Creativity in a Chastened World: The Opportunity for Disabled People

Keynote speech at the Jodi Awards 2008

Date: 05/12/2008
Venue: British Museum, London, UK

1. Introduction

First of all, let me say how pleased I am as Vice Chairman of RNIB, the main sponsor of this event, to be your keynote speaker and to hand out the awards, not least because Jodi joined RNIB in 2000 after working here at the British Museum; so she is a real link between the two institutions. After John's kind introduction, here, for what they are worth, are my less conventional credentials:

In 1974 I was severely reprimanded by a museum attendant at the Tate for climbing a Rodin; but a year later I made an 11 minute film for the Arena programme with the great Nigel Finch on an exhibition in the same gallery of sculpture designed for blind people;

In 1989 I played cat-and-mouse with an attendant at the Pompidou Centre to get my hands on Constantin Brancusi's Le Phoque [i] which is now available to touch in his atelier on the ground floor of the Centre;

For ten years I was a classical CD critic; I have acted and directed plays, mainly Shakespeare, I'm a published poet and if you know of an agent, I've got two unpublished full-length novels;

But perhaps the facet of my career that is most relevant here is my work with RNIB and my own charity, humanITy, on the accessibility of digital information systems to people who are disadvantaged and specifically to people who suffer from visual, hearing, physical and intellectual impairments. Incidentally, that language might be a trifle clumsy but I want us to think about the neutral concept of impairment rather than the loaded concept of disability.

2. The Context

As we meet during an economic depression of indeterminate length and depth, it might seem wildly idealistic to call for a renewed commitment to creativity and I do so against a background of relative failure in efforts to improve the lot of people with impairments in general and in the specific context of access to information, during the boom that has lasted for almost two decades: web accessibility has been a mantra, a standard and a set of regulations appended to legislation but it has not been a reality for most people with impairments on most web sites, not least because the public sector has been the chief infractor of its own rules. During this period, too, the Member States of the European Union have legislated to turn off the analogue television signal without any reference to whether digital television will be accessible to people with impairments; and a whole array of consumer electronics is passing out of the autonomous control of many of us; indeed, we might soon reach the ironic point where digital radios are inaccessible to blind people.

And so I am not under-estimating the problems which face us; but my central point is one for the whole of this Century, based loosely on Mr. Micawber's [ii] pair of aphorisms about money and also on Alvin Toffler's [iii] perception about consumers and producers in the digital age: if you are a net consumer you are bound to be poor. Put simply, if we go on training disadvantaged people, including those with impairments, in a fragmented accessibility and usability ecology, to acquire what are called 'basic' skills in accessing and processing information, we will doom them to be poor. Much of what the Government thinks of as basic has been overtaken by automation; and we must also think of employment in the context of a global fall in the price of graduates.

I do not, however, think that the picture is so gloomy when it comes to creativity. There is a post modernist fallacy which says that restraint is bad for creativity - represented in the microcosm which says that web accessibility criteria are a limit to creativity - reinforced by the romantic notion of the great artist in the garret and Shelley's flamboyant claim that poets are society's unacknowledged legislators. Conversely, we should think about the use of form as a spur to creativity, not least because art critically depends to such a great extent on breaking rules which is, by definition, impossible if you don't have any. If we think about the spontaneous and the aleatoric we will find that the notion of the accidental or serendipitous realisation is illusory: beneath apparent spontaneity there is a ruthless formalism in James Joyce, Jackson Pollock and Luciano Berio; just as there is a calculated demotic appeal in the apparently casual approach of Tracey Emin, Roger McGough and Jerry Garcia; they were all making a point and/or making money but they were all deeply respectful of and in debt to form.

