Dark Matter in Creativity

Beneath the surface lie materials and forces that shape what we do.

Something that personally fascinates me about creativity is its infinity.

We can define it, understand it, and practice it in almost infinitely many ways, bringing countless possibilities, elements, and dynamics into its realization. Every person alive, who has ever lived, or who is yet to live can develop not just one version of creativity —which, in fact, they do, did, or will— but potentially many different versions. That is why creativity is infinite.

But if everything we've explored so far weren't enough to keep us busy forever, let me point you toward the unnoticed, the unknown, and the invisible: dark matter in creativity.

If we thought we already had enough, there's now a whole lot more...

You can't see it. But it's there.

Creativity is not solely the product of what we consciously know, think, or decide. An enormous part of what we create is shaped by materials and forces we don't recognize as participants in the creative act.

We call dark matter in creativity the collection of these presences, absences, materials, and forces that intervene in our creative processes without us noticing their involvement.

It is not necessarily something negative, limiting, or undesirable: it can enable, enrich, guide, organize, restrict, or reshape our creations, sometimes in remarkably beneficial ways.

4 properties of dark matter.

We've probably heard about dark matter in relation to the physical universe. That's where we borrowed the idea from (at ByBa, we'd say we "alienated" it) to apply it to the universe of creativity. Let's examine its 4 properties in both universes:

1- Superabundance. In physical terms, dark matter accounts for approximately 27% of the universe's total matter-energy content and 85% of all its matter. In creative terms, dark matter represents the cultural, historical, experiential, and cognitive heritage that precedes us and extends far beyond us. An indeterminate portion of all this influences our creativity without us realizing it.

2- Invisibility. In the physical universe, dark matter neither emits, absorbs, nor reflects light; this makes it undetectable in the same way as ordinary matter. Nor does it interact electromagnetically to any appreciable extent. In the universe of creativity, the influence of dark matter is not consciously perceived; we neither observe it nor deliberately make use of it.

3- Gravity. In the physical universe, we infer the existence of dark matter by observing its gravitational effects on light and other matter. In the universe of creativity, we infer the participation of dark matter by observing how it shapes our decisions, possibilities, and creative trajectories.

4- Infrastructural function. In physical terms, the gravitational concentration of dark matter has played a decisive role in the formation of galaxies and cosmic structures. In terms of creativity, dark matter participates in the constitution of our creative architecture: it helps establish the conditions from which we think and create.

The nature of the beast.

Beyond its properties, when we examine what dark matter in creativity is made of, we discover a vast number of elements. But we can organize them into 2 major categories: materials and forces.

Materials.

Materials are the entities, contents, structures, and historical, cultural, social, familial, or personal constructs that can participate in the creative act without us recognizing their influence. They are elements we create with, even when we don't always realize we're using them.

Examples:

• Patriarchy and sexism as historical and cultural constructs.

• Institutionalized religions, such as Catholicism or Judaism.

• Inherited narratives, conventions, codes, symbols, and knowledge.

• Organizational models that we reproduce without noticing.

A material can be extremely dominant and exert an organizing influence without thereby becoming a force: once recognized, a material can be subverted with greater or lesser effort.

To make this clearer, consider the A series of paper sizes (ISO 216). A designer begins a creative project using a particular size —A4, A3, or A1, for example— under the influence and gravitational pull of that system of proportions and dimensions, barely questioning it. The A series is a material of dark matter in creativity: something that is simply there, simultaneously restricting and enabling our creation, yet so often something we don't even see...

Forces.

The forces of dark matter in creativity are constitutive dispositions or principles of human thought, perception, and experience that guide our creative trajectories. They are functionally comparable to biases, although they should not be confused with cognitive biases: they do not necessarily constitute errors or deviations from rationality. Forces are formative tendencies that participate in the way we interpret, organize, and produce the world.

Examples:

• The search for meaning.

• The tendency to identify patterns and relationships.

• Centrality as an organizing principle.

• The search for order and coherence.

• The inclination toward the mystical or transcendent, as a hypothesis that deserves further substantiation.

A particular religion would be a material; the human impulse toward transcendence is a force.

Sexism is a material; its ability to structure societies does not automatically make it a constitutive force. But the need for hierarchies is a force. Forces are generally harder to detect than materials (we cannot see them "from the outside"), and even if it were possible to neutralize them completely, doing so would undoubtedly be far more complex than in the case of materials.

Criterion for distinction.

Materials can be replaced without necessarily altering the deep constitution of the creative subject. Forces belong to that constitution, although they may vary across individuals and contexts.

They are distinguished not by the intensity of their effects, but by their nature.

Scales of creative forces.

Forces can originate and become established at different scales: species, cultural, social, familial, and personal.

-Species level: for example, the human tendency to identify patterns or construct meaning.

-Cultural level: preference for particular forms of organization or interpretation.

-Social level: the pursuit of acceptance, legitimacy, or belonging, etc.

-Familial level: dispositions toward obedience, autonomy, or conflict.

-Personal level: the need for control, differentiation, exploration, coherence, etc.

A force doesn't need to be universal to be constitutive. It may form part of one person's deep architecture without being part of another's.

Moreover, a force may originate externally —within the family, culture, or society— and eventually become incorporated into our identity.

Three dimensions of dark matter in creativity.

