Creativity favors the inner beginner. This was the message we took home last month from a national symposium on creativity at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. A light green haze hung in the dogwoods in and around campus, but spring was not the only thing in the air there. We sensed a hum of joint exploration and purpose among the many researchers from many fields in inquiry who came to give talks, hear lectures, attend performances and converse with one another. We found people willing to break out of their expert fields, to embrace multi-disciplinary endeavor and to consider in their work diverse notions of aesthetic and intellectual purpose. Three themes in particular ran through our two-day experience like sap in the trees. Let's call them supra-disciplinarity, the creator as neophyte, and creativity as a positive social value. The future of innovation depends upon them.
Supra-disciplinarity combines methods, tools and processes from many fields to address complex, multi-variable problems. It begins by acknowledging connections between disparate fields. The physicist Josh Frieman and the filmmaker, Abigail Child formally discussed points of contact they saw between their respective interests and endeavors. In preparing for their formal conversation, they discovered a shared fascination with certain ideas, like time, and shared commitment to certain knowledge-building strategies, like aesthetically informed discovery and play. Though no one argued that film making or theoretical physics produced equivalent intellectual or emotional results, there was a sense that these two practitioners met as creators equally captivated by the same fundamentals of wonder and exploration.
This common understanding was only a hop, skip and a jump from the kind of problem-solving collaborations that David Edwards, a biotechnologist at Harvard, tries to jumpstart at his experimental art-and-science center in Paris, Le Laboratoire. Edwards deliberately pairs artists and scientists whose complementary skills and convergent interests promise breakthrough ideas and inventions, from the gustatory (inhalable chocolate, anyone?) to the environmental (how about a living air filter, shown at left?).
It takes a particular, and even peculiar, kind of person to break through disciplinary boundaries and redraw intellectual or commercial markets. Whether artist, scientist, inventor or entrepreneur, we met individuals driven to follow inner drummers and strike out in unconventional directions. Often they are remixing and repurposing hitherto discrete ways of understanding things and being in the world. Edwards, whose own fields of endeavor combine biology, engineering, writing novels, and starting businesses, spoke of himself as a serial neophyte.
Neophyte means beginner. Neophyte is the opposite of expert. The serial neophyte is one who relishes the prospect of feeling a kid again, embracing the uncertainty of ignorance and discovering new things constantly. The serial neophyte, first cousin to the polymath, purposefully moves from one discipline and one venture to another, transferring thinking skills and problem-solving strategies as he or she goes.
Another symposium presenter, the artist Meredith Monk (portrait at left), has most definitely embraced the neophyte within, which, in the Buddhist tradition, she calls "beginner's mind." As an artist at work on the cutting edge of multi-media performance, Monk has fended off fear of the unknown by purposefully placing herself in the moment of art-making, trusting in the discovery process, waiting for problems and their solutions little by little to make themselves known. In a capstone concert, she demonstrated what may sometimes be the glorious result: creating a whole new dimension of human possibility. Monk did more than sing. With unusual sounds, hums, clicks, ululations and exhalations, she gave expression to the universe.
That's a tall order. By wearing the various hats of composer, vocalist, choreographer, dancer, filmmaker and performance artist, most often simultaneously, Monk takes it in her stride. Her particular blend of these art forms took root in one formative flash of inspiration: that her voice could move like the body, and like the body, was capable of a wordless vocabulary of images and emotions. For over forty years, she has dedicated herself to the discovery of that language, in the process breaking down specializations in art (voice is not dance is not image) and reintegrating them into a new whole (voicedanceimage).
Embracing the beginner within, not just in one field of endeavor, but in many, Monk has proven herself, in the words of one critic, "a provocateur, a pathfinder, even a prophet of sorts" (Ulrich). As we learned at the symposium, these characteristics place Monk in close company with entrepreneurs in many fields of endeavor. Successful entrepreneurs, along with successful artists, scientists and inventors, tend towards the visionary, show high levels of persistence and willingness to take risks.
These behaviors and mindsets come in handy for anyone set on generating novel ideas and effective inventions. The particular job of the entrepreneur is something more, however: to turn creative ideas and inventions into viable innovations. The entrepreneur, in other words, creates commercial products and economic markets that drive business. This is true whether the innovation in question is the next iteration of gee-whiz technology (think Twitter); the next workable strategy for alleviating poverty (e.g. micro-financing); or the next new forum for stimulating art science collaborations (among which, David Edwards' Le Laboratoire in Paris).
Like many in attendance at the symposium, we tried on a diverse idea or two ourselves-chief among them the notion that artistic and scientific creativity might fruitfully be understood as a kind of intellectual entrepreneurship, akin to the social and commercial kind. (In which case, Monk has been a pioneering intellectual entrepreneur.) Add to that the rather different idea that the challenges of today and tomorrow increasingly require the supra-disciplinary neophyte, whether working individually or in teams, to synthesize solutions that have thus far eluded specialized experts and to "bring them to market" in the arts, sciences and technologies. When novel arts and sciences expand our human understanding, when social policies and commercial technologies improve quality of life for more people, creativity takes center stage as a positive social value.
And here's another diverse thought. We might all profit, in professional vocation or personal avocation, from embracing our inner beginner, learning new things and starting afresh again and again and again... Do we dare?
© Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein 2009
References
Ulrich, Allan. (February 13, 2006). Meredith Monk's eerie vocals have led her to unique synthesis of arts. San Francisco Chronicle, C1.
Available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/13/DDGNA...
For more on Meredith Monk, see http://www.meredithmonk.org/
For more on Le Laboratoire, see http://www.lelaboratoire.org/
For more on the Wake Forest Symposium on Creativity, see http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/15/finding-the-creati...
Photo of dogwood blossoms by Martin LaBar
