There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between (...) creativity and the perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

Dans les années 2000, Paul Ardenne avec l'art contextuel et Nicolas Bourriaud avec le concept d'esthétique relationnelle, donnaient forme à un nouvel ensemble de pratiques artistiques participatives. Qu'en est-il aujourd'hui de cette activité qui ne vise pas tant à produire des objets que des relations humaines? En donnant la parole à des artistes, des designers, des chercheurs de disciplines associées pour évoquer les questionnements qui sont les leurs, dans le cadre de la plate-forme de recherche Artem (ARt, TEchnologie, Management), ce (...) livre montre comment ces pratiques débordent désormais le champ de l'art et développent une nouvelle conception de la créativité où être créatif n'est pas seulement renouveler un ensemble de produits ou de gestes, mais aussi repenser les milieux auxquels ces produits sont destinés et au sein desquels ils sont conçus, posant les bases d'une nouvelle individuation individuelle et sociale. (shrink)

"LiteraCity is a literary and cultural mapping project of Kuala Lumpur. This book contains essays, interviews and photo essays that shed light of contemporary perspectives and discussions that go beyond existing discourse in regards to urban literature specifically in Kuala Lumpur"--.

In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with 'innovation' in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.

Partir à la rencontre d'artisans ou observer des plasticiens contemporains à l'oeuvre ; enquêter au sein d'écoles d'art, interviewer des compositeurs et auteurs ; se plonger dans les partitions du XVIIème siècle, étudier les fonds d'archives «rock» de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France ; ou encore écumer les rayonnages «rap» d'une discothèque : comment les chercheurs en sciences sociales peuvent-ils appréhender la création artistique?

The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons provides an extensive analysis of knowledge and creativity in twenty-first century networked culture. Analyzing massive projects like the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, and the Creative Commons Licenses, The Gifting Logos responds to a fundamental question, What does it mean to know something and to make something? With the idea of a gifting logos, Hartelius integrates three habits of a rhetorical epistemology: the invention of cultural materials such as text, images, and software; (...) the imbuing or encoding of the materials with the creator's experience; and the constitution and dissemination of the materials as gifts. (shrink)

Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the US Presidential election that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, (...) responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. (shrink)

This book is about aesthetic processes and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. They explore the underlying processes from many viewpoints, including the prehistoric roots of language and art; the historical evolution of artistic, literary, and musical styles; the structure of artworks from both gestalt and semiotic perspectives; the biological and psychological processes underlying production and appreciation; the appeal of sentimental art; emotional responses to art and other aesthetic forms; personality in relation to artistic style; the testing (...) and measurement of art-related skills; the relations between social life and literary understanding; literature in relation to media; as well as neurobiological, developmental and individual growth perspectives on play activity. (shrink)

La quête de repères identificatoires est probablement l'une des plus vieilles entreprises que l'humanité s'est donnée pour asseoir son histoire et construire sa mémoire. Toutes les sociétés, toutes les civilisations, fussent les pires totalitarismes, ont besoin d'une genèse héroïque — et donc exemplaire — pour fonder leurs origines. Une geste destinée à justifier leur présent ; un point de départ qui fixe un "avant" et un "après" et qui fait qu'à partir d'un événement créateur, selon la formule maintes fois annoncée, (...) toujours contredite : "rien ne sera plus jamais comme avant". On a tous besoin d'un père, tous besoin d'un géniteur, individuel ou collectif. Cette qualité peut naturellement se décliner sous différentes formes : le "père fondateur" est, selon les cas, un homme, une femme, un événement, un discours, un livre... Cet ouvrage se propose donc d'explorer ce concept, en croisant différentes approches : la linguistique, l'histoire, la philosophie, la littérature et le droit. (shrink)

A collection of previously published articles and essays.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Achieving Social and Cultural Educational Objectives through Art Historical Inquiry PracticesJacqueline Chanda (bio)Some overburdened art or generalist teachers may ask: "With all the things we have to know and do these days, why should we be interested in art history inquiry processes? What educational value is there in promoting the use of art history inquiry processes in teaching and learning?" The answer to the first question lies in (...) art history's relationship to the humanities and the visual arts. The humanities is the branch of learning concerned with human thought and relations. We turn to the humanities when we wish to understand the human condition, social and cultural values, and ourselves. But some might say that historical inquiry methods do the same thing. What distinguishes art historical inquiry from general historical inquiry is the focus on the visual arts. Visual arts are in the branch of learning that deal with the production and study of visual imagery and material objects. In the context of art history inquiry, visual imagery and material objects are the primary data used for the study of changes in ourselves; religious, social, and cultural values; and human conditions. Visual imagery is one of the universal ways that the human condition and social and cultural values of the past and present are expressed. It is one of the fundamental means by which humans communicate feelings, emotions, ideas, ideologies, etc.Art educators have acknowledged for a long time the importance of the study of images and visual elements in the lives of children and the field of art education. This is even more evident today as the discipline moves to embrace notions of "visual culture," which emphasize exploring and studying all the things that visibly shape our lives. The acknowledgment of art history as an inquiry process rather than simply the study of facts about past artworks developed in the discipline-based arts education (DBAE) [End Page 24] movement of the 1980s and 1990s.1 In spite of the recommendations that art history be explored as a discipline of inquiry, much of the art history investigations that take place in the classroom today focus on understanding the artist through his/her biography and understanding the work of art through analysis of style and formal description.2 While the artist biography brings to light the artist's intention and a formal description examines what one can see in the work and makes reference to aspects of style and formal elements, the two approaches do not provide enough information to generate meaning and speculate about what social and cultural elements may have caused the work of art to look the way it does or the effects it may have had at the time of its creation. Unfortunately, many educators are not aware of how to extend their investigations to uncover these levels of analysis.Erickson provides one definition of inquiry as describing, attributing (determining who created the work), reconstructing (determining what the object originally looked like), and interpreting the artwork.3 While these aspects are all a part of an art historical investigation, they do not go far enough into the practices utilized by art historians when exploring a work of art. Therefore, in the context of this article the phrase "art historical inquiry processes" refers to the use of authentic activities (asking questions, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting, speculating about cause or effect, and disseminating knowledge) and approaches that art historians use when studying works of art; this approach goes beyond what is clearly seen in visual imagery in order to reveal not only the denotative but also the connotative meanings that are relevant to the historical and cultural context of the artwork. These authentic activities incorporate approaches related to structural analysis (that is, contemporary analysis—iconography, iconology semiotics, feminism, etc.—that draws from literary reading skills to generate meaning) and explore, examine, and facilitate the drawing of conclusions about the significance and place of visual imagery and material objects in the societies from which they come.4 The purpose of this article is to discuss the value of studying visual images and material objects using authentic art history inquiry processes to uncover meanings, and by extension... (shrink)