As Wallace Stevens wrote « not ideas about the thing but the thing itself, part of the world and not about it », the Creativity, Play, and the Imagination Conference seeks to bring together educators, artists, scholars, and game-makers from all disciplines to reflect on and experience creativity as a central site for learning and everyday living. In exploring content and concept, the conference will be a forum for constructing
By providing a space for participants to come together and share creative practices, processes, and products, the conference aims to facilitate creative discovery and promote interdisciplinary collaborations so vital to expanding our perspectives. To this end, this conference seeks to blend theory and practice. Rather than flat, one-directional presentations of information, this conference places an emphasis on a dialogue among people and an interaction of ideas across disciplines in order to bring forth new possibilities. This then embodies the notion of creativity which requires imagination, an openness for possibilities. It also involves play, a space to explore possibilities.
The conference is organized in conjunction with Game Show NYC, an art exhibition of games that expands the concept of an art show by making the enjoyment of art an active and educative experience (see www.gameshownyc.com for more details). By orchestrating this conversation between conference and exhibition, we envision an intersection and interaction of people and events that will continue to grow and bring forth new possibilities long after the events themselves are concluded.
Creativity, Play, and the Imagination will be held from May 26 through May 28, 2011 at Teachers College, Columbia University – 525 W. 120th St. New York, NY 10027.
Illustration : Creativity, Play, and the Imagination Conference, Call for Proposals
