Creativity in amateur multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI - 0 views
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shared by Nele Noppe on 23 Feb 10
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Today, especially in academic circles, this pop culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood. -
These analyses reveal relationships among emerging amateur multimedia aesthetics, common software authoring tools, and the three theorizations of creativity discussed 
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This paper explores the enabling factors, especially the role of multimedia authoring tools, in the recent explosion of amateur multimedia.
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Yet control over popular culture by mass media is clearly eroding
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HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity
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Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them. Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories
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this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI, poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.
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Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.
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Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was most often put in service of professional productivity software.
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HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words, “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity, especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in environments conducive to creativity.
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All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses, lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here, Page 17 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 15 and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses
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Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses, in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers. Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist- individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.
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The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.
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The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.
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(Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,
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In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule- transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages
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Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion Page 19 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 17 that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)
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Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.
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Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by technology.
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Like Schneiderman (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the comparatively meek procedures of science and governance
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As a result, according to Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.
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Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003) characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).
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For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.
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To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production. Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion; it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts, discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity
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Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?
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A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing) more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?
