Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 125! Creativity, What is Real?...
Good Morning more than actual beings,
This week, we are just plunging head first into exploring our ongoing topic of “Understanding and Visualizing the Full Scope of Creative Processes” with no warm-up other than a quick shout-out to our readers in the New Jersey + New York region: this weekend is the Jersey Art Book Fair. We were there last year, and it was amazing – a true world where many worlds were recognized and where many others were being made. It is a jolt of hope and a radical injection of difference. It runs this Saturday and Sunday. There is a party on Saturday evening. There will be many interesting workshops each day and much else besides. Hopefully, we will see you there. (NOTE: you need to get tickets in advance).
Last week, we left off in the newsletter with a deeply nested and networked ecological model of the self and creativity:
Simplifying last week's newsletter immensely, we could summarize it thus: Creative outcomes are always emergent and ecological (never personal and ideation driven). This week, we are interested in using this approach to understand how we actually get to creative outcomes in more detail.
Creative outcomes are always emergent and ecological (never personal and ideation driven).
But first, let's take a moment and remind ourselves of the key concepts that we are referencing in the above diagram from last week. First, we can make it a bit simpler:
There are five key aspects to this diagram of the self-ecosystem to remind ourselves about (numbered 1-5 in the above diagram):
What is important is that we can see how this diagram frames an emergent ecological approach to creativity agency as primarily (though not exclusively) the property of the whole.
Now, this diagram is highly abstract, and ultimately, so was much of last week's discussion. In this diagram, the “self” and “environment” are potentially any subject and any environment. This leaves things very broad indeed! Now, this level of generality is part of this approach's power (as we shall see,) but – we also understand – this much abstraction can leave things far too vague to be either clear or useful. So, let's get a bit more concrete and introduce an actual subject.
And our choice for an actual subject is our dear friend – the crow:
Why a crow? Why not stick with a person – perhaps even Alan Turing himself – after all, he has been a central figure in the story so far?
We promise you we will come back to Alan Turing down the road, and we’ll address the question of human creativity below, but part of what we wish to explore first is a broader and more general vision of what constitutes a creative practice. And this goes far beyond creative processes centered on humans. Additionally, and more importantly, we find that human examples of creativity are often far too loaded with beliefs in genius, brains, and human exceptionalism to be a neutral starting place to develop an alternative. And because of this (as well as our deep fondness for crows), we wish to introduce a crow into our story.
Let's meet and befriend this actual crow that has co-emerged with an actual environment. To get more specific, our friend who is perched above using a fine tool of its own manufacture is a New Caledonian Crow.
She is from a community of crows found on one island in the Arepeligo of New Caledonia, which is located about one thousand kilometers east of Australia. Part of what makes these crows special (to us) is that this community of crows has co-evolved and co-shaped a particularly rich environment, and in this dynamic and active context of its environment, the crow community has developed a culture of quite sophisticated tool manufacture and use. They make a variety of hooked tools and spearing tools.
Thus, it would be a mistake to see this individual crow we depicted above as a “self” distinct from its actual environment. Let’s connect our friend to our diagram:
And in connecting our friend to our diagram – let's bring in an actual instantiation of a specific environment, taskspace, activity, body, etc:
It is important to remember that these diagrams convey a dynamic, active process – it is not a static picture of a thing resting in a supportive but ultimately passive environment. These crows, and this specific crow, are in dynamic relational processes that are intra-woven into a relational dynamic co-shaping environment. All aspects are active, and the specific agency of each aspect arises relationally because of how they mutually shape each other. Additionally, the system as a whole (via emergent processes) shapes each and every component of the system – even as the components give rise to the system.
It is equally important to recognize that from beginning to end, this is an inherently creative process – all of these terms: co-evolving, co-making, co-shaping, etc. – these are active, creative terms. Nothing here is passive or neutral – the co-shaping of bodies, habits, and environments is a highly creative event.
Additionally, it is a highly creative process that is without a creator or author in the sense of someone or something guiding the process. This is a non-linear, self-organizing creative process. This does not mean that there is no autonomy or agency for our dear friend the crow. It is a process full of sense-making beings (crows, plants, insects) that have intentions (in a very general sense), propensities, autonomy, and agency. But such autonomy and agency is a relational outcome of the system and it operates within and of the dynamic system.
This specific crow and the living community of New Caledonian crows are actual – if we traveled to their island, we could touch them and watch them make tools. And in this way our diagram of the self-environment depicts things that are actual.
But as “actual” living crows – how did they come about?
For us, this seemingly dumb and obvious question is a key question in terms of understanding creativity. How did these crows creatively come into physical existence? Is it just that two actual crows got together and made another actual crow?
But, while this is true, it gives us a very incomplete picture of the creative process. An actual crow is one possible variation of a virtual space of possibilities – it could have been different – perhaps a bit taller or longer legs. The varying dynamics of the actual system (chemical signal variation, environmental variation, variation in gene expression, etc.) gives rise to a space of possible variation in the actualized crow. We could understand it this way: each crow that is born is an “actualization” of one point in that space of possible variation.
