Unit Origami Diagram

The instructions for unit origami are illustrated in the diagram (DIY) below:

The Irony of Creativity

I was surprised when the readings from this week built my understanding of creativity and constraints from last week. I disagree with Gardner’s nomothetic methodology, but I do appreciate his attempt to classify intelligence into categories such as logical-mathematical and bodily-kinesthetic. Once he found ways to classify intelligence, he was able to describe artistic output as a function of a person’s strengths and weaknesses in these categories. I really like the idea that a creative person is often the result of an unusual combination of intelligences. I think that’s what makes the area of computational media special: a combination of logical-mathematical and spatial or musical intelligences seems to be rare, but there is such potential for output in this area with advances in computational ability in the past few decades. There is still room for new styles of painting, but computational media is so new that there aren’t even any styles yet defined.

I was also interested in Gardner’s notion that creativity is bestowed upon an individual by society. A work is deemed creative only when is has been accepted by the majority and seen to extend existing aesthetic or scientific works. Maybe this is what people mean when they say there is a thin line between genius and insanity: they’re actually the same thing, but recognition of work as genius is only given when people can understand the work. Gardner explains that people recognized as creative have a “fruitful asynchrony” with the rest of society. I think the word asynchrony is apt because designation as asynchronous means that people understand work well enough to designate it as outside the norm. If work isn’t understood well enough to make this seemingly trivial classification, it has little hope of ever being accepted into the mainstream. It seems ironic that we can only understand creativity when its product is familiar enough to compare to existing works.

Creativity and Constraints

Two ideas stuck with me after our discussion on constraints and creativity. I was really interested in the idea that an artist’s style can be represented in logic by a set of constraints. Harold Cohen’s style consists of simple shapes and large swaths of color. The clean lines lend themselves well to systemization. Cohen seems the logical place to begin a study in the creation of art through logical constraints. I think it is human nature to immediately attempt to extend this experiment to more complex cases. Could one also represent the works of Picasso or Duchamp through equations and constraints? Can creativity be distilled into something cold and mechanical?

Sometimes I think people don’t want to admit that our brains are (incredibly complex) machines themselves. Given additional processing power and more complex algorithms, why shouldn’t machines be as creative as people? We call a human action “random” when we don’t understand the chain of past events and experiences that led to a given reaction. Modern computers use a simplified version of this artificial randomness, gathered from a natural event such as date and time, because computers do not have a body of past experiences and knowledge from which to make decisions. But I think that we’re beginning to see this kind of randomness in machines like Watson. Most of the answers Watson gives to inquiries are correct. However, sometimes it gives answers that we might describe as random, such as naming Toronto during a question about U.S. cities. This randomness is based on the vast body of knowledge Watson has access to—not dissimilar to the large body of knowledge humans make decisions based on.

I think that in the future, there will be more work done to understand the nature of “randomness.” Like we discussed in class, I don’t think there is anything that is truly random; it’s just a matter of dissecting a huge amount of data to understand the chain of associations that led to an event. It might not be comforting to imagine that creativity results from a similar process. It seems equally likely, however, to be the result of some complex mental-machine process that we have yet to understand, but which is nonetheless completely straightforward and even logical once the associations have been mapped out.

Make a Messenger Bag out of Trash Bags

       Make a Messenger Bag Out of Trash

      Fusing Plastic Bag Tutorial

      By Anda Lewis of Etsy.com

 

Sketching and Representation

For Class (2/1)

• For the class session, each person please bring one piece of letter size paper, divide it into 6 equal size segments, and write on each segment a word or a concept (if it’s a phrase, no more than 2 words) that you think will be difficult to illustrate

Readings

• Schon, D. A, 1985, The Design Studio, RIBA, London. p 30-52 schon.pdf

• Suwa, M. and Tversky, B.: 1997, What do architects and students perceive in their design sketches? A protocol analysis, Design Studies, 18(4), pp. 385-403 – direct link to science directdoi:10.1016/S0142-694X(97)00008-2, a copy in ftp site pdf

Recycled Material Fashion Show

Assignment for two weeks –

Recycled Material Fashion Show Video production

Pipeline tool is at http://pipeline.cc.gatech.edu/gt

There are several parts of the project:

1. team name, theme for your fashion show

2. design the fashion show – a couple set of clothing, using recycled material (80%)

3. design the performance of the fashion show for the models – music, choreography, presentation, dance, cat walk, performance, etc.

4. make a video of the fashion show performance – with music, narrative, etc.

5. collaborate in anyway as you see fit.

video screening to be Feb 8th in class 😉

A.I. as a contribution to musical creativity?

Videos at: http://www.gtcmt.gatech.edu/research-projects/shimon

“It is amazing to see Shimon improvise and interact with human musicians. Imagine a pianist playing a musical phrase followed by the robot, who builds on this input with a new improvised sequence. A fellow guitar player can then enhance Shimon’s ideas, leading to new responses that could inspire the humans to play in ways they have never played before. The result is not only novel and expressive human-robotic interaction, but also great new music”. (http://www.gtcmt.gatech.edu)

In a nutshell, in the context of AI being involved in the creative process, the machine itself may not be the mean by which artistic creation is built, but rather the combination, the coordination of actions and perceptions from both the machine and the artist. Such collaboration may give rise to a musical experience that is not accessible by human-to-human type interaction and inspires players to communicate in novel expressive manners, which naturally leads to novel musical outcomes.

Origami ‘How-to’

Creativity and Constraints

Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new (a product, a solution, a work of art, a novel, a joke, etc.) that has some kind of value. What counts as “new” may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs. What counts as “valuable” is similarly defined in a variety of ways.

– Wikipedia

The definition of creativity is itself wide open for debate and here  we were debating effects of ‘constraints’ on enhancing creativity. Though it was cited that constraints contributes towards developing creativity in children by causing them to make something definitive, critics may argue that creativity results bests from letting the imagination flow free. I feel that though creativity results bests from letting your imagination flow free, there should always be some form of rules that guides you create something. It lets you keep track of direction in which you want to go.

Constraints indeed, though not always, tends to bring out creativity in humans. Constraints, clubbed with desire to accomplish a task, results in some of the most beautiful and creative end-products. In our own example, previous week we were given a task to develop a structure with only newspapers. The desire to win, led many teams to get their thinking cap working and the result was quite a few marvelous structures. Though whether a structure was creative or not depends on personal perspective, each one was indeed unique in its own way. Even in real world, desire to make products compact and mobile, led engineers to come-up with laptops and tablets. Is this creative? Again, matter of personal opinion but we cant argue the fact that these products were result of some form of constraints on requirements.

Transcendent Man Viewing/Discussion

This Tuesday GTNeuro will hosting our first social event. We will be viewing the film Transcendent Man, a highly rated and provocative movie about what technology could do for human intelligence. The movie focuses on the idea of “Singularity” which is the merging of human and technological intelligences and what it could mean for humanity as a whole. After watching the movie we will have a discussion lead by Dr. Steve Potter- Georgia Tech Director of the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering. Food and refreshments will be served during the screening. You can check event details and sign up for this event on our website if you plan on attending: http://www.gtneuro.net/?q=node%2F186

• Tuesday

  6:00pm until 8:00pm
• Whittaker 1103