From 2015-2017,  Disappearing Acts, an artistic collective of dancemakers, performers, and intermedia artists, created a new work entitled 0 ⏎. The performance was a computer-augmented improvisational score with the goal of creating a new mode of improvisational performance that would allow the computer to be a co-choreographer in the artistic work. You can read more about the piece here. This original dance piece was made years before Generative AI and LLMs became ubiquitous in a wide range of creative practices. Using custom software that ​generated the video projections, audio, and music for the performance from a series of small data sets that were fed into the program, the computer became an “engaged” participant in the work. The performers were challenged to improvise with the computer as it algorithmically derived commands and inserted projections that impacted the dance and the​ ​dancers’ choices during the performance. 

0 ⏎ remake is a new project, sponsored by a Berkeley Center for New Media Seed Grant. A new collective of artists and technologists is revisiting the concepts uncovered in 0 ⏎ in a world where Generative AI and LLMs are widely used and highly engaging. Drawing from the first version, this collective group is using specific theories of creativity to inform working with generative AI systems, namely:

1. We are building off the definition of creativity refined by Dr. Ruth Richards “Creativity is our ability to adapt to changing circumstances, to generate new ideas, and to express ourselves in ways that are meaningful to us and potentially to others.” Creativity is linked to well-being. Expressing creativity helps people grow psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Creativity is adaptive. It's a resource for navigating uncertainty, change, and complexity. Creativity is relational It often emerges in connection to others, cultures, communities, and environments.

2. Earthseed values based on Octavia Butler's book Parable of the Sower. The central tenet of Earthseed is that "All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change." This aligns similarly with process philosophy, especially the work of Alfred North Whitehead, which views reality as dynamic. Nothing exists in isolation, and creativity, novelty, and emergence are not accidents but are the core of how reality works. The collaborators of 0 ⏎ remake paid special attention to these principles as we engaged with and explored the potential of generative AI to impact our artistic choices. And, at the same time, we explored how the AI responded to us and adjusted its responses to our new prompts and directions  -  humans and AI impact each other in the act of co-creation.

3. N. Katherine Hayles’ theories of cognitive assemblages and the nonconscious cognition of intelligent systems offered a crucial perspective in shifting away from anthropocentric approaches. Hayles’ work challenges the notion that cognition resides solely in the human mind, instead framing it as a distributed process across humans, animals, machines, infrastructures, and environments where all participants equally contribute to a process of world-making and meaning-processing. When it comes to AI, Hayles resists the binary of artificial versus natural intelligence and instead emphasizes relationality and interdependence. In her view, AI should not be understood as an isolated system of computation but as a participant in larger cognitive ecologies.

4. Yoed Kenett and Roger Beatty's research on associative networked thinking and creativity. Associate thinking theory investigates how we  create new ideas based on recombining prior knowledge into unexpected  associations. How we search, retrieve and combine information from our prior knowledge greatly impacts our creative capacity.  The 0 ⏎ remake collaborators explored how AI and humans work together to recombine existing information into new and unexpected ideas and modes of thought and/or making.

5. Alfred Korzybski’s work from 1933 Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics "A map is not the territory." But, if the map is accurate it can help us get to new places and be quite useful. Korzybski was interested in how language, symbols, and thought shape our perception of reality. He warned that when people mistake words for things, or descriptions for experience, symbols for reality it can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding. How accurate can generative AI be in mapping the human experience? What complications arise when AI no longer is considered an abstraction of the real, but instead becomes a new reality altogether? Will we know if we humans are the map or the territory?

6. Danah Henriksen's Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (the seven transdisciplinary habits of mind) and Sara Beckman and Michael Barry's Learning as Innovation: Embedding Design Thinking, informed much of our creative process which included working through these practices:

Close observational skills - increased noticing 

Pattern thinking

Abstract thinking

Embodied thinking and empathy - kinesthetic way of thinking and knowing

Modeling and prototyping

Play and improvisation

Synthesis and framing

Themes that emerged during our process inlcuded the following: