Creative Endeavors in Art

Historiography of the seventeenth century reflected many of the patterns of historical writing developed during the earlier age of discovery and conquest. The principal historians of the sixteenth century worked with fundamental models of historical expression that survived well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We see a continuation of the crónica mayor, religious historiography that dealt with the history of religious orders and the spiritual life of the colony, various forms of testimonial literature, works that are primarily descriptive of New World geography, and other narrative modalities that were commonly employed during the era, such as the relación and learned commentaries. Yet there were significant developments within these well-defined norms – creative endeavors that have recently interested literary scholars – to communicate a more imaginative interpretation of those events and processes that led to the expansion and stabilization of the colonies. Though somewhat guided by functional models written in the sixteenth century, historical writing of the late colonial period became more complex and varied in style and structure.

In the increasingly fragmented, cost-conscious and competitive terrain of modern British broadcasting, such creative autonomy is atypical within the mechanics of the industry process. As Robin Nelson notes, ‘as both writer and director . . . Poliakoff’s work is as close to “authored drama’’ as it is possible to be in a necessarily collaborative, creative endeavour’ (Nelson 2006: 124). Indeed, Poliakoff’s dual credentials as writer and director compound this sense of authorship, forging links with the writer-led traditions of British theatre and television, and with more recent cinematic conceptions of director as creator. In this way, Poliakoff has generated a public image of himself as British television auteur par excellence: writing, directing and overseeing every aspect of his work. When I interviewed Poliakoff in September 2007, he made clear that he could no longer imagine working on a television piece with less artistic control than he presently enjoys, a far cry from the circumstances of the majority of creatives currently working within the prevailing production-line methods of the television industry. Further linking Poliakoff’s work to the televisual branding of ‘quality’ and ‘authored drama’ is the aura of must-see, special event television which surrounds the publicity and scheduling of his output. For

With an emphasis on high-stakes testing and a focused curriculum, it would seem at times, the joy of creativity is missing from the classroom. This article describes a curricular approach the children named “Creative Endeavors”, as implemented by a first grade teacher. The approach is described in three phases. In the exploratory stage the children were presented with various media, made requests for additional materials, and explored different forms of expression. In the second phase the children made choices based on interests, and typically worked with others in a spirit of collaboration with an emphasis on the process of the project as well as affective responses. In the final phase of intentional planning, children began to independently design, construct, and take responsibility for their project working alone or with others. Phases are intended to provide a blueprint for other teachers to explore creative endeavors in the classroom. Children in this project communicated through various media including sewing, photography, and drama. Through collaborating with peer and choosing projects, the children became authentically engaged in the various classroom experiences. Although the curricular approach was intended to foster creativity, in each phase writing about their projects became a natural and critical element in the process. Children wrote about their experiences, the steps they took to take part in the process, why they chose it, and reflected upon the projects undertaken.

When it’s hot, we find a shady tree to sit under; when it’s cold, we find a windbreak and build a fire; and if there’s danger, we find a safe protected place. This is what people have always done; we’re just a little more sophisticated in the twenty-first century. It’s still about function and amenity of the shelter: function – the requirements of utility and economy, efficiency in construction of a serviceable building for the needs of production and profit. Architecture is the consequence of human interactions and lies on the realm of memory and the experienced. Architecture has the power to comfort and to inspire, and through the intimacy of places and moments lived, there is a blurred line between the built and natural environment – dream and reality – time and space. Every creative endeavour is woven from and relative to the processes that influence the way we experience the world, and mostly it’s the little unnoticeable things that create sweeping change.

The freedom to try new things plays a vital role for employees engaging in creative endeavors. This freedom can be influenced by one's relationship with her supervisor, relationship with her team, and various work pressures. One of the first steps to reaching creative output is to have a playful attitude toward work where there is encouragement and processes that allow individuals to take risks and try new things. However, we argue that what allows someone to try new things earlier in their career and when they are more established might be different. Noteworthy progress has been made in conceptualizing the multi‐level factors that are important for creativity. In the current study, we identified variables associated with a willingness to try new things, part of the exploration phase of creativity, and divided them by the early and established careers of 59 Nobel Prize winners. Using a historiometric approach, we rated individual and team‐level variables to identify what makes someone try new things either earlier or later in her career. Findings indicate that willingness to try new things is related to autonomy, the relationship with one's mentor, team climate, and team network, but not to personal initiative.

