Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity in general is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas (conceptual, theoretical, musical, literary, or visual). Boden identifies three forms of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. These elicit differing forms of surprise, and are defined by the different kinds of psychological process that generate the new ideas. Boden examines creativity not only in traditional fine art, but also in craftworks, and some less orthodox approaches--namely, conceptual art and several types of computer art. Her Introduction draws out the conceptual links between the various case-studies, showing how they express a coherent view of creativity in art.

Margaret A. Boden is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex. She is a Fellow (and past Vice-President) of the British Academy, and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (and its British and European equivalents), and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2002 she was awarded an OBE for services to Cognitive Science, and she holds a Cambridge ScD as well as honorary doctorates from Bristol, Sussex, and the Open University. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, her earlier degrees were in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology.