The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society: 2022-2023

Bruce Evan Barnhart is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. His latest publications are Temporal Experiments: Seven Ways of Configuring Time in Art and Literature, co-edited with Marit Grøtta, and LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class. His research interests include African American literature, post-Marxist theory, jazz, and Caribbean aesthetics.

"I really admire how James Baldwin always talks about jazz as a kind of model for his writing style. But music has certainly had a profound influence on the way I see the world, especially in terms of the social world. One of the big problems we have in all sorts of different places around the world is the question of how to coordinate difference. All sorts of people have different modes of living, different cultural rhythms, and different ideas about the future. Jazz is brilliant at a lot of things, but it notably brings together different people and allows them to retain their own sense of time and rhythm while playing together. It's a really profound model of social coordination. Now, of course, it says something particularly pressing about the United States, but I think as a model for how differences go together, jazz is perhaps unparalleled."

www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/people/aca/bruceb

www.routledge.com/Temporal-Experiments-Seven-Ways-of-Configuring-Time-in-Art-and-Literature/Barnhart-Grotta/p/book/9781032350240

https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/groups/temporal-experiments/

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www.oneplanetpodcast.org
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“I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.”

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia (USA). She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press) and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).

www.anna-abraham.com 

https://coe.uga.edu/directory/torrance-center 

www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/elements-in-creativity-and-imagination

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia (USA). She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press) and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).

“I love podcasts and things like that, if only to listen to people who've done incredible things. We live in a kind of unusual time where we can hear firsthand people talking about their own experiences, and what they went through when they were creating something. And while artists differ greatly from one another in terms of the specifics of their process, what certainly seems to be the case is that they're extraordinarily interested in their own mind, and they have what we would call a metacognitive awareness. They know almost quite precisely, at least what doesn't work for them. They're very cued into what to avoid and how to sort of generate the mental conditions that are necessary in order to be as generative or as creative as they're likely to be in a specific situation. So that is a deep medical awareness that they have about their own process that is really quite something. They know themselves very well.”

www.anna-abraham.com 

https://coe.uga.edu/directory/torrance-center 

www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/elements-in-creativity-and-imagination

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen. I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water to see through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean will become solid. Finding the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities. The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgewood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin’s egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, right, and at the same time ghostly. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.”

Jill Heinerth is a Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.

www.intotheplanet.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Jill Heinerth is a Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.

“If I die, it will be in the most glorious place that nobody has ever seen. I can no longer feel the fingers in my left hand. The glacial Antarctic water to see through a tiny puncture in my formerly waterproof glove. If this water were one-tenth of a degree colder, the ocean will become solid. Finding the knife-edged freeze is depleting my strength, my blood vessels throbbing in a futile attempt to deliver warmth to my extremities. The archway of ice above our heads is furrowed like the surface of a golf ball, carved by the hand of the sea. Iridescent blue, Wedgewood, azure, cerulean, cobalt, and pastel robin’s egg meld with chalk and silvery alabaster. The ice is vibrant, right, and at the same time ghostly. The beauty contradicts the danger. We are the first people to cave dive inside an iceberg. And we may not live to tell the story.”

www.intotheplanet.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels…I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics.

When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down and then when he played the song ‘Father and Son,’ then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic. You know, the I person I'd seen on television had nothing to do with this person sitting in front of me. And so that's really when I said to him, I opened up to him and I said, ‘Honestly, I wasn't really interested to meet, but this song that you've just sung for me is such an incredible song.’ I felt that I could definitely connect with him. ‘Where Do the Children Play', that was the one that, just the fact that he was somebody who was thinking like that.

There was one time when Mick Jagger asked me to come and meet with him because I think he'd heard the records that were coming up from me, mainly Jamaican records and things, and that's why he wanted me to come and meet with him. He was leaving Decca, and wanted to go to another level. And I said, ‘It makes absolutely no sense for you to come to my label because you already are huge.’

Grace Jones, she's a stunning-looking lady. They put on the record and there was a drum machine, and all it played was a drum machine. There was no vocal, there were no instruments, nothing for about two and a half to three minutes before I heard a voice. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a disaster. This is going to end in tears. And then suddenly I heard the voice, and the voice sounded great.”

Chris Blackwell, an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is widely considered responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. As the founder of Island Records, he helped forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2, Roxy Music, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch a Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpost, a group of elite resorts in Jamaica, which includes GoldenEye—the former home of author Ian Fleming. He received the A&R Icon Award in recognition of his lasting influence on the music business. He is author, with Paul Morley, of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.

www.islandoutpost.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Islander/Chris-Blackwell/9781982172701
www.islandrecords.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Chris Blackwell, an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is widely considered responsible for turning the world on to reggae music. As the founder of Island Records, he helped forge the careers of Bob Marley, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, U2, Roxy Music, among many other high-profile acts, and produced records including Marley’s Catch a Fire and Uprising. Blackwell currently runs Island Outpost, a group of elite resorts in Jamaica, which includes GoldenEye—the former home of author Ian Fleming. He received the A&R Icon Award in recognition of his lasting influence on the music business. He is author, with Paul Morley, of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond.

