Draft:Artistic intelligence
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Artistic intelligence is an emerging concept used to articulate the potential of artistry-based approaches to generate broad, significant, or even paradigm shifting impacts beyond an immediate application, context, or domain. These effects are in no way limited to substantive outcomes; they can include social techniques, institutional strategies, conceptual models, and/or general methods.
As the name suggests, the significant distinction proposed by artistic intelligence is intrinsically related to art. The lack of any clear consensus on what art is or how it works might make that seem like a serious weakness — a bug, so to speak — but in this context it can equally be seen as a feature. Artistic intelligence can be understood as modes of perceiving, orienting, working, and/or producing that are ideally suited to navigating and negotiating the conflicting cultural demands of different disciplines, epistemologies, and institutions. By creating conceptual and practical spaces that are open to the strengths of diverse perspectives and modes but freed from the weaknesses of their procedural demands, some have argued, artistic intelligence represents an important strategy for addressing increasingly complex challenges in an era of polycrises.
The potential meanings and applications of artistic intelligence have not yet been fully formalized or settled. The phrase is typically used not in an individualistic way (for example, to describe a specific person’s unique forte) than more broadly as a way to describe social or even structural capacities, akin to Karl Marx’s idea of general intellect.
While its acronym (AI) might seem to invoke the concept of artificial intelligence, the idea draws on the growing recognition that “intelligence,” far from being monolithic in the way proposed by Charles Spearman), involves diverse processes and can take many forms. The theory of multiple intelligences is widely attributed to Howard Gardner’s 1983 book Frames of Mind, but they can be traced back farther — for example, to Darrell Huff’s 1954 book How to Lie with Statistics, in which he argued that that intelligence involves a variety of qualities including leadership, creativity, judgment, and emotional balance.
In the decades since, some of these theories — for example, Robert Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence (analytical, creative, and practical forms of intelligence) or Daniel Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence — have become touchstones of popular culture. Artistic intelligence has not yet attained such widespread status, but other important parallels (for example, the ideas of situational awareness and design thinking) suggest that its open orientation and eclectic flexibility respond on many levels to widely acknowledged challenges. This conceptual overview has many practical precedents — for example, Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works (founded 1939), the rise of the media labs format over the course of the twentieth century, and key innovations from the multidisciplinary workshop approach to Cold War–era scenario planning. However, artistic intelligence is not tied to any of these generations of innovation; instead, it draws more broadly on the modernist and contemporary artistic impulses to redefine, reframe, and reevaluate.
This emphasis on art might seem to suggest that artistic intelligence is averse to the rigor and often-quantitative focus of STEM and adjacent fields, but that is not the case. Artistic intelligence can embrace these approaches as easily as it can embrace ways of working drawn from the humanities, qualitative social sciences, or even artisanal and folkloric practices. Indeed, some have argued that its potential derives precisely from its (again, fundamentally artistic) ability to “think” and “work” poetically — for example, through analogies that are surprising or even “alienating” in the Brechtian sense.