2019 – Conference: The Brain and Creativity

What is the essence of creativity ? How can it be transmitted ? Can AI do the same ? A lecture about the creative instant, with Pierre Lemarquis, neurologist, and Derrick de Kerckhove, writer and specialist in cognitive intelligence. Auditorium Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Listening to Mozart’s music, admiring Michelangelo’s fresco, or reading Shakespeare can transform our brains. This is the magic of aesthetic empathy, embodying the spirit of the creator, which transforms us. This lecture will plunge you into an exciting and topical debate on the creative instant, seen from a scientific perspective. What makes a work of art the work of an author and not the collective creation of all of the people who worked on it ? An artist who executes someone else’s work will definitely also engage his or her own creativity, if only through the choice of materials and colours and, in the case of a mosaic, through his or her own particular technique in producing the work. 

Examining the famous theory of the « aura of an original work », Derrick de Kerckhove also questioned the place of a digital artwork. It cannot exist other than in its ephemeral appearance on a screen, or in the multiplication of its reproductions, always recreated from its database and its program. Is a robot an artist like any other ? They can draw, paint, copy, but also invent. And create a work of art ? Will robots replace artists ?