The creative process calls upon a function of attention that includes movements that go beyond acts of attention usually predominant in daily life activities. This text develops the idea that creation involves a fluctuation of attention. By analyzing this fluctuation, one can see that creation is not a spontaneous process, and that it is intrinsically a process of self-creation. A study on the attention of blind and visually impaired participants in a ceramics workshop shows… Lire l'article

Digital technologies have spread to all fields of creation. Given the increasing diversity of related technologies and possibilities, it is no longer an option, for those who want to explore them, to master the entire chain of creation. Technical and industrial partnerships have become commonplace, but they remain complex to manage, particularly in terms of division of roles. The 15 experiments completed since 2007 by the ARNUM research group – art and digital research –… Lire l'article

This article is a reflection on the different ways of addressing conception, creativity and creation in design and project-related disciplines. To explore these terms related to design and the project-related act, the first part of this article will focus on value and controlling valorisation. The second part will focus on conception, creation and creativity in design and project-related disciplines. The third part of this article will focus on Paolo Deganello, Ikea and Carlo Mollino. These… Lire l'article

There is a genealogy to Abraham Moles' idea that the use of some ‘computing machine’ would allow us to take the first steps in understanding creativity. For example, in 1871 Charles Cros had devised a machine to simulate sight or hearing, that he proposed to replace the direct study of structures that determine these functions in living beings, in a treatise entitled Information Theory and Esthetic Perception. These were cinetic templates that he thought should… Lire l'article

Written in the second half of the 19th century, the work of Stéphane Mallarmé immediately and painfully envisaged itself as founded on a crisis of artistic creation, a crisis that the poet has never tried to overcome. He simply wanted to unfold and explore it in order to make it the constantly diverse theme of a form of poetry that reflected on its own practice and made writing the very place and instrument of a… Lire l'article

This article examines the relationship between creation and design. After defining the concept of a poiesis of design, the article considers the process of creation in design from the perspective of ‘work in progress’ and shows that it is based on an infinite loop of co-determination between thinking skills and modelling skills. Redefined from the cultural theory of Bruce Archer, modelling is presented as the fundamental and characteristic creative process of design. Far from being… Lire l'article

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Cet article s’intéresse aux liens qu’entretient la création musicale avec la douleur de l’auditeur. Il s’agit de voir comment l’émancipation de la musique par rapport à l’exigence de plaire aux sens modifie les pratiques créatives, en élargissant à la fois le matériau musical et la manière de l’agencer. A travers l’analyse d’exemples empruntés à la musique occidentale contemporaine savante et populaire, deux types d’inconfort sont envisagés : le premier concerne une écoute intellectuelle, tandis que le… Lire l'article

This text aims to lay the foundations for a way of evaluating creation, through newness. It links different fields (art, science and design), and endeavors to define their connection to creation. It considers an exchange of texts and practices, between art and science. It also evokes a range of newness, with a minimum and a maximum. It reviews gradualness, and relates gradual production to social acceptance, which would also be gradual. Creation is a discovery… Lire l'article

Duchamp is often presented as an artist who would render obsolete all creative practices that had preceded him. This article does not contest the critical import of his work, but shows that he followed the same paths as any artist, as he himself explained, and that he may have encountered the same challenges. The inventor of the readymade, the precursor of conceptual art, is often contrasted with the figure of the “inspired” artist. What if… Lire l'article

Since 2008, Greece has experienced the most tumultuous economic and political situation since the fall of the military Junta in 1974; the massive city riots and the subsequent and to the day ongoing economic crisis have shattered politico-economic stability. The domains of art and culture have not remained unaffected, and this subject has received attention in Greek and international press. This interest has transpired predominantly through a certain leitmotif; artistic creation is encouraged or has… Lire l'article

Exoticism is a concept created in France in the 19th century. Associated with colonialism and its incarnations, including tourism, exoticism has raised, in the late 20th century, a different kind of interest, in the light of historians” analyses of colonialism and the destruction it caused, and in the way artists and philosophers have responded to the past by using exoticism as a material and as evidence. Creating without denying history, notably by transforming exoticism, as… Lire l'article

The text below is like a daydream based on some pictures of sculptors of the late 19th century. Written for an exhibition catalogue, this short analysis is supported by several theories related to the history of the emancipation of female artists. First, one focuses on women who steadfastly claimed their role as an artist. Represented by a painter, sculptor and photographer, they illustrate the artistic gesture, regardless of whether they have a woman's body. They… Lire l'article

This article is based on a text of a conference that I gave at the Théâtre National de Chaillot, the 11th of February 2012, in the cycle of 'La Petite université populaire de la danse' and aims to grasp the intellectual and practical similarities between the concept of installation, which is traditionally assigned to the visual arts, and that of dance-movement, which is often considered as ephemeral and transitory. Through this comparison one can draw up… Lire l'article

