For many years three key aspects of creative processes have been glossed over by theorists eager to avoid the mystery of consciousness and instead embrace an implicitly more formal, computational vision: autonomy, phenomenality and the temporally embedded and bounded nature of creative processes. In this paper we will discuss autopoiesis and creativity; an alternative metaphor which we suggest offers new insight into these long overlooked aspects of the creative processes in humans and the machine, and examine the metaphor in the context of dance choreography.

Key words: autonomy, autopoiesis, creativity, dance, improvisation.

Open peer commentary on the article ““Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance” by Tom Scholte. Upshot: This commentary adds historical perspective to the use of improvisation and conversation as models for the promotion of naturalism in acting. It wants to denaturalize naturalism and the concept of embodiment in support of Scholte’s reconceptualization of the naturalist theatre, and concludes with a reflection on the societal function of art and theatre today.

Open peer commentary on the article ““Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance” by Tom Scholte. Upshot: My aim is to show that “truthful” acting that emerges through improvisation is equivalent to the development of mutual forward models in the actors. If these models match those of the audience members, this is perceived as “truthful.”

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. Barandiaran’s (2017) enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational.

Key words: improvisation, thinking in movement, sense of agency, interactional asymmetry, dancer, free improvisation musician.

Inspired by Heinz von Foerster’s notions of observing systems as a merging of second-order and first-order understanding, we explore the multiple senses of observing frames. We draw organically from ethnographic observations of visitors in a regional science center to reconceptualize processes of meaning construction in designed learning environments more generally. Von Foerster’s ethical and aesthetic imperatives are used to develop an understanding of science learning as an emergent co-improvisation between designers, researchers, interactors and visitors. Links are drawn with Luhmann’s paradoxy of observing systems, while implications for design processes are considered.

Although Mahoney (1988) has traced the heritage of general constructive metatheory and Zelhart and Jackson (1983) have examined the influences of Kelly’s Kansas environment on his developing theory, there has been relatively little investigation of the origins of Kelly’s constructivism. Although Kelly (7955) was undoubtedly influenced by many philosophers and psychologists as he developed the psychology of personal constructs, the roles of these people have not been extensively investigated. However, Kelly (1955, 1969) cited, in a general way, the works of Korzybski and Moreno several times in describing the origins of his theory. Lecture notes taken by one of Kelly’s students (Barry, 1948) reveal more specifically the sources (Korzybski, 1933, 1943; Moreno, 1937) that seemed influential as Kelly developed his theories. Kelly borrowed ideas of Korzybski and Moreno, among many others, in creating parts of his role therapy and personality theory. In adapting Konybski’s notion that semantic and linguistic labels are used to understand phenomena in the world, Kelly also accepted the idea that these semantic labels are indeed constructed by individuals. In adapting Moreno’s spontaneous improvisation and self-presentation techniques as a way to change semantic labels, Kelly emphasized that construction processes occur and change in a social realm.

The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader socio-material milieu they are situated in. This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. We suggest that this approach may help us better understand creativity in terms of how interacting individuals and social groups bring forth worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity. We also explore how dynamical systems theory (DST) may offer useful tools for research and theory that align closely with the 4E perspective. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and suggest possibilities for future research.

Key words: 4e cognition, dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition, improvisation, musical creativity