Eitan Wilf
I am a cultural and semiotic anthropologist. My research focuses on the institutional transformations of modern creative agency and modern creative practice. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which modern normative ideals of rationality, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other hand, are negotiated in different institutional settings in the U.S. and Israel. This interest has led me to pursue a number of research projects. First, I am interested in the organizational cultivation of creativity, especially as it finds expression in forms of art socialization that take place in rationalized bureaucratic settings such as colleges and universities and any institutional setting that relies on standardized and rationalized curricula and pedagogies. This strand of research touches upon and problematizes a long-held dichotomy in anthropological theory between rule-governed or imitative social behavior and spontaneous or creative social action. As part of this research, I conducted a two-year ethnographic fieldwork in creative writing workshops in Israel and another two-year ethnographic fieldwork in collegiate jazz music programs in the U.S. These research projects resulted in a number of publications that approach these questions through different foci such as embodiment (Wilf 2010), the materiality of semiotic forms (Wilf 2011), and new media technologies (Wilf 2012); a book-length manuscript is in preparation.
An additional research project that has emerged from my interest in the institutional transformations of modern creative agency and modern creative practice focuses on the creative cultivation of the modern organization. I am interested in the ways in which contemporary modern organizational settings mobilize discourses and practices of creativity in an attempt to enhance the productivity of their employees. To study this phenomenon, I am launching a new ethnographic research project on the Israeli high-technology start-up sector. This research is supported by a generous Career Integration Grant from the European Research Council.
Phone: 972-2-51883328
Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology
The Hebrew University
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905
Israel
Photo Credit: Dudu Bahar, Haaretz
An additional research project that has emerged from my interest in the institutional transformations of modern creative agency and modern creative practice focuses on the creative cultivation of the modern organization. I am interested in the ways in which contemporary modern organizational settings mobilize discourses and practices of creativity in an attempt to enhance the productivity of their employees. To study this phenomenon, I am launching a new ethnographic research project on the Israeli high-technology start-up sector. This research is supported by a generous Career Integration Grant from the European Research Council.
Phone: 972-2-51883328
Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology
The Hebrew University
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905
Israel
Photo Credit: Dudu Bahar, Haaretz
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Books by Eitan Wilf
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change.
Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.
Papers by Eitan Wilf
this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies dominate many post-Fordist production and distribution systems, the Post-it note—a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties—looms large as a key semiotic technology of idea generation in many contemporary business-innovation contexts for two reasons: (1) its small dimensions afford pragmatic ambiguity and consequently the decoupling of data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, and (2) its
weak adhesive properties afford the synoptic arrangement of such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus the quick production of ritual insights. In doing so, the essay builds on and contributes to recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role
played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production.
be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with
notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants
in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—
from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.
In The Inspiration Machine, Eitan Y. Wilf explores the transformative potentials that digital technology opens up for creative practice through three ethnographic cases, two with jazz musicians and one with a group of poets. At times dissatisfied with the limitations of human creativity, these artists do not turn to computerized algorithms merely to execute their preconceived ideas. Rather, they approach them as creative partners, delegating to them different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons.
The algorithms these artists develop and use, however, remain rooted in and haunted by the specific social predicaments and human shortfalls that they were intended to overcome. Experiments in the digital thus hold an important lesson: although Wilf’s interlocutors returned from their adventures with computational creativity with modified, novel, and enriched capacities and predilections, they also gained a renewed appreciation for, and at times a desire to re-inhabit, non-digital creativity. In examining the potentials and pitfalls of seemingly autonomous digital technologies in the realm of art, Wilf shows that computational solutions to the real or imagined insufficiencies of human practice are best developed in relation to, rather than away from, the social and cultural contexts that gave rise to those insufficiencies, in the first place.
In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change.
Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.
this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies dominate many post-Fordist production and distribution systems, the Post-it note—a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties—looms large as a key semiotic technology of idea generation in many contemporary business-innovation contexts for two reasons: (1) its small dimensions afford pragmatic ambiguity and consequently the decoupling of data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, and (2) its
weak adhesive properties afford the synoptic arrangement of such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus the quick production of ritual insights. In doing so, the essay builds on and contributes to recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role
played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production.
be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with
notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants
in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—
from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.
major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as
a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article’s ethnographic site
is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develop computerized
algorithms that are able to simulate the improvisation styles of past jazz masters and mix them with one another
to create new styles of improvisation. The article argues that the technology that allows the scientists to simulate
and mix styles is playing an increasingly important role in mediating contemporary forms of sociality over the
Internet and that the anthropological tradition that has theorized culture as artistic style has to be reconfigured to
account for the dynamic nature of these contemporary forms of sociality not as styles but as styles of styling styles.
in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among
jazz students and the development of a
jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player in
the United States, contextually meaningful
contingency is widely used as a cultural resource for
negotiating problems of intentionality. Whereas
anthropologists have been concerned with the use
of contingency mostly as a cultural resource for
increasing predictability of intentions in conflictual
situations, I highlight contexts pervaded by modern
normative ideals of creativity in which predictability
of intentions constitutes a problem, for which
contextually meaningful contingency is used as a
solution. [contingency, intentionality, creativity,
semiotic mediation, mechanical divination,
computerized algorithms, jazz music]
and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.