A Visual Epistemology of Readymade

The enunciation of the words “All” “Ready” “Made” auditory forms the adverb “Already” that actually defines the essence of a readymade. This article presents several intertextual recontextualisations of this notion are proposed through a re-narrativization of readymade (wordy) components. This collection has no other intention that unloading the concept of readymade by using art to think about art and acknowledging therefore the art’s capacity for self-reflection and auto-theorizing in line with recent call for the development of an artistic research.

The Legendary Creativity of Hayao Miyazaki and Shigeru Miyamoto as a Product of Metacognitive Awareness, Family, and Environment

This article compares two eminent programmers, Shigeru Miyamoto and Hayao Miyazaki, and their respective works, the video game The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and the film Princess Mononoke. It discusses their creativity in the context of their above-average access and opportunity to metacognitive skill development, ideation, production, and influence in relation to methods recommended in the research on creativity and genius. This article also looks at how their individual creativity was nurtured by family and scholarship, influenced by birth order and parental relationships, and enhanced by their geographic location and work place. The article concludes that all of these factors combined to allow Miyamoto and Miyazaki to reach legendary levels of creativity, with remarkable similarity to one another.

Dancing the digital age: a survey of the new technologies in the choreographic process

This article considers fifty-eight selected dance works created during the time period of 2000-2018. In doing so the work of renown artists Wayne McGregor, Garry Stewart, Dawn Stopiello and Bill T. Jones are used as case studies to highlight how the eminence of these choreographers has engaged dance as a meeting point and merging point for humanity and ‘New technology’. The article reviews the impact of new technologies as an essential tool in the creative processes of dance and exploration of the moving-body. Innovative technologies in the 21st Century have offered choreographers new capacities for the creation of movement. These explorations into the performance space advance insights into broader questions of the human body at the intersection of arts and science. The choreographers’ exploration of the dancing form cultivates questions about how the human body extends, begins, ends and is present. As the digital age proposes new ways to (re)imagine the communication and impact of the human body we suggest these artistic collaborations also offer insights into commonalities and places of exchange across notions of art vs. science. These choreographers inter-disciplinary artistic endeavors, into how the moving body transacts and is harnessed as a mode of expression reveal deeper possibilities of the ontology of the lived-experience.

The Finnish Poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937-1983)

The poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937-1983) was one of the most significant Finnish writers of the 20th century. He was also a prolific translator, who received many prestigious awards for his literary production. Throughout his life Saarikoski showed evidence of a certain psychopathology and mental complications for which he was twice hospitalized. The paper argues that Saarikoski possessed a large number of autistic traits and elevated symptomatology of ADHD. The traits of these conditions are often found in persons with high creative achievement. The works of the psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald provide the theoretical background, on which the biographic evidence from Saarikoski’s childhood and adult life is analyzed. The identity diffusion under which the poet suffered can be shown as beneficial to this level of creativity. Saarikoski was an autistic writer, who visualized his poetry which eventually provided him with artistic identity. In addition to autistic traits and high intelligence, Saarikoski also sought novelty and sensation, which can be attributed to his ADHD traits.

Sympathy for the Devil - The Creative Transformation of the Evil

Mythologies, religions, philosophies, and ideologies show that all cultures are concerned with human destructivity. The same is readily apparent in many modern creative works of eminence. In their famous song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones refer to Goethe’s Faust, where the Devil is characterized strangely as “a portion of that power/ which always works for the Evil and effects the Good … a part of Darkness which gave birth to Light”. These verses remind one of ancient myth but also of modern ideas of the interplay of creation and destruction. The poetry of Goethe, the scientific psychoanalysis of Freud, and the aesthetic enactments of Madonna Ciccone and Mick Jagger show that the creative transformation of destructiveness provides a chance to cope with evil. Through his poetic and autobiographic self-reflection Goethe described how men are composed of constructive and destructive forces, light and dark, good and evil. This dialectic of drives and activities is also fundamental for the Freudian scientific model of the mind and its interrelation with the body and the social environment. Humans can only survive when they transform their destructive inclinations into constructive activities. The creative transformation of destructiveness is also a central issue in today’s pop culture. Paradigmatically the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ describes the atrocities humans are able to commit. The song is exemplary for the transformation of violence into music, dance, and shared aesthetic experience. This is also valid for the provocative enactments of Madonna. Behind her sometimes seemingly shameless enactments one can find a serious working through of depression and aggression. Fundamental elements of aesthetic pleasure in art, science, and social activity stem from the creative transformation of human destructiveness.