At this time we might also want to think more carefully about the effect of hardship on creativity: war poets like Wilfred Owen and photographers like George Rodger, reforming novelists like Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Zola, musicians like Shostakovich and Gubadulina working in the shadow of imprisonment. Of course I am not saying that an economic depression is like a war but I think we stand at the end of a period of creative indiscipline and shallowness not dissimilar to that which preceded the First World War (except in Austria) and the Second World War. We have had our 'Naughty Nineties' and our ';Roaring Twenties' all rolled into an era which started with Bill Haley and was only temporarily slowed down by temporary economic depressions in the mid '70s, early '80s and early '90s. For more than forty years people have been making stuff which is some form of creative hybrid between the self indulgent and the commercial; and nowhere has this unfocused self indulgence been more evident than on the web where art school graduates, innocent of syntax and taxonomy, have bamboozled marketing departments and government agencies. Ever since Tim Berners-Lee crystallised the musings of Royal Society founder John Wilkins [iv] in 1660s [v], we have all known that the internet is really important; but not why. The answer, to the distress of the establishment, is that it will evolve from an early consumption to a mature production paradigm.

In 1990 the founder of the first democratic internet system, Howard Rheingold of the San Francisco WELL Network [vi] and I had a discussion in which he said that the internet would be a paradise for anarchists while I said it would be a paradise for capitalists; we were both part right but also part wrong. There has been enough self indulgence to satisfy any anarchist and, of course, not enough profit to satisfy any capitalist; but the chief characteristic of the web has been its failure to be the laboratory for anarchists or the forge for capitalists. It has, with some honourable exceptions, been pointless, vulgar, posturing and self indulgent, exemplified, above all, by the blog which is only worse than the radio phone-in because its fatuities survive for all to see in the public domain. Government frequently wonder why 1/3 of the population can't be bothered; I wonder why 2/3 can; the only people who rejoice that the king has no clothes are the porn merchants who are the chief collectors.

What I am pointing towards is the revived assertion of the marketing department over those who think that web design is only one rung down from television. When money is tight people will, at last, want to know what they are getting for it; and with this financial discipline there will emerge a creative discipline which will show postmodernism to have been a temporary self indulgence; even the label is self indulgent.

3. Accessibility as a Precondition for Creativity

It is in this new, more astringent environment that I want to propose that while we do not forget accessibility as a necessary precondition to creativity, it is creativity that will set our people free as human beings, citizens, students, workers, commentators, critics and, above all, as creators; and so I want to look briefly at that set of necessary preconditions; to make some suggestions about how we might raise our accessibility game from the tundra of WCAG 1.0:

First, even though I have used it as shorthand, we really do need to get rid of words like "accessibility"; abstract nouns are the joy of legislators and lawyers and a curse on reality. When people ask me what I want the Web to be like I say: "Multimedia is a silly word for television" to which we need to add signing, sub-titling and audio description; but, in addition - and while this is not possible on linear broadcasting channels it is possible in the on-demand market - we need language simplification, story boards and automated language translation.

Secondly, as the cost of good prose rises while the cost of good pictures falls, and as the trend towards the pictorial is given added impetus by multi lingual societies and global markets, we cannot leave description for blind people, captioning for deaf people and language simplification for people with intellectual difficulties as a pastime for improvising amateurs and SMEs; we really do need a core institution for accessible multimedia funded by the public sector, industry, broadcasters and the third sector which combines research with production, creating high quality product. We have had enough of advocacy, bench-marking, guidelines and the mantra of the need to replicate good practice when hardly any good practice exists.

Thirdly, the revolutionary advances in sound technology which allow 16 and even 32-track recording to be transmitted unmixed, the development of solid object printing (rapid photocopying), the ability to deconstruct images by segment and layer and the use of simulation each offer magnificent opportunities for representing the real world to mitigate impairment either in ways which enhance the initial work or in ways which provide a near equivalent alternative method of articulating the authorial intention.

You can see how the use of these technologies are a necessary precondition to creativity in a technological world that will continue to change in spite of the economic slow-down.

