Honolulu, Hawai’i. What meaning does artistic creativity have for the future development of humanity? A research project by Bert Chase, Patricia Dickson, Van James, and Regine Kurek.
In September 2022, the Worldwide Anthroposophical Society held a groundbreaking conference at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. The purpose of this conference was to bring together forward thinking individuals from around the world to look at key issues facing us collectively as human beings. Questions included those concerning world economics, its structure, and its impacts on human populations globally; questions concerning equality and identity; themes dealing with healthcare and nutrition, farming and urban renewal; and, for our current area of research, questions concerning the significance and role of creativity and artistic processes in human development and their influence on our shared future.
This research has been taken up by the council of the Visual Arts Section in North America. The following is an initial overview and distillation of the extensive research undertaken to date by this research group.
Background
For some time, those concerned with the future of humanity’s cultural life have warned of the ongoing diminution of a shared understanding for the role and significance of cultural institutions and activities. This diminishing consciousness has, over decades, led to an ongoing reduction of support for cultural institutions and of funding for the education of the future creative individuals needed to support and develop a rich cultural life. When faced with financial constraints, schools most often reduce or eliminate creative programs as a first step toward balancing budgets. In many situations, the artistic education of young people suffers—irrespective of the art or medium. This long standing, gradually diminishing recognition of the significance of the arts leads us to our current situation.
What has evolved is a pervasive lack of understanding of what occurs in creative processes, irrespective of the medium or the creative engagement. Is it this lack of a sense for the significance of what occurs in cultural collectively, and in the development of the individual, that has resulted in an accelerating marginalization of creative endeavors?
This diminishment has created the vacuum, the void, that the field of artificial intelligence beckons to fill. This is not an absence in the world, but a deep sense of a lack of something significant that is missing in the inner life of the human being.
The extensive, all pervasive artificial intelligence industry, which currently invests billions of dollars annually in its development, must find ways to monetize its investments. Part of this monetizing process is its entry into the universe of creative fields using digital platforms currently in development. Creators of these platforms are now the ones most often deeply concerned about them.
Against this broad cultural background, a new mythology is in the process of being created. In essence, the evolving narrative is that the activities that we identify with as the human capacity to create, and the individual creative person, can now be subsumed by complex, multilayered computing. This narrative only further undermines, at an accelerated pace, the deterioration of support and understanding of creative thought and activity.
The Research Project
Against this background, a group of artists in North America—together with the Visual Arts Section council—have taken-up an international research project. The aim of this project is to uncover and deepen our collective understanding of the impacts of creativity on the individual and on society as a whole. In an attempt to develop an easily comprehended working framework that is applicable in multiple settings, the research project has been subdivided into two phases. First, to research what takes place and what the impacts are of creative activities. Second, to research the significance of what arises out of creativity and how it fashions—if at all—the future of individuals and our collective future.
For the first phase of the research project, the research team identified three main steps that occur in any creative process: First, the beginning, or the commencement of a process. Where does creativity come from and how can it be characterized? Second, its ongoing development once begun. What is the nature of the engagement needed for its continuation and what is it like being in the”zone”? Third, its completion or conclusion. How does the artist know the process has come to a conclusion? How does it end and has it in fact ended?
Irrespective of the medium or the creative endeavor, all creative processes go through these three stages. What has evolved through this research is an awareness that what at first may seem like simple steps is in fact a more complex life process.
The second phase of the research project which is focused on future impacts and the significance of creativity, is currently in the process of being developed out of what is arising in the first phase. It will be taken up in the coming year or two.
Phase One: Summary of Research to Date
Observations arising from the commencement of a creative process: There is something about the beginning of the process which has a resistance or hindrance that needs to be overcome. In order to push through this barrier or overcome the resistance, the creator/artist, needs to engage a focused intention and will towards the task: initiation of effort and attention. The process involves a relationship that develops between the creator and something in the environment: time, materials, etc. This is complex in that the world needs to organize itself in such a way that the inner world of the creator comes to a point of seeing or recognizing something coming towards one. If this recognition, or a sense of meeting, of engagement, doesn’t occur, then the calling up of the will of the creator doesn’t take place.
Observations on being in the continuity of the process: In describing how the creative process continues once it has begun, the terms harmonizing and balancing often occurred. A deeper understanding of what the inner experience is being referred to by these terms is needed in order to come closer to an understanding of the impact of this second phase of the creative process. Being “in the zone”, in “a holy space”, a “place out of time” or with “a different sense of time” and “receiving rather than giving” have been mentioned by participants in the study.
Observations on the conclusion of the process: This experience can vary depending on whether there is or is not a deadline to the project. For some this may seem like a “little death,” while for others it is a kind of “birthing process” and a “release.” It may even be that there is no conclusion to the creative process, but only a diminishing to a temporary point of closure.
Numerous group artistic activities have been undertaken for the purpose of exploring these three stages of artistic creativity. Phase Two of the research project, which deals with the future impact and the significance of creativity, is currently being developed based on the findings from the first phase. It will begin in the fall.
Image Painting by Van James
