Creativity in Art, Change and Survival

Don Foresta & Edwige Armand

Why art is linked to the survival of humans in general. We start from an ancestral point of view and end with a look at the world [ http://airmail.calendar/2018-04-20%2012:00:00%20EDT ]today. The roots of art are to be found very far in the past of our species, hundreds of thousands of years, long before homo sapiens. We develop the idea that art is a product of instinct in the sense proposed by Bergson, that it is linked to the creation of perceptions essential for the evolution of our representations. Art in its earliest expression is linked to the premise of symbolic thought and the found object. Creativity comes from a crisis in perception, in the sudden incomprehension of the outside world and is a temporary solution to resolve these crises. Instinct is then mobilized to find an explanation, bringing in new information and thereby causing a shift in perception. In the beginning of life, cognition, perception, imagination, sensations are of the order of the unlimited incomplete. However, culture shapes intuition before actualization is arrived at.  Creativity thereafter serves as a safeguard against the perceptual, cognitive normalization of the human being, creating disorder in the secure perceptual certainty that science and technology contribute to by inserting tools between us and the outside world to understand it. Technology, itself an expression of creativity, is our invented interface with the exterior, allowing us to better control it which, in turn, influences our perception of this exterior. By giving that technology a symbolic meaning, we make it an integral part of our culture and close the circle, only to start again. Much experimentation and artistic production of the 20th century was an exploration of interactivity. The notion of connection was and is a leitmotiv in current artistic creation that brings us to a kind of neo-animism, making it a new paradigm for the 21st century. The rhizomic idea – the network paradigm – better defines the relationship between human beings than the separate and replaceable parts of the mechanical era of the first renaissance.