Stop talking about creativity

But not because it isn’t important — even crucial — to our future.
Because I propose we stop talking about creativity, and start talking about creativities.
It is a starting gesture, one I make without yet proposing a comprehensive theory or even strict definition for the terms at hand. With this shift in understanding, creativity itself multiplies from the uniquely human act often attributed to artists and innovators, to the entire possibility space for how things which exist might be recombined or extrapolated or performed to create things which, until that very moment, did not.
These alternative creativities don’t emanate exclusively from the realm of the human. Might it be productive to understand generative computer algorithms as an alternative form of creativity? What about biological patterns and processes?
It’s a concept that I’ve arrived at experientially through my own work as an electronic media artist, and one that I’ll be exploring further in future articles. I’m not especially interested in the semantics but rather what the (re)turn to an understanding of creativity as not exclusively human enables us, as humans, to do and think and acknowledge.
I’m following in the footsteps here of Kevin Kelley, who discusses artificial intelligence as relentlessly multiple (“The Myth of a Superhuman AI,” Wired). Contemporary discussions around artificial intelligence often implicitly assume a “general intelligence,” optimized in all possible metrics to surpass human cognition in all forms.
Yet if there is no single “general intelligence” we can attribute to or quantify in humans, why should we expect that we can program one into AI? Instead, Kelly suggests, “we will invent whole new modes of thinking that do not exist in nature,” some as hyper-specific as existent biological niches: a Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligences.
I believe we can say something similar for creativities. And that for the future we are already building, we may need to.
Cover photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
About this project
This article is the first in an exploration of why we should replace the notion of creativity (singular) with that of alternative creativities (both human and non-human). For more:
- “On the origin of creativity and species,” a look at the politicized history of our contemporary understanding of creativity.
- …more coming soon!