This article examines the relationship between creation and novelization (i.e. the transposition in fictional form of films and screenplays). It first examines the reasons why novelization is considered “bad taste”, analyzing the institutional, aesthetic, semiotic and practical constraints that seem to stifle the work of the “novelizer.” Secondly, it opposes two ways to position oneself regarding these constraints: refusing them, on one hand, or considering them as a source of inspiration, on the other. Finally,… Lire l'article

This article considers the relationship between olfaction and creation from the perspective of contemporary Western visual art by combining multidisciplinary considerations, including field studies in art and science. It examines the role of olfaction in the aesthetic appreciation of the Fine Arts system, clarifying its value and its paradoxes in various fields. From the analysis of current art works and the evolution of creative practices, this article highlights the distinction between the odourisation of the… Lire l'article

The process of creating a pictorial form such as a painted panorama (form developed in the late eighteenth century) engages the viewer in a unique experience, in which figurative detail and accessories play a major role. Before the invention of the motion picture, pictorial panoramas offered a place where art and culture could meet, reaching a utopia of an all-inclusive view of the world, that both the gaze and the body could embrace, in real… Lire l'article

By juxtaposing and exploring the relationship between the terms art photography and manipulation, this article proposes to address a certain visual ambiguity. After revisiting the importance of indiciality, put forth by Charles Sanders Peirce and Rosalind Krauss, relative to new image practices, it aims to reconfirm the place of the creative act in indicial photography. This place has been replaced by the idea of trace or imprint. We will rehabilitate the former, before examining photographic… Lire l'article

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The creativity displayed by queer feminist activists in their self-designation and in the denominations they choose for their collectives shows us the full measure of the potential of language. Playing with phonetics and spelling, using neologisms, inventing new meanings, hybridizing concepts and displacing meaning are all the processes used in these linguistic creations. Their presentation is an opportunity to give an overview of queer feminism in France, a movement of critical thinking and activism, as… Lire l'article

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This article aims to question the concept of Romantic creation within its historical and philosophical context. A veritable turning point in aesthetics, the rise of Romanticism established the predominant role of the subject in art, and of the autonomous work. For the first time in art history, the classical concept of imitation of nature was deeply called into question, in favor of a philosophical, even mystical investigation of the inner foundations of the creative act.… Lire l'article

HIV/aids has marked history at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, for the havoc it has wreaked and the anxiety it has provoked since its discovery in the early 1980s, as well as for the clash of cultures, ideologies and habits it has given rise to (Grmek, 2005). For more than thirty years now, in response to new health and safety requirements, governments (by this idea, just like… Lire l'article

Is there room for spontaneity in visual arts? Answering this question is to consider the possibility of creating works of art without any planning of their future form and no preliminary sketches. This article will determine what are the conditions and reasons for spontaneity, while situating it in regard to instinct or habit, establishing the affinities between spontaneity and spontaneous creative acts, revealing the links between spontaneity and immediacy towards an unexpected act of creation… Lire l'article

Synthesizing skills are in high demand in the 21st century. Educators believe the synthesizing process goes hand in hand with creativity. As a synthetic communication tool, data visualizations such as infographics and word clouds can effectively convey complex information in simplified visual form. Examining samples of data visualizations made by college students, this paper will investigate the relationship between the creation of data visualization and synthesizing skills, as well as address how the creative process… Lire l'article

What goals for what teaching? When the question of teaching screenwriting and film direction is brought up, a host of questions arise: Are we talking about teaching filmmaking in public and private film schools, in primary, middle or high schools, in multidisciplinary universities ... or in continuing education seminars and workshops? Can we imagine teaching screenwriting solely through manuals? (Major books on screenwriting claim to provide rules on dramaturgy, to be applied indiscriminately.) Do we… Lire l'article

Is there any antagonism between tradition and modernity or, on the contrary, are we are faced with a scale of nuances whose extremities would be tradition and modernity? The 19th century saw the term “modernity” take on another meaning, to be closer to the meaning we use here, adding to the “modern” (current) sense a dimension of “rupture.” We have chosen an example from the field of artistic creation to test these allegations. To do… Lire l'article

In 1937, when he delivered his inaugural address (Discours au Collège de France) as the chair of poetics to the Collège de France, Paul Valéry (1871-1945) broke away from prescriptive poetics by creating the word poietics (poïétique in French) from the Greek poiein (poïein). This essential ï focuses on production by separating it from action (prattein) but also from phusis. What can be seen in all Valéry’s writings is the point of view of the… Lire l'article

In the past fifteen years, the women from Argentina and from a few South American countries have acquired growing freedoms. Still, it is clear that they have not yet managed to change traditions that are heavily rooted in a system of male domination based on a dominating and archaic model. This essay intends to analyze, in a heterodox manner, two works of art created by women that denounce violence: a poetic novel by Susana Romano… Lire l'article

While IT now populates many objects of our everyday life, one paradoxically finds it difficult to understand what is the virtual. The creations – for which and in which the virtual (i.e. modelling and programming) is explored –, do not represent the virtual but embody it to finally think or theorize it. The objective of this article is to use some of these creations to understand what they conceptualize and to see the virtual ‘in… Lire l'article