“I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels…I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics.

When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down and then when he played the song ‘Father and Son,’ then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic. You know, the I person I'd seen on television had nothing to do with this person sitting in front of me. And so that's really when I said to him, I opened up to him and I said, ‘Honestly, I wasn't really interested to meet, but this song that you've just sung for me is such an incredible song.’ I felt that I could definitely connect with him. ‘Where Do the Children Play', that was the one that, just the fact that he was somebody who was thinking like that.

There was one time when Mick Jagger asked me to come and meet with him because I think he'd heard the records that were coming up from me, mainly Jamaican records and things, and that's why he wanted me to come and meet with him. He was leaving Decca, and wanted to go to another level. And I said, ‘It makes absolutely no sense for you to come to my label because you already are huge.’

Grace Jones, she's a stunning-looking lady. They put on the record and there was a drum machine, and all it played was a drum machine. There was no vocal, there were no instruments, nothing for about two and a half to three minutes before I heard a voice. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a disaster. This is going to end in tears. And then suddenly I heard the voice, and the voice sounded great.”

www.islandoutpost.com
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Islander/Chris-Blackwell/9781982172701
www.islandrecords.com

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"Are we looking at intelligence wrong? There are an awful lot of people who have graduated from top schools who become leaders who are worse than incompetent. They make their countries worse rather than better. And the conclusion I came to is that we made a mistake, in that intelligence was originally defined by the founders of the field Alfred Binet, David Wechsler, and others, as the ability to adapt to the environment a requirement. And answering a vocabulary problem for an obscure word is not about adapting to the environment. So I began to wonder where we lost the train of thought. And the conclusion I came to is that colleges just forgot the original message of the founders of the field, and so we got immersed in these numbers that turn out not to mean that much. So I wrote about intelligence as the ability to get along in the world and hopefully make the world a little bit better. And what I argue in the book is that we not only need to develop this kind of intelligence, we need to recognize that it's important, that getting A's in school and top scores on standardized tests, that's not what intelligence is about. So there are people who make serious efforts to make the world better, who fight pollution, who try to be good at what they do, you know, as judges or lawyers or as cleaning people or car mechanics, or doctors, but those aren't the ones you hear about. The ones you hear about are often those who have prestigious degrees and can't seem to do much with them.”

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science. Sternberg has served as President of the American Psychological Association, and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His latest book is Adaptive Intelligence: Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty.

www.robertjsternberg.com

www.cambridge.org/fr/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/adaptive-intelligence-surviving-and-thriving-times-uncertainty?format=HB&isbn=9781107154384#bookPeople

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science. Sternberg has served as President of the American Psychological Association, and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His latest book is Adaptive Intelligence: Surviving and Thriving in Times of Uncertainty.

"Are we looking at intelligence wrong? There are an awful lot of people who have graduated from top schools who become leaders who are worse than incompetent. They make their countries worse rather than better. And the conclusion I came to is that we made a mistake, in that intelligence was originally defined by the founders of the field Alfred Binet, David Wechsler, and others, as the ability to adapt to the environment a requirement. And answering a vocabulary problem for an obscure word is not about adapting to the environment. So I began to wonder where we lost the train of thought. And the conclusion I came to is that colleges just forgot the original message of the founders of the field, and so we got immersed in these numbers that turn out not to mean that much. So I wrote about intelligence as the ability to get along in the world and hopefully make the world a little bit better. And what I argue in the book is that we not only need to develop this kind of intelligence, we need to recognize that it's important, that getting A's in school and top scores on standardized tests, that's not what intelligence is about. So there are people who make serious efforts to make the world better, who fight pollution, who try to be good at what they do, you know, as judges or lawyers or as cleaning people or car mechanics, or doctors, but those aren't the ones you hear about. The ones you hear about are often those who have prestigious degrees and can't seem to do much with them.”

www.robertjsternberg.com

www.cambridge.org/fr/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/adaptive-intelligence-surviving-and-thriving-times-uncertainty?format=HB&isbn=9781107154384#bookPeople

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Today's complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking — one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the leaders and innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is THE NEXUS. In this provocative and visually striking book, Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau offer a guide for navigating the intersections of art, technology, and science.

Julio Ottino is an artist, researcher, author, and educator at Northwestern University. He is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. He was the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2008, he was listed in the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering.

www.juliomarioottino.com
www.thenexusbook.com
www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/about/leadership/profiles/ottino-julio.html