Our diagram, as we have drawn it so far, does not capture this. It only reflects what is actual but not what is possible. It shows a system of actual bodies, tools, and environments and how they co-shape each other. But creativity deals with more than what is already given (the actual) – it deals with possibilities – novel possibilities. Where are these in the diagram?
Now the actual is real, but what about this field of possibilities? Is it not also real? Is it not always there?
Consider this: in the immediate future, things will vary from the present. But there will always be a statistical pattern to this variation – certain things, given the circumstances, will always be more likely than others.
The next generation of New Caledonian Crows that hatch will be variations, and these variations will have a reasonably predictable pattern. Is it not then true that the pattern of variations that makes up a virtual field of possibilities is already there prior to the birth of the next crow?
This set of variations is very much real – it is not “actual” – but It is real and virtual. (Here, we are following the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze).
Thus, to get at the creativity of the real, we need to consider how the actual and the virtual interact. Our diagram shows only how the actual gives rise to the actual – e.g., a system of actual crows in an actual environment gives rise to one more actual crow:
But what of this virtual field of possible variations that surrounds this one crow that is the actualization of only one point in this larger virtual field of variation?
What is important about making this claim in regards to creativity?
The real is a creative process by which actual things give rise to a field of possibilities of something else coming into being and not just the making of discreet new thing. The dynamics of the actual assemblage (the very arrangement of what exists) means that certain possibilities are stabilized into a virtual field of what is far more likely than other possibilities. Thus the system is generating its field of possible futures. And these futures are very much real.
While we are focused on a form of creativity that gives rise to one new thing. The dance of creativity is not focused on the making of one new actual thing. The dance of creativity is happening between the varying of the actual such the field of virtual possibilities varies such that new outcomes are possible. Without an understanding of this dialogue and dance, our engagement with creativity falls prey to a parochial narrowness: “I made this” – when all you did was actualize one already real virtual possibility (that was made by the dynamics of the ecosystem…).
Let's take a moment to make this concept of a virtual field more concrete. If we return to our crows, our friends, the New Caledonian Crows are themselves just one actualization of a field of possible variations of all existing crows interacting with all possible actual environments. Thus, our New Caledonian Crow sits in a dynamic field of crow variations:
Again, it is important to remember that each type of crow is an assemblage co-evolving with an environment. It is making its environment as its environment is making it. Thus, we could never fully specify all the possible forms crows might take in the future. Why? Because of two things: their environments are not fixed, and because they are co-shaping their environments. It is a radically open (but stable) system:
We can zoom out further: our crow is but one zone of variation in a field of all possible bird variations:
This is where things get really interesting. If we carefully map out this virtual field of all possible birds (based on some context-relevant variables), a specific pattern will emerge.
Why is this relevant?
The virtual field of possibility always has a specific shape. Because of the given specific stable dynamics of the actual, the field of the virtual is not filled evenly with equal possibilities in all directions. This means that creativity is never “anything is equally possible." The given organization of the actual always means that only some things are possible (because of the actual specifics of the configuration of the assemblage).
Let's look at an actual example – how does the virtual space of all possible birds organize itself? Here is a rough sketch of it:
This diagram organizes birds into a field of variations along two variables: their wing width (wing aspect) and size (wing loading).
We can see that birds clump into six related families of wing shapes (Ocean Soarers, Birds of Prey, Inland Soarers, High-Speed Hunters, Land Fowl, Water Fowl, and Diving Birds). These “clumps” are not evenly distributed across the full space of possibility. There are gaps and blank spots in the field of possibilities. Why is this? It is because of the actual integrated dynamics of the birds and their environments means that only certain virtual possibilities emerge. Waves and ocean winds afford certain virtual possibilities to a winged, feathered creature and not others. Mountains, sun, trees, and thermals offer others. But it is not anything goes.
Does this mean creative potentialities are “fixed” in advance? Importantly, the answer is both yes and no. Yes, creative potentialities are (statistically) fixed in advance – if an assemblage is stable, then the virtual field of possible variations is also stable. But if the assemblage (the actual system) can be shifted, then the virtual field of the possible also shifts in new and unexpected ways. And given that no assemblage is truly fixed – creative possibilities always exceed the given. (This is something we will get into with more nuance next week).
What matters from the perspective of fully engaging with creative processes is that we understand that creativity lives in and across the dynamics of the space between the actual and the virtual.
Far too often, human creativity is understood only from the perspective of the actual. And this leads to a fetishization of the actualization of just one new thing (without any sense of how the space of possibility emerged), which is far too often then framed as the singular achievement of one unique individual. But this totally misses that the dynamics of the system gave rise to a very real field of virtual possibilities (from which the individual is just actualizing one option).
To engage with the full space of creative processes, it is important to understand that:
It is our hope that we have made the relation between the actual and the virtual clear via the example of crows and birds. And that, at least in the instance of animal evolutionary creativity, it makes sense to you to speak of creativity in this manner (we are trying to develop the argument slowly and carefully). Next week, we will introduce human examples and add more concrete details (and nuance) to this approach.
We have a question for you as we come to the end of this week's newsletter: How would you find and develop some examples of virtual fields in your personal areas of interest? Have you? If you do, please share these with us. We are quite curious.
See you at the Jersey Art Book Fair!
Till Volume 126,
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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