Computational Creativity through a Gap

A significant aspect of creativity is its elusive mystery. Unlike pure novelty or pure originality and adaptability, creative ideas have an aura of something which is unanticipated, yet, in a way not completely surprising, but providing insight into familiar ideas. This position paper wishes to focus on this mysterious aspect of creativity and discusses uncertainty and the creative gap as aspects that are part of creative thinking processes in generative art and design. This paper argues that a significant part of the mechanism underlying a creative process using generative methods is a cognitive gap or dissonance between the human mind of the designer or artist and its otherness, the non human computer expressivity. What is re-established through this gap is a feedback process between the designer and the computer or its algorithmic expressivity that serves as an autonomous agent. This process of feedback can at a certain point give rise to some new insight, and thus enables the generative design or artistic process to become creative.