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
Additional Glossary Terms Related to Creative Experiment
Blocking, Emergence, Exaptation, Experiment, Refusal, Future Backwards Design, Ambiguity, Configuration - Creative & Enabling Configurations
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