Pilot: Distributed Creative Cognition in Choreography

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The intellectual history of science and computer science has placed undue weight on the propositional, symbolic and linguistic side of thought; leaving unexplained how thought can occur in non-verbal systems, based closer to our senses, and often coordinated with non-verbal processes in the socio-technical world. The goal of this study is to develop a new computational model of creativity based on an experimental and ethnographic study of choreographic invention. The core question is how the distributed system consisting of choreographer and dancers are able to be so generative. In all design and research work, creativity inevitably makes important use of non-propositional thinking. It is important, therefore, to deepen our insight in this ill-understood process. A further reason to study choreographic production is that it resembles large design and research projects in taking place over many weeks or months, it involves the collaboration of multiple parties, and a new production may easily cost a million dollars. At a group level the dynamics are similar to other large design efforts.The choreographer being studied has developed techniques for keeping the generative phase of the creative process open longer and for maintaining substantial variance among the dancers despite the urge for group think and convergent behavior. He has also developed techniques for exploiting the coding language of sensory systems, of both himself and his dancers, to create new movement ideas. In this project shareable ethnographic and experimental data will be gathered that broadens the development of new computational theories about: 1) Distributed creativity: how the distributed components work to generate creative product - the mechanisms by which team members harness resources to interactively invent new concepts and elements, and then structure things into a coherent product; and 2) Embodied cognition: how the embodied aspect of cognition is harnessed to generate new 'thought' - the mechanisms by which designers, engineers, artists, dancers, and scientists think non-propositionally, using parts of their own sensory systems as simulation systems, and in the case of dance, using their own (and other's) bodies as active tools for physical sketching. The close study of both of these processes bears directly on the goals of developing new theoretical models of creativity and new models for research and education that will foster and reward creativity. The theory relocates creativity from a within-the-mind process to a more socio-technical process involving resources and other people; and it recognizes the important role that bodies and sensori-motor systems - both non-verbal and perhaps sub-rational elements - play in creative cognition.