Creativity, Technology and The Arts – John Cohen (1971)
from Cybernetics, Art and Ideas Edited by Jasia Reichard

• clockwork as a dominant metaphor for Leibniz / Newton – the big argument was not wether or not the universe was a clockwork, but whether or not god needed to intervene (Newton – yes; Leibniz – no)
• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
  • The Earth says, “I spin beneath my pyramid of night, Which points into the heavens, dreaming delight, Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep; As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing, Under the shadow of his beauty lying, Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”
  • Could only be written by someone with (Whitehead) ‘a definite geometrical diagram before his inward eye’
• Dostoevsky’s influence on Einstein – ‘experimental’ heroes willing to risk everything for knowledge
• Creativity, intution and chance:
  • William Blake – thought he was an antenna to god
  • Nealcles and the horse foam – throws his painter sponge on the painting and gets the right effect
  • Soto – valued what he found by pure chance
  • Cezanne – movement of the eye – “I could keep myself busy for months, without moving from one spot, just be leaning now to the right , now to the left”
  • Do we find the sculpture in the stone?
  • Babbage and the story of coming up with mechanical tables of calculation in a daze
• Dante’s disease – “The chief symptom is a presumptuousness which makes the patient suppose that he knows everything and so he affirms uncertain thingsas certain; what he approves is true and everything else is false. The result is that he cannot questinos, and insists that others should ask questions of him, but before a quation is well out he gives the wrong answer”
• Schiller’s rotting apples – the smell allowed him to write
• The input output myticism of creativity: We admire most that which brings much from nothing – i.e.: with fewer inputs we ascribe more to the individual. “The smaller the part played by the input and the bigger the part played by the individual as transducer, the more creative we regard the output. In the limit – when the input is zero, achieved only by the gods – we have creatio ex nihilo“