Origination and Metacreation: A Conversation with Ben Bogart, Vague Terrain:

Ben Bogart is a Canadian artist whose works encompass science, machine creativity and open source ethics. His innovative and fascinating investigations on artificial imagination and machine learning are effectively demonstrated through his body of work, which is neatly underpinned and strongly characterized by a critical analysis of the paradigm of creativity.

Marco Donnarumma: Ben, to what extent can creativity be investigated through algorithmic means and which of your works best embodies such a practice? In which ways can the development of creative machines foster a better understanding of individuals as makers?

Ben Bogart: My research group (MAMAS), directed by Philippe Pasquier, my Ph.D. supervisor) is a group of students and faculty many of whom are working on “metacreation”, where we attempt to design systems that exhibit creative behaviour. Personally, I came to academia not to explore creativity directly (creative machines that is), but origination: how something (idea, form, life, universe) could come to be. The early genesis of this thinking is apparent in my 2005 paper “untitled iterations” in Vague Terrain. I started my M.Sc. degree with the idea of making a site-specific artwork that could “find its own relationship to its context”. Eventually this lead to research on creativity and creative machines. Memory Association Machine (MAM) (2007) was an answer to this investigation of a machine forming its own relationship to context.