Since 2000, Molecule of the Month articles have highlighted functional stories about biomolecular structures in the Protein Data Bank. The central motivation behind the feature is to provide a user-friendly introduction to the PDB archive, which currently includes over 215,000 entries of experimental data from X-ray crystallography, 3D electron microscopy, and NMR investigations. Accessible language and comprehensible images are used to explore structural stories ranging from genetic mechanisms to current threats to global health. Articles are viewed ∼1 million times annually by students and researchers around the world. Readers have enthusiastically embraced the series, and repurpose articles and illustrations in classrooms and other creative endeavors. The Molecule of the Month and related training, outreach, and educational materials are presented at PDB-101 (PDB101.RCSB.org), the education portal of the RCSB Protein Data Bank. RCSB PDB Core Operations are funded by the National Science Foundation (DBI-1832184), the US Department of Energy (DE- SC0019749), and the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant R01GM133198.

<p>This thesis examines the construction of Intellectual Property discourses using the social Psychological theoretical framework of Social Representations theory (Moscovici, 1984), and explores the various themes which emerge around the treatment of knowledge, ideas and creative work from both historical and contemporary perspectives. The first two chapters introduce Social Representations theory and the methodology of Thematic Analysis. Study one presents a historical account and literature review on the general themes of knowledge, intellectual and creative endeavours, and how various cultures and social powers have approached these concepts throughout history. It includes an overview of current technological and social changes around the same themes, the challenges these changes may have on existing social representations, and the groups that have vested interests in particular representations. The idea that existing dominant representations cannot adequately incorporate new representations arising from users and adopters utilising the new medium of the 'network' as a social-cultural tool is also introduced. Study two examines similar topics through analysis of public submissions to the New Zealand Patent act review. In this study, individual submissions are analysed in detail using a thematic analysis-like process, incorporating this into a Social representations framework designed to extend and test the representations observed in study one. Evidence of a dominant industrial representation involving market economic treatment of knowledge centred on a physical resource conceptual anchor was observed. Conflicting social representations held by other groups included representations of a collectivist common good centred on innovation and rights themes. Evidence that significant re-representation of the property conception away from a physical good anchor by various groups was found. Social, cultural, and economic consequences of these competing representations effect on societies are considered.</p>

This paper returns at first to ancient definitions of ekphrasis as vivid description, including that of bodies or persons conjured up before the eyes of the reader. The passages from Ovid and Diodorus Siculus on which I focus (DS Library 32.10-12 and Ovid Met. 9.669-797), represent descriptions not of works of art, but of bodies. To complicate matters, these bodies as objects of description are also undergoing change from one sex to another; they are also events. Nevertheless, although they do not describe works of art, this literary trope (ekphrasis in the modern understanding of the term) does prove to be an important reference point for both these highly aware authors in their description of the phenomenon of sex-change. As generations of writers have done before them, Ovid and Diodorus Siculus allude to the tradition of ekphrasis as a means to reflect upon their own artistry and creative endeavour. They also invoke this trope to introduce into their narratives the issues of illusion and deception, and of viewpoint and interpretation, that are associated with this ekphrastic tradition. They use the concept of ekphrasis to problematise the relationship between text and reader, viewer and object of gaze, reality and appearance, seeing and believing.

There is an odd dichotomy going on here. Try and find examples of photographed comic strips and, excepting the odd flourish of ideas here and there, you are limited to dreary and repetitive love-angst in teenage magazines. Yet is there a creative endeavour more pervasive than photographic narrative? Think about it. Is there anyone in the Western world (and a goodly part of the Eastern world) who does not make photographs and then use them to tell stories: holidays, celebrations or private moments collected into sequence—time cut up with a narrated voice track added? This is the most ancient form of creative communication (storytelling) in its most current form, so why is it not represented across the board at all cultural levels?

Though Virginia Woolf’s and Kathe Kollwitz's personal histories and specific cultural circumstances were quite different, their aesthetics share fundamental qualities. This dissertation demonstrates that both artists affirm memory, the maternal, and creativity as coalescent, and through doing so assert a principle of connectivity that counters the turmoil of their times. Through this constellation, Woolf’s and Kollwitz's aesthetics exude faith in the continued viability of beauty and of possibility, faith that a commitment to becoming will undermine the sources of hopelessness that enshroud the modem world. Channeling their losses into their creative endeavors, Woolf and Kollwitz appropriated crises from their pasts for moments of personal and cultural edification. They establish maternity as exemplary of the human need for mutuality and maternal desire as a search for interrelation that must be exercised imaginatively. Charting the cataclysms of modernity evident in thought, technology, and warfare, Chapter I demonstrates modernity's collective sense of homeless ness. Chapter II situates theoretically the presences Woolf and Kollwitz assert as potentializing a rediscovery of home; Svetlana Boym's reflective nostalgia and Grace Jantzen's ethic of natality prove especially instrumental here. Chapters III, IV, and V interpret Woolf’s "A Sketch of the Past" and To the Lighthouse as manifestations of Woolf’s creative memory work, of her search for her mother and her lost home. Sketching her mother as an artist, Woolf identifies Julia Stephen as the source of her daughter's creativity and suggests art as a regenerative expression of love. Chapters VI and VII transition to a consideration of Kathe Kollwitz's autobiography and diaries, and of her War series and The Mourning Parents memorial. These chapters illuminate her alignment of the sensuality of mothering with the sensuality of creation, and establish that she experienced her son's death in World War I as a death of becoming. Chapter VII in particular probes the depths of Kollwitz's grief and describes the creative process as a means through which she soothed herself. Creating art enabled her to work toward a world that does not desecrate interconnectivity, imagination, and childhood, a world worthy of her deceased son and of her own mothering.

