Transformative Creativity in the Expanded Digital Field

The idea that art may (can/will) transform ‘society’ is not a new one. Some would call it idealism - or an ideology, even – to have anything outside the market create transformation. But changes over the last decade, in the cultural constitution of the world’s global culture and economy, have changed the attitude towards art and creativity

It is an important fact, that the art-is-transformation metaphor is a very strong driving force in the creative development of new ideas in the growing alternative culture of transdiciplinary domain-exchange. Art, in this instance, is practice, the facilitator of movements across domains and the dialogue between different fields of competences. It is, also, the implementer of new aesthetic paradigms.

There are some good examples to give from the art world, but indeed very few where society is, in fact – if not transformed – then being moved in a new direction. The question I want to rise here is what is the status of ‘transformation’ as an artistic form of practice? What, indeed, do we understand by ‘transformative creativity’ today?

It could be possible to identify three trends of transformative creativity that were (and still are) active in the formation of modernity, and the modern society: The rationalistic (bourgeois) trend focusing on progress and creation of technologies of (re)production and pleasure; the subjective (protestant) trend focusing on the emphatic now and the creation of individual experience ; the aesthetic (formalistic) trend, focusing on existence transcending time and space, and the creation of the radical ‘new’.

The question is: does transformative creativity today add something new? Is participatory practices brought on by digital technologies inside or outside the complex of modernity?

By analyzing examples from new art-practices like the Augmented Reality Project by the danish artgroup Boxiganga and the digital art/archive project MAP – Media Art Platform (Jacobsen og Søndergaard), which is using reactive media as a participatory strategy to map to a navigating audience the media art collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (DK), I will show that the modernistic trends of transformative creativity has changed dramatically. Instead of a division of (often) opposing trends, today technologies for (re)production, individual experiences, and the idea of the radical ‘new’ are all part of a transdisciplinary field, which I will call the expanded digital field.

The expanded digital field encompasses transformation of societal, cultural, political and individual creativity on three levels (my hypothesis): Technologies become reactive, hence reproduction of creativity becomes the standard for communication; Subjectivity enters into a dynamic exchange between opsis and optics (between the visual-as-system and vision) based on bodily experience; and, finally, aesthetic paradigms are augmented from the tactical to the meta-strategic level, exchanging the radical ‘new’ as style with radical new domains.