Roundup: Hybrid Talks XXXIV "Creativity"

The 34th Hybrid Talks, faced the challenge of finding the imaginary in the field of creativity. Our speakers from different disciplines have tried to capture "creativity" a little more concretely from the perspectives of philosophy, aesthetic education and the arts.

Prof. Dr. Simone Mahrenholz finds her access to creativity through a philosophical approach and speaks about the "Black Box Creativity" in her talk. A process that we can not visibly grasp in its structure, but that is definitely worth talking about. Although we cannot look into the black box, we are quite concerned about the process that leads to creativity. For this, Mahrenholz refers to the 4-phase model (1st preparation, 2nd incubation, 3rd illumination, 4th verification) by Graham Wallace, in which the 2nd phase of the incubation plays the decisive role: creativity happens exactly in those moments when we do not think and give ourselves a break. While we consciously turn away from something, the mind-game continues in the back of the mind. This brings a changed starting position for a problem and flashes the possibility of a solution. Her conclusion: creativity takes time to incubate!

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Prof. Dr. Kirsten Winderlich is leading the "grund_schule der künste" since 2012 at UdK Berlin, a space-based teaching and research model. During our 34th Hybrid Talks, she speaks of her personal driving force for this aesthetic education project, which, among other things, resulted from the lack of perspective shifts and artistic access in textbooks. Children should open up our world through these books, but they have no way of producing something of their own, discovering the unexpected and venturing a change of perspective. Thus, at the beginning of the development process of the language education book, she established the idea of ​​the empty space, which not only breaks the linearity of the narrative flow, but also creates space as a productive gap for own stories, inventions or paraphrases and thus promotes one's own reception.

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Monika Grzymala worked as a sculptor, draftsman and installation artist and enriches our evening with the artistic perspective on the subject: „Space drawing: Hand-driven thinking within real and virtual space“. Grzymala gives us an insight into her personal creativity process and reports on her development of a new form of expression. At the beginning of her studies, she worked very figuratively, lifelike and colourful regarding her sculptures and thought through sensible spatial arrangements in order to present them. But to give her art more depth and strenght, she was looking for new ways to see and express her work differently. During a study with Bogomir Ecker at the HBK Hamburg, she developed her first space drawing, through a line that found its starting point in a notebook and took its course on Grzymala's own four walls.

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Prof. Dr. Günter Abel comes from the theoretical philosophy and speaks about "The Mystery of Creativity" in his lecture. At the beginning of his talk, he first of all sets the distinction between something "new" and something "novel" - the "new" being born without having been there before and thus carrying a radical creativity that is able to break old patterns and the "novel", which recombines previous elements according to previously known rules. A third kind of creativity, he calls the "Intuitive Creativity", which deals with things of everyday life and the familiar. But no matter what kind of creativity we go for, Abel says we need to have a thorough knowledge, neet to want to try something new, relate and address different levels of description, and be able to transform mechanisms from one area into others.

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- Lena