The moving image has become a key marketing tool for luxury fashion, central in enabling brands to shape their visual codes and extend their brand awareness. Fashion Film is the first detailed study of the shifting shape of fashion imagery in the digital age, investigating the role of the moving image in the promotion, communication and spectacle of contemporary fashion. Combining interdisciplinary analysis of cinema and digital culture, this ground-breaking book traces the emergence of fashion film in the 21st century through its historical roots in pre-digital forms of photography, experimental cinema, mass-media advertising and documentary film-making, right up to today’s visual spread of contemporary fashion on video blogs, online magazines and live-streamed catwalk shows. Examining collaborations between fashion designers and pioneering image-makers such as Guy Bourdin, Jean-Paul Goode, William Klein and Nick Knight, the book highlights the critical tension between the fashion film conceived as a creative endeavour and as commercial enterprise. Fashion Film also includes a parallel focus on factual representations of fashion through the recent rise of documentary fashion film that goes behind the scenes to follow the processes and personalities involved in making fashion. Accessible and well-illustrated, Fashion Film will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, film, media, photography, celebrity, sociology and cultural studies.

AI can even outperform humans in many tasks such as winning games like Go and poker as well as engaging in creative endeavours in writing novels and music. Despite this, it is still a long way from building artificial human intelligence. Current AIs are only designed to excel in their intended functions and cannot generate knowledge to new tasks and situations. For AI to achieve artificial human intelligence requires us to study and understand the human brain. Neuroscience is the study of the anatomy and physiology of the human brain. It provides us interesting insights into how the brain works to develop better AI systems. Conversely, better AI systems can help drive neuroscience forward and further unlock the secrets of the brain. Neuroscience and AI are closely related. The synergy of the two will benefit each other. Besides the benefits of neuroscience for AI research, neuroscience also has important implications for machine learning. This chapter discusses the implications of neuroscience for general artificial intelligence and the benefits of AI for neuroscience research.

This chapter outlines key aspects of Airbnb’s economic and rhetorical strategies that position them as such. The gig economy emerged in this context. New “start-up” platforms—like Airbnb, founded barely two months before Wall Street’s meltdown—encouraged speculative investment in a destabilized economy. Airbnb’s promotional discourse constructs a progressive neoliberal myth, wherein hosts and guests are part of a global yet intimate creative community free of exploitation. The notion that hosting allows hosts to remain in their homes, sustain their own businesses, and engage in creative endeavors is central to Airbnb’s argument that they serve progressive ends. Host workshops and corporate communications mask how Airbnb generates the majority of its revenue. The Airbnb community’s systematic marginalization of people of color is a product of the company’s branding decisions. The personal narratives in the Spotlight series assume one of three generic forms.

The role of the emotions in learning has long been acknowledged but is often overlooked. This article considers the impact one particular emotion, happiness, has on learning and the school curriculum. Recent reports have drawn attention to the importance of happiness (or the lack of it) by highlighting concerns about childhood well‐being. At the same time, there is increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience to suggest that periods of happiness are linked to personal growth, health and development. When we are happy it seems we are more likely to be receptive to outside stimuli than when we are sad or distressed. Happiness also makes us more disposed to engage in creative endeavour, which is itself another source of fulfilment. Positive psychologists argue that rather than being fixed, happiness, optimism and other positive traits can be learnt. We offer evidence from our own professional experience in teaching to corroborate these claims and to extend the debate about the relevance of affective neuroscience to education. In conclusion, we consider how a focus on happiness might underpin a positive approach to curriculum reform.

This article presents the results of a phenomenological study conducted with the help of 20 music students, aiming to explore self-discovery through music.The central activity, entitled "This Is Me", was an individual exercise in which participants created an autobiographical musical collage using the Reaper software (DAW).The process of creating the collage provided students with the opportunity to explore and express essential aspects of their identity through the selection and combination of meaningful musical fragments.The article details the methodology used, from the organization of the activity to the analysis of the results, highlighting both the challenges and the benefits of such a creative endeavor.