Looking at Creativity

Following an interactive Creativity exhibition in mid October, “LOOKING AT THINKING – The Mind at Work”, as part of Heritage Open Week, BRLSI plans a new themed programme on Creativity in 2012. This is a call to those involved in research, study or experimentation in the fields of imagination and the processes of creativity who may wish to give a paper. A few thoughts follow.
Just as Man conjures with his imperfection, and Nature delights in experiment as the very key to evolution, so Curiosity drives our conscious enterprise and catalyses our imagination. Or does it?
What are the parameters of novelty; how indeed does it arise? Is it laboriously sought, or spontaneously revealed? The ways of Creativity are perhaps unfathomable, but its manifestations are everywhere proclaimed, sometimes to dazzle, yet sometimes in sad, vain rescue of the commonplace.
At a time when unexpected phenomena challenge Man’s ways, and where economic imbalances leave mature economies with the need to rejuvenate, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution is inviting a broad range of speakers to make presentations on many aspects of this fugitive phenomenon we call Creativity.
From the development of early hominids, obscured to us by modern sophistications, to the dizzy imaginings of cyber-science, we shall pursue every inviting trail in this journey.
Might Creativity be a spark that floats, then catches tinder, or a photon, at once particulate and undulatory; or is it rather a process of conjugated energies that sense and find their opportunity, or their goal?
What might be its dangers – envy, disorder, war, profligacy, crop catastrophe – and their prevention?
Should we consider that Creativity gains vitality from challenge and the prospect of danger, or believe, with the rise of social sciences, that it can be encouraged, as is a keystone of present educational policy?
What do you think? What do you see?
Comments, proposals to participate, suggestions of topic or speaker, and other relevant ideas are welcomed at creativity@brlsi.org, with telephone numbers if possible.