4. Creativity & Disability

Let me state the obvious first and then park it. We know very little about the limitations on creativity imposed by impairment. Yes, of course we know that a congenitally totally blind person will be limited in her use of paint to create an image or that a congenitally deaf person will be limited in the way that he can create music from a set of rules; but I am thinking of something less easy to define but equally profound, namely the limitations which an impairment places on, say, blind authors or deaf painters; we simply don't know enough about this area and so we are in danger of trying to teach creativity without knowing what is possible and, almost as pertinent, what is worth trying. There is, for example, a great deal that can be done graphically to explain music and also a great deal of description that can be used to describe images but might the effort be disproportionate? We have to consider what we do in the context of limited time as well as limited money.

Having got over the "more research needs to be done" recommendation, I want to spend the rest of this talk discussing the lineaments of digital creativity which we need to think about which fall under four broad headings:

Imagining the world;
Creativity for a purpose;
The Authorial intention;
Social and economic benefits.

Let me start with imagining the world which presents people with different impairments with different challenges. Some, of course, are obvious, like my capacity to imagine a painting or Amy Winehouse; a deaf person's problems with the difference between different performances of a Mahler symphony - say Mahler's Ninth by Walter in 1938, Bernstein in the 1960s and Tillson Thomas in 2001 - or the impact of sound on a landscape; or the capacity of a person with intellectual difficulties to decode Proust or E E Cummings; but the problem lies deeper than that because we now live in an age which is deeply self referential and multiply ironic; things are not only not what they seem but they are not the opposite of what they seem; they might be what they seem but only because we are prompted to think that they are not. People with hearing, visual and intellectual impairments have immense problems with irony and the richness of expression which is based on a culture of layering, interpolation and meta commentary. Unless we are to be confined to making ultra practical artefacts such as shovels or "keep off the grass" signs, we need to explore how this sense of the real world, in itself and in its cultural artefacts, can be conveyed in a way which forms a basis for creativity.

If we can solve this apprehension problem, the next thing we must do is harness - to parody Mr. Brown - creativity for a purpose. By this I do not exclusively mean an economic purpose; but people who labour at a disadvantage in terms of effort and time compared with their peers need to be clear why they are doing what they are doing. It might be argued that this imposes terrible rigidities when peers live in a world of serendipitous flicking and flickering; but just as most people with an impairment have to be more ergonomically precise, so they need to be creatively precise. There is not, for example, much point in asking blind children to describe a landscape which can only be meta description, i.e. "When I went out, the sky was blue and the trees were green" but it would be worthwhile to teach the same children how to touch and how to make pots; incidentally, one of the saddest moments of my professional life was taking half a dozen blind children from years five and six to a sculpture exhibition only to find that they had never been taught to touch. I don't want to stereotype people but I want to extend possibility; the blind musician is iconic and the blind person's hands and ears are almost revered, but how many blind composers, critics, sculptors, potters and engravers are there? In a world which requires clear, simple prose for labels and signage, how many people with intellectual difficulties are engaged in generating and testing simple messages? And do we really think that ugly, ill fitting ramps are the only way to offer accessible architecture?

If we can put in a foundation which conveys reality and then impart creative skills, the third stage is to help people to define an authorial intention; what does the creator want people to do when they perceive a created artefact through their senses? Is this painting a piece of social art that tells the admiring public that physically disabled people and prisoners can generate pleasing images; or is it a work in its own right that is offered for admiration in its own terms; and for sale? Is building this web site a test for a blind person's stamina and creative skills or is it to sell something? Is the choice of certain music as a soundtrack by a deaf person a nod in the direction of audio cliché or does it have a deeper significance? One of the real problems for people with impairments is that we are the clients of well meaning ambition, the creatures groomed for a human version of Crufts; we might produce wonderful things but we don't get paid for our work, just as we don't get paid by global corporations for user testing; it's just another case of the poor obliging the rich; we are not so much ragged trousered philanthropists [vii] as day-centred, third-sectored philanthropists.

Finally - and this follows from what I have previously said - we need to be careful that creativity has a social and/or economic benefit and that if the latter turns out not to be real, that we do not morph it into the former.

