[Commlist] CFP "Creativity After Automation" Special Issue Balkan Journal of Philosophy

  Balkan Journal of Philosophy*


  *CALL FOR PAPERS*


  SPECIAL ISSUE of the/Balkan Journal of Philosophy/for 2023

*"CREATIVITY AFTER AUTOMATION"*

The new field of ‘computational creativity’(CC) (also known as 
‘artificial’ or ‘algorithmic creativity’, ‘creative computation’ or 
‘creative AI’) attracts growing popularity with the recent advances of 
deep learning and other cutting-edge forms of machine learning 
algorithms. During the past twenty years CC has grown into a discipline 
of its own, part of the domain of artificial intelligence, which 
explores ‘the capacity of machines to both generate and evaluate novel 
outputs that would, if produced by a human, be considered creative’ 
(Veale and Cardoso, 2019: 2). The focus of computer scientists is 
to/systematise/,/formalise/, and thus/automatise/what has once been 
deemed a rationally inexplicable and almost supernatural capacity of 
some human individuals to generate new ideas and artistic masterpieces. 
In their attempts to mathematicize creative behaviour CC researchers 
reduce creativity to specific processes, algorithms and knowledge 
structures. At stake here is to program the least programmable, which is 
the freedom to deviate from the program and from predetermined rules. 
The goal is to design machines that produce outputs that are novel, 
surprising and have value – all these judged by human users. Novelty, 
surprise and value are the features of creativity advanced by Margaret 
Boden (2004) along with her classification of the three types of 
creativity: exploratory, combinational, and transformational.

The underlying assumptions about the concept of creativity, implied in 
the technical formulations above have evoked the critical responses of 
various humanities researchers, who have pointed out the reductiveness 
and intrinsic contradictions in these definitions from aesthetic, 
philosophical, and historical perspectives (see Still and d’Inverno 
2016, Du Sautoy 2019, Fazi 2019, Zylinska 2020, Stephensen 2021). Some 
of the researchers emphasise the historical richness and ambiguity of 
the concept of creativity itself (Still and d’Inverno 2016) and, hence, 
its ideological bias and political consequences (Stephensen 2021), 
others insist on the intrinsic potential of algorithms for creative 
expression according to their own nature (Fazi 2018), thus denouncing 
the flaws of the ‘imitation game’ (Turing) and summon us to recognise 
machine and other forms of intelligence and perception as co-creative 
agencies (Zylinska 2020).

In light of these critiques we would like to pose the question of 
automated creativity from at least three different perspectives: the 
human-centred, the machine-centred, and the systemic.

Creativity is the last resort believed to be impenetrable to automation. 
When fortress after fortress of ‘uniquely human’ cognitive capacities – 
memory, reasoning, learning, intentionality, complex pattern 
recognition, symbol manipulation, prognosis/prediction – fall one after 
another to the computational logic of algorithmic automation, creative 
imagination is still believed to symbolise every bit of what means to be 
an embodied human being. Creativity as it was advanced by Kant’s theory 
of the genius is radically opposed to imitation and pre-programmed rule 
following. Illuminated by this understanding, computer scientists’ 
definition of creativity formulated in the footsteps of Turing’s 
‘imitation game’ seems a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, the 
proposed ‘mechanisation’ of the creative process calls for more nuanced 
rethinking of the dynamics between imitation and originality, and has to 
be considered as a potential challenge of the very notion of individual 
authorship and human exceptionalism.

The second direction questions the notion of automation itself. Thinking 
about automated creativity we imagine the mechanical automatons of 
Descartes and nineteenth century industrial machines, their operation 
fully controlled by predetermined procedures. However, as Yuk Hui (2019) 
and other researchers have shown, machines after mid-twentieth century 
cybernetics are becoming less and less mechanical and more and more 
lifelike. While deterministically driven mechanisms break if they 
accidentally deviate from their predetermined program, cybernetic 
systems are open to contingency and incorporate it as part of their 
operative power. Thus, instead of mindlessly repeating the same outcome 
over and over, cybernetic machines utilise feedback, thereby generating 
novelty at every recursive turn.

We could return to the question of creativity again, going this time 
beyond the dichotomy between human and machine. If we consider 
creativity as the force that brings forth the new into the world, a 
force, which is universal, how could we think of computation as 
creative? How can we reimagine the concept of computational creativity 
as a shifting/epistēmē/, an underlying sensibility in the sense advanced 
by Hui (2019, 2021), which sets the conditions of our existence in 
relation to the cosmos and which, consequently, demands from us to 
generate new syntheses of thought? From this perspective, the question 
of computational creativity needs to be articulated in light of 
algorithmic logos creating systemic conditions for structural 
transformation of the world, reconfiguring the bonds between space-time, 
objects and actions. It is a new algorithmic governmentality operating 
beneath the surface, which Benjamin Bratton (2015) termed ‘the stack’ – 
a megastructure of multiple layers of systemic organisation stretching 
at a planetary scale, which follows the contingencies of its own 
internal logic. If the current creative power of computation is rather 
systematizing and totalising, tunnelling the future into mere 
probability of the past, what forms of resistance to this closure could 
we think of? How can we mobilise this creative power in the opposite 
direction so that it generates diversification and radical openness of 
the future?

The discussions in this special issue are invited to go beyond the mere 
opposition between automation and creativity and mobilise cosmotechnical 
(Hui) interpretations of computational creativity from 
non-anthropocentric, Indigenous, Afrofuturist, post-communist, East 
Asian, techno- feminist and other embodied localities, cultural 
intuitions and technogeneses.

Possible topics could include (but are not limited to) the following:

  * Creativity and automation
  * Creativity and cosmotechnics (Hui)
  * Automation and de-automation
  * Computational aesthesis (Fazi)
  * Computational creativity and deindividuation of authorship
  * Computational creativity and systematization
  * Planetary scale (Bratton) creativity, the noosphere (de Chardin)
  * Computational logic and aesthetic sensitivity
  * Techno-logos, instrumentality, creativity
  * Technological innovation, scientific discovery and artistic
    creativity/Tertiary protention/(Hui) and creativity
  * Creativity and recursivity
  * Creativity and the ‘imitation game’ (Turing)

Confirmed contributions by*Yuk Hui*and*Anna Longo*.

Submitted papers should not exceed 8,000 words (including references, an 
abstract of about 150 words, and a short list of keywords). Papers 
should be sent to the journal’s email address 
at:*(balkanjournalofphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)* 
<mailto:(balkanjournalofphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)>.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:*December 30, 2022*.

This special issue will appear in*2023*.


* The/Balkan Journal of Philosophy/ is indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.




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