Artificial Creativity?

I'm still not certain that I can support artificial creativity as being fully creative. By definition of developing something appropriate and new contingent upon the situation, I feel like the artificial aspect of these arts take away from the true creative style. As I mentioned in class, I feel like the arts we discussed (music, the computer painter, the story creator, etc) become more of an application of creative thought than an outlet for creative process.

For example, last semester in our theatre class we were told to put on a scene from Peter Pan on a program called Second Life. Second Life is a program where people make an avatar to look anyway they want and then run around creating things and making friends in a virtual world (thus, their "second life"). Though the process was fascinating...including building the terrain to look like the set, dressing our characters, rehearsing on the program, gathering props like handbows, and working through all the kinks and whatnot...it still does not compare to the creative process of constructing a real show. Gestures, acting techniques, full control of the body, and the ''onspot''ness of being in a real show were completely lost. I'm not saying that these experiences qualify the meaning of theatre, but I do think that the creativity process of doing a real show plays both a pivotal role and an important skill of understanding the tasks of a performer.

I will not deny that the makers of this program are extremely creative, but it almost seems that one accounts those people's creativity as one's own when playing this game or making up a story, etc...You aren't building anything on there, you're applying what you're given and claiming it for your own. At the end of the semester our class got into a heated debate over if this scene that we had done qualified as theatre. The argument lasted for over an hour, so I'll spare the details but I do think its a form...just like radio theatre or pantomime, but a form where something is missing to make a complete image. Just because it takes less time to make a tree out of pixels than it does out of plywood doesn't make it any better or more creavite (simply on the grounds of being faster). If the experience is anything its new and unique, but as discussed in class that is not the entire explanation of creativity.

So, with all this said I really can't say I fully support artificiality as a creative art. The makers of it are creative, the process behind it is creative, but I'm not sure that the application of another person to act as a parasite off of these means qualifies.

Kate Lawrence