Donnerstag, 8. Oktober 2020 | Thursday, October 8, 2020
16:00–16:20 Screening

Abstract
The idea of artificial creativity in many ways sits quite uncomfortably with some of the prevailing ideas about what creativity is, especially the view that it is a purely human phenomenon. In fact, for a scholar that studies discourses on creativity, it is somewhat of a paradox, how hard it is to find an area in which the anthropocentric understanding of creativity is advocated so strongly as in the fields of computational or artificial creativity. Hence, this paper introduces the notion ‘post-creativity’ as key to discussing computational simulations of creativity in ways that are less much-too-human and focusses more on the contingent, permutable and often also ideologically-charged character and origin of both our notions and practices of creativity. To this end, the paper will draw partly on Andreas Reckwitz' (2017) Foucault-inspired notion of 'the creativity dispositif', partly on more posthuman/ANT/STS-informed theories like for instance Joanna Zylinska's recent, Vilem Flusser-inspired take on AI Art (2020) as just another instalment in the story of human/technology entanglement. Thus, the paper will suggest that thinking about creativity in such terms will enable us to make more reasonable claims about the contemporary surge of computational/artificial creativity as well as its cultural, social and political-economic implications.

Jan Løhmann Stephensen is associate professor at Aesthetics & Culture at Aarhus University. His research interests are cultures and practices of participation, democracy and the public sphere, and creativity and its diffusion into non-art related spheres like work life, economics, policy-making, university research agendas, new media technologies, etc. The last few years he has been working on so-called ‘post-creativity’, which seeks to explore the increasing entanglement of human and computational creativities. He is co-editor and founder of Conjunctions — Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation.