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SYMPOSIUM PAPERS Selected Papers from Creativity and Cognition Burleigh Court, Loughborough University, England, 13-15 April 1993 In April 1993, a gathering of artists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, designers and musi­ cians from North America, Japan, Australia and Europe took place at Loughborough University of Technology, in the U.K. This was the first International Symposium on Creativity and Cognition [1]. The main aim was to bring together leading practitioners from the fields of creative practice, the study of creative thought and computer support systems for creative tasks, in order to promote dialogue between these different perspectives. My personal motivation in proposing the symposium was that I had attended many meetings over the previous few years [2-5] in which experts had discussed creative practice and theory, but all of these meetings had included only a subset of the relevant experts. Artificial intelligence, cog­ nitive science and philosophy were often discussed together, as were art practice and theory. The missing discussion from these wide-ranging meetings was the one that brought all of these con­ cerns together. That is what we did at Creativity and Cognition. This was an enterprise in the tradi­ tion that Leonardo has always promoted. Artists and scientists may think differently in important re­ spects but, for both, their exposure to new views of creativity proved stimulating and mutually beneficial. This special section of Leonardo brings together several of the presented papers that, in part at least, reveal the open, diverse but fully engaged nature of the symposium. With one exception, the papers here are revised versions of presentations made at the symposium. The exception is Vera Molnar's contribution. She is welcomed as a guest contributor here not only because of the high quality of her computer-related art, but also because she would have been at the symposium if cir­ cumstances had allowed it. At the time, some of the ideas discussed were certainly influenced by her work. Vera Molnar's paper describes the creative process as illustrated by the development of a series of computer-based works that derived from samples of her mother's writing. One particularly inter­ esting aspect of this process is the reflection upon tradition, or classical principles, that it contains. It is instructive to note that scientific descriptions of creativity make particular play on the break­ ing with convention that often marks the creative moment [6]. The other related point is the sig­ nificance of practice—that is, of the making of the artwork itself, in the creative development [7]. It is no accident that the act of making a work is described by Molnar as an "experiment." Stephen Bell also describes a process in the development of his art, but his paper is less con­ cerned with the cognitive processes of the artist and more with those of the audience. As has been argued for some time, one of the key impacts of computer technology on the arts is likely to be in the area of participatory art [8,9]. The point is that the speed of the electronic computer allows us to construct interactive artifacts with feedback, which was previously impossible. Bell's paper de­ scribes his work and identifies a set of characteristics by which, according to his investigations, par­ ticipatory artworks can be evaluated. Thus, the implications of the new technology for the arts is specifically addressed. Fre Ilgen, on the other hand, attempts to relate recent scientific work, concerned with space and time, to certain twentieth-century developments in art practice. His discussion provides an ex­ ample of the importance of the artist's dream, which so often draws upon the dream of the scien­ tist. It is not necessarily the case that the art practice is "scientific" or that it logically depends upon scientific truths. Much more significant is the influence of scientific imagination upon the artist and, perhaps, vice versa. In the next paper, Arthur Miller takes an historical perspective on the relationship between sci­ entific and artistic thought. Basing his comments on studies of both scientists and artists, he finds a reciprocal relationship between the two. He argues that the artist seeks what the scientist assumes to exist. However, both...

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