The mathematical creativity of Ramanujan FRS (1887–1920)

The occasion of the centenary of his death provides a poignant opportunity to reflect on the mathematical creativity of Ramanujan, on the cultural and social milieu in which he grew up, and on the educational experiences that informed his development. Attention is drawn to the deep nature of his discoveries in number theory, set alongside a sketch of the humble person who created so many wild and fantastic theorems.

Music and embodied creative space

This article places the compositional work of Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of present day practice of creating music. It uses images and places from the art of memory to the act of making music in order to closely examine the relationship between musical creativity and embodiment. While focusing on the central hypothesis that exposure to specific musical practices leads to the formation of multimodal creative agency, an argument is made for the emergence of an embodied creative space. The embodiment of musical creativity is defined as a cognitive and performative causality: a relationship between the cause and effect when composing, performing, or listening to music. Expanding on this model, music making is further considered to be an embodied activity that stems from the causality of these interde-pendent attributes of creativity: the cognitive actions controlled and sustained by our mind, and the performative interactions mediated by our body and the environment. By exploring the actions and interactions commonly associated with composing and performing music, this article defines the embodied creative musical space as an interactive agency that lives at the threshold of cognition and performativity. As a result, the nature of musical creativity as an embodied, lived experience extends the social and collaborative concepts of creativity, as it becomes an interactive creative contingency. Delivered from the perspective of a compos-er, performer, and music scholar, the paper contributes to the growing interdisciplinary discourse on musical creativity.

Creative Process in Hollywood: The Role of Imaginary in the Creation of Mainstream Movies

The creative process in Hollywood’s movie industry is the result of a complex combination of symbolic elements arising from imaginations of screenwriters, directors, executives, marketing experts and producers. This article analyzes the anatomy of the creative process inserted in the logic of production of major studios. The earliest scripts of three movies—Back to the Future, Blade Runner and Star Wars: A New Hope—and their theatrical movie versions are compared to find some patterns in the formation of the imaginary during the creative process in mainstream productions. The theoretical approach is mainly based on Gilbert Durand’s theories about the imaginary.

De-pathologizing Creativity: Psychobiograpy and Creativity Research: the Case of Eminent Hungarian Painter Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919)

The problems of eminent creativity and its connection with clinical phenomena have long been in the focus of psychology and psychiatry research. A “madness and genius” narrative has existed for ages, but it became significant in the 19th century, and remained highly influential until today. Psychiatrists, representatives of the medical discourse, developed pathography as a method in the end of the 19th century in order to study how illness affects life-works and cre- ative process. In the beginning of the 20th century Sigmund Freud formed another approach, psychobiography, which is not based on using different diagnostic categories; instead it is try- ing to unfold the interrelations between life history, psychodynamics and the creative process. In this recent article I will try to demonstrate the differences between the two approaches by concentrating on an outstanding Hungarian painter Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, whose life history contains serious clinical aspects. Instead of following traditional clinical endeavors, in my approach I will take illness as a Jaspersian existential “boundary situation” that contributes the transformation of the whole personality. This transformational process does not lack pro- gressive and regressive elements, and by analyzing its dynamics we can understand how creative activity—along with the feeling of evocation—can evolve and maintain the cohesion of the self by integrating traumatic emotional experiences.

Eminence and Genius in the Real-World: Seven Critical Skills that Make Possible Eminent Achievement

Genius and eminence has traditionally been understood in terms of basic abilities such as intel- ligence and creative thinking. Although we do not dispute the importance of basic abilities, we argue that eminent achievement in real-world settings also depends on the skills people acquire with experience. In the present effort, seven skills which appear critical to real-world eminent achievement are identified: 1) problem finding, 2) causal analysis, 3) constraint analysis, 4) forecasting, 5) elaboration, 6) compensation, and 7) wisdom. The findings obtained in various quantitative studies, along with the evidence drawn from the careers of those who have made eminent achievements, are used to provide evidence for the nature and significance of each of these skills. The implications of our observations for the development of eminent individuals are discussed.