future.

The conceptual project started from a dream and proceeded, at first, with the help of Internet search engines. The dream experience allowed a deviation in the search algorithms using private intuition. This methodology contradicts the rational tendency behind the “improvement” of the artificial intelligence of these mechanisms. This effort included bibliographic research and the construction of a web page that will contain more information about the work in development. The process also allowed the idealization of Oneirographia, which is a 3D interactive online environment that is under construction. In this work, the interactor can build or simulate his digital dreams with data input that´ll randomly create a sensory ambiance. First, the user will fill a form and, then it will be possible to choose between a dream or a nightmare to define the atmosphere of the digital experience. After that, the user will navigate between images, words, and sounds, and, at any moment, he can choose to capture photographs of the digital dream to download or share them on the social media networks.

Dreams hold relevant messages and memories that we cannot access otherwise. However, its encrypted language makes it difficult to understand, and usually, during the wake, we quickly forget what we have dreamed of. Oneirographia aims to facilitate the remembering, reimagining, and sharing of this important aspect of our lives.

The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across different forms of representation. The outcomes of this experimentation could illuminate our knowledge of creative processes. As part of our research on glitch pedagogy and transmediation over the last two years (Peña, James & DLC, 2016), we have experimented with the functionalities of raw data by comparing patterns of mis/representation between textual, aural and visual data. Our inquiries have allowed us to engage in the intervention and purposeful disruption of these patterns while shedding light on the underlying processes behind these disruptive practices. Delivered as a performance, this paper will demonstrate a few such practices. In our role as noise-musicians, we will improvisualize a transmediatic piece while describing the process behind it. This performance/presentation will start with the production of a natively visual digital artifact (i.e., a digital photograph). This artifact, produced during the session involving attendees, will be then translated into while modifying the sound with analog synthesizers. Simultaneously poetry will be performed, recorded and interpolated with the raw data of the pictures' sound file. This step will effectively involve passing digital data through an analog channel before its re-digitization in real-time. Finally, the intervened artifact will then be re-presented in its visual form. Our presentation will not only contrast between performance as a process and performance as a product, it will allow participants to compare the aesthetic properties of an artifact when presented both in a native and in a non-native format, and will reveal the patterns-in-common between these different media by merit of disrupting them.

Sources: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/854/Trans…; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327163262_Transmedia_an_improv…

A version of this illustrated article about creative process was given by J.R. Carpenter as a Keynote Address at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event at Bournemouth University in January 2017.

In this paper, I depart from the notion of digital literature trying to look beyond the linguistic layer of digitability as proposed by Simanovski (2010). Thus, the main goal of my discussion is to face some specific problems regarding both theoretical and instructional perceptions of digital literature: the creative process, the technological conditions and software limits in the production of a media art object, and the literary materialities digitally present. To demonstrate how these constructs and circumstances affect the production and the reception of an object perceived as literary and digital from its planning, I will propose a challenging reading of O Cosmonauta by Alckmar dos Santos and Wilton Azevedo.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)

In the fields of literature, creative writing, and media studies, creative practice and critical analysis have long been parallel and complementary activities; the poet’s creative experience gives her unique insights into the poetry of others. Direct experimentation for the purposes of critical research, however, has long been relegated to science. Practice-based research, also called action research, is a tried and tested methodology in medicine, design, and engineering. While it has always been present to some extent in the arts and humanities, though generally restricted to practice and research, in recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and several recent texts as well as discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity as a method of studying art and the practice of art.

Digital writing as a creative practice and field of scholarly study is similarly new; it is also singular in that a significant portion of its practitioners are equally academic researchers. Given that the affordances and limitations of digital storytelling tools are highly unique, encouraging experimentation with narrative form and content, it is timely that a direct approach to studying the process and results of digital writing is emerging as well.

This paper proposes a specific methodology for the practice-based study of digital writing. “Practice-based” connotes a focused project, a creative experiment designed to answer questions about the process and results of the practice itself: “it involves the identification of research questions and problems, but the research methods, contexts and outputs then involve a significant focus on creative practice” (Sullivan 2009, 48). The proposed method aligns foremost with Sullivan’s conceptual framework of practice-based research, in that the creative undertaking is an attempt to understand the artefacts themselves. As such, it incorporates ethnomethodological (Garfinkel 1967; cf. Brandt 1992) observation of writing activities, maintaining notes, journal entries, comments on drafts, and other relevant, observable paratexts to the composition, in order to “make continual sense to [the writer] of what [the writer is] doing” (Brandt 1992, 324). These notes and paratexts are later analyzed, placing them within the context of composition cognition (Flower & Hayes 1981), and post-textual, media-specific analysis (Hayles 2002) is conducted on the narratives that result. In this manner, the various strengths of practice-based research, ethnomethodology, cognitive process, and post-textual analysis are combined into a robust, widely applicable method of evaluating the activities of the practitioner/researcher.

The digital fiction Færwhile: A Journey Through a Space of Time (Skains 2013) was composed as a practice-based project using this methodology, and is used in this paper as a demonstration.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Existing approaches to narrative construction tend to apply basic engineering principles of system
design which rely on identifying the most relevant feature of the domain for the problem at
hand, and postulating an initial representation of the problem space organised around such a
principal feature. Some features that have been favoured in the past include: causality, linear
discourse, underlying structure, and character behavior. The present paper defends the need for
simultaneous consideration of as many as possible of these aspects when attempting to model the
process of creating narratives, together with some mechanism for distributing the weight of the
decision processes across them. Humans faced with narrative construction may shift from views
based on characters to views based on structure, then consider causality, and later also take into
account the shape of discourse. This behavior can be related to the process of representational
re-description of constraints as described in existing literature on cognitive models of the writing
task. The paper discusses how existing computational models of narrative construction address
this phenomenon, and argues for a computational model of narrative explicitly based on multiple
aspects.

This presentation uses Chimamanda Adichie’s lecture The Danger of Single Story as a starting point to discuss how new media technologies can be used to counteract the simplistic narratives typically assigned to marginalized communities and allow for a more nuanced depiction. By examining two of the presenter’s multiformat, multi-year, transmedia documentary projects: Closer: A Journey with Charles and Punk Rock Mommy: Ephemeral the question of complexity versus economy will be addressed. The discussion will address: creative process, strategies for shared authorship that provide the subject with agency, justification for the technological variety, and respond to the challenges of this approach. With multiple channels containing varied information some viewers/readers/participants become disinterested where others find themselves immersed in the narrative. Mainstream audiences sometimes prefer the minimal investment required by a narrative where the text clearly states how one should feel about a subject. The abundance of simple stories that extol stereotypes or clichés for the sake of efficiency and expressing a convenient narrative (even if it is a “positive” depiction) is potentially damaging to our ability to empathize with human beings who encompass multiple layers along with fluctuating moods and attitudes. An open text that mirrors the complexity inherent in all human beings invites engagement on a deeper level. What we need are stories that embrace the variability that makes us human. The practice of engaging in challenging narratives requires a flexibility and patience that provides practice for empathetic and patient engagement with the non-mediated human beings we encounter in the flesh.

(source: author's abstract)

The age of letter writing is coming to an end, just as an era of e-mail, blogs, online groups, and social networks is emerging as a new mode of communication. The work of scholars interested in what writers have to say about their work has simultaneously become easier and more challenging, depending upon the technologies used by these writers. How do we conduct authorial scholarship in an age of digital media? This paper address this question through a case study: Flores' own research on Jim Andrews and his work, focusing on the challenges and affordances offered by the current media ecology.