What is a Creative Experiment?
A Creative Experiment can be defined by many things, but the defining features are twofold: the outcome cannot be known in advance, and is a co-emergent outcome of the creative process.
While the classical definition of an experiment is a form of a hypothesis test: will this work? Or: Can this be proved or disproved? A creative experiment, because it is interested in the new (that which does not exist) – does not – and cannot share this logic. It is an experiment in production – in construction, in the making of that which does not yet exist – the new (and is as such non-knowable). Because of this, no hypothesis can be generated, and other qualitatively different practices are required.
Because of this, we can develop at least seventeen propositions in regards to creative experiments:
What Do Creative Experiments Include?
Creative experiments include, but are not limited to:
- …will perhaps produce the qualitatively new – that which does not exist
- …have non-knowable (in advance) outcomes
- …are not one thing – rather they emerge “in the region of”
- …must begin before one can know what will make it “work”
- …don’t have a fixed duration before one could say they have done something relevant
- … are not tests
- …will produce a new aesthetics, ethics, and criteria of what is interesting, relevant, good, bad, successful, and unsuccessful, etc.
- …entangle broadly with ongoing creativities
- …will involve many refusals
- …involve new enabling and stabilizing configuration
- …are profoundly anomalous (neither similar nor opposite – but different)
- …are affirmations
- …develop qualitatively novel approaches before anything like a concrete, identifiable “outcome”
- …are wide, dense transversal unexpected weavings
- …embrace the vague
- …have a long iterative, thick, wide, and dense processes of enaction – making the path in walking
- …will fall apart in the face of retrospective thinking, future backwards design, and solution thinking
See Also: Affect, Blocking, Emergence, Exaptation
Further Reading:
