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Creative Ecosystems

  • Chapter
Computers and Creativity

Abstract

Traditional evolutionary approaches to computer creativity focus on optimisation, that is they define some criteria that allows the ranking of individuals in a population in terms of their suitability for a particular task. The problem for creative applications is that creativity is rarely thought of as a single optimisation. For example, could you come up with an algorithm for ranking music or painting? The difficulty is that these broad categories are shifting and subjective: I might argue that Mozart is more musically creative than Lady Gaga, but others may disagree. Objective, fine-grained ranking of all possible music is impossible, even for humans. I will show how reconceptualising the exploration of a creative space using an “ecosystemic” approach can lead to more open and potentially creative possibilities. For explanatory purposes, I will use some successful examples that are simple enough to explain succinctly, yet still exhibit the features necessary to demonstrate the advantages of this approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By my estimates, about 5×10−1444925 % for images of modest dimensions, far beyond astronomically small.

  2. 2.

    By “generative mechanism” I am technically referring to the genotype and the mechanism that expresses it into a phenotype.

  3. 3.

    The mechanism can include the ability to self-modify, change, or learn.

  4. 4.

    We might think of “viable” as meaning being able to effectively express a living organism from a zygote or through mitosis of a parent cell. But this is problematic for many reasons, most of which are too tangential to the argument to list here.

  5. 5.

    This issue is a topic of discussion in Chap. 4.

  6. 6.

    Although there are exceptions where the IGA has proved useful to expert users as well, e.g. Dahlstedt (2006), McCormack (2008a).

  7. 7.

    Danish biologist Eugen Warming is also attributed as the founder of the science of Ecology.

  8. 8.

    Autotrophs, such as plants, produce organic substances from simpler inorganic substances, such as carbon dioxide; heterotrophs unable to perform such conversions, require organic substances as a source of energy.

  9. 9.

    See their website at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~notnot/index.html.

  10. 10.

    Which has included over the last few years: Oliver Bown, Palle Dahlstedt, Alan Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Taras Kowaliw, Aidan Lane, Gordon Monro, Ben Porter and Mitchell Whitelaw.

  11. 11.

    Chapter 4 discusses this issue in more detail.

  12. 12.

    Reminiscent of Kodak founder George Eastman’s famous tag line of 1888 for the Kodak No. 1 camera: “You press the button, we do the rest”.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grants DP0877320 and DP1094064.

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  1. Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University, Caulfield East, Victoria, 3145, Australia

    Jon McCormack

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  1. Jon McCormack
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Correspondence to Jon McCormack .

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  1. , Caulfield School of Information, Monash University, Caulfield East, 3145, Victoria, Australia

    Jon McCormack

  2. University of London, Computing Department, Goldsmiths,, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, United Kingdom

    Mark d’Inverno

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McCormack, J. (2012). Creative Ecosystems. In: McCormack, J., d’Inverno, M. (eds) Computers and Creativity. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31727-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31727-9_2

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