5. Conclusion

I want to conclude with some further encouragement. In almost all cases - some forms of autism being an exception - there is an inverse relationship between impairment and autonomy; it is therefore vitally important that we focus on the means of enabling people with impairments to collaborate with their peers. There is a need for creativity tools in the digital environment which allow people to work autonomously but the really vital breakthrough will be collaborative tools that enable people with impairments to work in a team. There is a mass of rhetoric in the 'disability' sector about respecting people for what they can do rather than being prejudiced against them for what they cannot do; but the ideology of autonomy has severely damaged what we are supposed to be able to do. Underlying this functional challenge, however, is the more basic requirement for collaboration which is self esteem. Of course there is a magical symbiosis between creativity and self esteem but the start-up is both difficult and critical.

Next, we need to be clear about the kind of creativity which is economically beneficial. Here I acknowledge my debt to Margaret Boden [viii], Creativity, she says, comes in three forms: collage, variation and transformation. I would say that collage is a DJ stringing together a medley; variation is exemplified in jazz; and transformation takes place when somebody invents a new form or radically subverts it, e.g. Haydn and Wagner in respect of classical tonality and structure.

Now despite our romantic prejudices, enshrined in our education system, in favour of the autonomous and the transformative, most of the creativity that makes money involves the collaborative use of variation: soap opera, quiz shows, sit-coms, chat shows, phone-ins, criticism, reality TV, fashion, rock music, games, popular fiction, television documentary, journalism, comedy, design and haute cuisine, are all based on taking a basic set of rules and finding a new variation. These activities may not entirely command the respect of the art establishment but what we are talking about here is economic survival and pleasure.

Finally, I want to draw some points together by way of recommendations:

I have already referred to the need for a Centre of Excellence for Accessible Media funded by the public, commercial and third sectors;
I have already called for research into the way in which impairment affects the creative process; and
I have encouraged us all, particularly those who work in the third sector, to be more forward looking in our use of emerging technologies; but I think there are three other actions we should take towards enabling creativity:
The British Library should be the lead agency in establishing a digital artefacts deposit, not just for the traditional media such as books, films and music but also for sculpture and other unique solid objects and designs;
The different sectors of society need to stop sitting on their hands waiting for somebody else; we are way beyond the Atlee settlement and we have just seen the last of Thatcher laissez faire; we need a new settlement which involves business understanding markets, charities doing their job properly and government recognising its responsibilities;
And finally, there is a moral and a social case for creativity but we need to recognise the hard headed case, not based on some vague right to work or some bogus business case; at the heart of our claim for creative enfranchisement is the core reality that we have paid for our stake in society; we have a fiscal case. Whether we are thinking about value added tax or the BBC Licence Fee, even unemployed disabled people - and most of us are either reluctantly unemployed or have worked until retirement - have paid for our inclusion and to be deprived of it means that we are cross subsidising the better off and are, therefore, paying for the widening of the gap between us and the rest. It's bad enough in a society that calls itself democratic that the poor subsidise the rich but worse still that some of the most disadvantaged people in society pay to blight their own prospects through the mechanism of the widening of comparative disadvantage.

We have, predictably, failed to reverse this injustice through asserting the right to consume; we must now make an even greater effort through enjoying the right to create.

[i] http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Musee.nsf/Docs/428D74425E0E020DC125750E002D6408?OpenDocument&L=2

[ii] Mr. Micawber in Dickens' David Copperfield "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

[iii] Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, (1980) Bantam Books ISBN 0-553-24698-4

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins

[v] Eco, Umberto, The Search for the Perfect Language, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 1997, ISBN 0-631-20510-1; Umberto Eco claims that hypertext was first posited by John Wilkin in the 1660's and crystallised by Leibnitz but that the only result for more than 300 years was the cross reference.

[vi] http://www.well.com/

[vii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Trousered_Philanthropists

[viii] Boden, Margaret A.: Creativity and Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence 203 (1998), 347-356

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