I have recently had the pleasure of editing a fantastic book on digital creativity. It is open access in Catalan here. Here I translate a small part of the text into English. Enjoy your creativity, digital or not!
Human creativity has always been linked to language (oral, gestural, or bodily) or technology. It is true that there can also be a kind of creativity, neither linguistic nor technological, strictly biological, biochemical, internal, in the sense that it occurs in a programmed way once life is already underway: this happens with mental, immaterial experiences, internal creations that thrive in the synapses of brains, which shape and generate ideas and imagination, and that we might perhaps call virtual. Likewise, perceptions of the external world stimulate and can provide new ingredients that are added to internal creativity. This internal creativity can manifest, or not, in actions that lead to external creativity.
This virtual creativity needs to be materialized, communicated, shared, externalized, to be evident, to exist outside. Perceptible creativity is thus inevitably social, linguistic, or technical; it arises when the imagined creations inside organisms emerge and are communicated, or else it does not exist beyond hedonism and the inner world of each being. To believe in it, we need the effect, the result of creativity; we cannot just focus on the cause. And a receiver is needed.
But what if we study, with neuroimaging techniques, the cause of creativity? In doing so, once again, we are invoking technology. We externalize internal creativity. One could also think that other biological processes, such as random genetic recombinations, which occur, for example, in sexual reproduction and contribute to our existence here and now, can show seemingly creative results. Like you, like me. In fact, they escaped human control until we developed biotechnologies, so there are already multiple biological phenomena that we can subject to our will… creative will? Nature is full of autonomous processes, biochemical or physical reactions, with results that may appear artistic or creative to human receptors, but they are not the product of creativity because there are no neural dynamics behind them.