Another approach that can help us think about, and eventually detect, dark matter in creativity is to examine its dimensions or origins. Here we present 3 sources of dark matter within the universe of creativity:

I- The unknown.

This encompasses everything we do not know whose absence shapes our creative possibilities.

For example, if we know nothing about fire, we cannot conceive certain solutions that depend on it.

But ignorance can also be enabling: being unaware of a danger may allow us to venture into territory we would otherwise avoid.

The absence of knowledge always has creative consequences, although not everything we don't know automatically becomes part of our operative dark matter.

II- The nonconscious.

Here we find the knowledge, experiences, learning, associations, and dispositions that participate in our creativity without conscious or voluntary involvement.

They are not necessarily unknown to us: we may know them perfectly well and yet remain unaware that they are influencing a particular creation.

III- The formative/deformative.

This dimension includes the conditions and influences that organize, guide, limit, facilitate, or distort our creative trajectories.

A cultural convention may lead us toward certain solutions without us even considering others.

These three dimensions can overlap. They do not constitute an additional classification of materials and forces, but rather different ways of describing darkness and its effects.

The infrastructural function.

We have already identified it among the 4 properties of dark matter: its capacity to establish a framework. And it is possibly the aspect that best summarizes its power and the importance of trying to make it visible.

Dark matter in creativity does not merely influence the ideas we produce.

It participates in the construction of the system that produces them.

Language, culture, forms of organization, experiences, and the learning we absorb all contribute to shaping our cognitive and creative architecture.

We never start from zero when we create.

Nor do we start solely with what we consciously decide to use.

Some of the initial conditions of our creative acts were already established before we even began thinking about the problem.

For all these reasons, we can say:

Much of what we consider our own thinking develops upon an infrastructure we have not consciously built.

And this infrastructure is not static: it changes through experience, learning, and creative activity itself.

Dark matter is neither good nor bad.

When we think about dark matter in creativity, we are not describing a collection of flaws, harmful biases, or restrictions that we need to fight against.

Dark matter in creativity can:

• Make possible ideas we would not have been able to produce consciously.

• Provide indispensable structures and knowledge.

• Lead us to reproduce inherited models without questioning them.

• Prevent us from imagining certain alternatives.

• Guide us toward unexpected solutions.

• Bring uniqueness to the way we create.

Its value is not determined by its darkness.

Dark matter conditions our creative processes; it is not a pathology.

Nor would it be desirable (or remotely possible) to expect every element of our creativity to operate consciously.

Metacognition: the instrument for illuminating dark matter.

In physics, we infer the presence of dark matter by observing its effects.

In creativity, we can attempt to discover hidden materials and forces by observing our decisions, thought patterns, and creative trajectories.

Metacognition offers a particularly suitable instrument for this purpose: thinking about how we think; thinking about how we create.

We could establish three stages of metacognitive work:

i. Reveal

Detect regularities, automatic decisions, assumptions, and previously unnoticed influences.

ii. Understand

Investigate which materials or forces might be producing these regularities and how they operate.

iii. Intervene

Explore what happens when we attempt to suspend, replace, compensate for, or modify an influence.

Metacognition allows us to formulate hypotheses about hidden forces. To understand them more rigorously, we can test those hypotheses against observable behaviors and outcomes.

Recognizing an influence does not necessarily mean controlling it. But it can open up possibilities for intervention that were previously unavailable to us.

The purpose of studying dark matter in creativity.

We do not investigate dark matter within the universe of creativity in order to eliminate it.

Nor do we do so to reduce creativity to an exercise in conscious rationality.

We investigate it because understanding the conditions under which we create expands our capacity to decide how we want to create. Within the ByBa framework, EVERYTHING we set out to do is intended to increase, improve, and diversify our creative power.

Dark matter participates in both our limitations and our possibilities.

Making it visible allows us to reconsider what we took for inevitable, recognize resources we didn't know we had, and explore alternative creative trajectories.

There is a particularly interesting paradox:

By recognizing part of our dark matter, we modify the very creative system we were trying to understand.

What previously operated unnoticed can become conscious knowledge and, eventually, material available for new creative operations.

Exploring our dark matter can, in itself, be a creative activity.

Consolidated definition

Dark matter in creativity

Dark matter in creativity is the superabundant collection of materials, forces, presences, and absences whose unrecognized influence shapes the constitution, possibilities, and trajectories of our creative processes.

Its influence may be constitutive, formative, or deformative, and its existence can be inferred through the observation of our creative processes and outcomes.

Studying it aims to make these influences recognizable, so that we can better understand how we create and expand our possibilities for conscious intervention.

A few thoughts by way of conclusion.

A great deal of what we do is shaped, at least in part, by dark matter as an underlying formative framework.

Not everything we think is something we have decided to think.

Creativity is shaped not only by what we know, but also by everything we take for granted and by what we simply do not know.

Materials are what we create with. Forces are what make us create the way we do. Until we deliberately set out to recognize them, we remain unaware of both.

Darkness is not a property of a material or a force: it is a condition of our relationship with them.

Dark matter does not merely shape what we create (both limiting and enabling it): it participates in the constitution of that with which we create.

What we do not know also helps determine what we are capable of imagining.

Illuminating our dark matter does not mean eliminating its influences, but expanding our ability to recognize and intervene upon them.

Metacognition can transform an invisible influence into available creative knowledge.

Yours,

Blithe Ernst.