The 2019 U-Create Seminar will be dedicated to examining the increasingly impactful role creativity plays in society at large, science, business and multiple areas of research. What are the demands on creative thinking and ways of working today? How can we understand creativity in light of the exceeding influence of artificial intelligences and automation on our patterns of innovation?
Moreover, there is a growing acknowledgement of the incapacity of any one discipline to address and make sense of the complex problems we face single-handedly. Hence, working across multiple disciplines requires a process of ‘opening up’ to creativity that the seminar will address from different angles through presentations by three distinguished guest speakers: Ursula Bertram (Professor UT Dortmund, Artist), Anne-Françoise Schmid (Philosopher) & Nishant Shah (Theorist, Vice President Research ArtEZ University, NL). The seminar will also have commentary speakers from Aalto University.
The objective of the U-Create Seminar on Creativity is to set the agenda for an ongoing and evolving discussion on the exigency, significance and future of creativity across society, industry and academia.
Schedule:
10.00 – 10.10: Introductory Comments by Bassam El Baroni and Juuso Tervo
10.10 – 10.55: Keynote 1: Anne-Francoise Schmid: Invention, fiction, creation
11:05 – 11:50: Keynote 2: Nishant Shah: The unbearable cleanliness of creativity: Of pornographers, pirates, and pagans
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch Break
13:05 – 13:50: Keynote 3: Ursula Bertram: Is Christmas already over? About artistic thinking
13:50 – 15:00: Open Panel Discussion with Contributions by Aalto University Conversants: Jouko Lampinen, Emmi Pouta, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Henri Weijo, Matthew C. Wilson (Moderated by Bassam El Baroni and Juuso Tervo)
15:00: Closing Remarks
The U-Create Seminar is free and open to members of the general public as well as the Aalto community. Students are encouraged to attend. Refreshments and snacks will be available.
Please Register for the Event here.
Abstracts of the keynotes
Professor Ursula Bertram (UT Dortmund): Is Christmas already over? About artistic thinking
Disruptive, non-linear, unruly thought and action have always led to great works of art, path-breaking inventions and forward-looking perspectives. But how can this precious good find its way into our everyday working life to help us deal with social, ecological and economic challenges?
The crucial step, Ursula Bertram contends, is to reach a synergy of logically justifiable knowledge and the capacity to navigate in open systems. To find out how such synergy could come about, Ursula Bertram has observed the strategies and principles of artists, choreographers, musicians and unruly thinkers and compared them with the statements of physicists, mathematicians, managers and researchers. She shows that when artistic thought is circulated and probed in non-artistic fields, an extremely efficient pattern called artistic transfer emerges.
Philosopher Anne-Françoise Schmid: Invention, fiction, creation
Starting from invention - often mono-disciplinary - in philosophy, we will broaden the subject by adding fiction. This is distinguished from invention by the assumption of a point of externality and a new opening of space. It prepares for variations of various disciplines and engages in a more generic process.
Creation, a quasi-divine affair, touches more closely the forms of reality. Creation leads to an interpretation of language as a forcing and modifies the functions of metaphor, confronting them with the impossible. Creation is indifferent to disciplines while making use of them. We will propose based on this a sequence: that there is an X, it is possible to make the X, the real = X of a public work, the construction of a common = X between philosophies, arts and sciences.
Vice President Research (ArtEZ University, NL) Nishant Shah: The unbearable cleanliness of creativity: Of pornographers, pirates, and pagans
Conversations around creativity often lead to gentrification and glorification of the creative actor. Creativity is often presented both as a scarce resource and as a privileged site of intervention making. Even when the focus is on ‘everyday creativity’ or ‘generalized creativity’ that interpellates everybody into the creativity discourse, there is a wilful erasure of bodies and subjectivities that are often not recognized or in fact penalized for being creative.
The unclean, the forbidden, the disruptive, and the dangerous are often sacrificed at the altar of creativity matrices. In this talk, concentrating on the technologized approaches to creativity, Shah will explore the limitations of the creativity discourse and propose that we need to make creativity dirty in order to account for its different futures.
About the speakers
