• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• 1: Introduction


• 2: Creativity in a Nutshell


• 3: Are Autodidacts Creative?


• 4: Crafts, Perception, and the Possibilities of the Body


• 5: Creativity and Conceptual Art


• 6: Personal Signatures in Art


• 7: What is Generative Art?


• 8: Agents and Creativity


• 9: Autonomy, Integrity, and Computer Art


• 10: Authenticity and Computer Art


• 11: Aesthetics and Interactive Art


• 12: Is Metabolism Necessary?


• Index

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.

Margaret Boden presents a series of essays in which she explores the nature of creativity in a wide range of art forms. Creativity is the generation of novel, surprising, and valuable ideas. Boden identifies three forms of creativity (combinational, exploratory, and transformational) each eliciting a different form of surprise.