The Power of Creative Visualization in the AI Era
Guest Correspondence
SRQ DAILY SATURDAY PERSPECTIVES EDITION
SATURDAY JAN 25, 2025 |
BY DR. LARRY THOMPSON
Photo courtesy Ringling College of Art & Design.
For many people—especially artists—the rise of AI technology was initially a cause for existential dread. And while we are learning how best to embrace AI, we should never lose sight of the powers we possess as thinking, feeling humans. Those are the qualities that will continue to set us apart from AI’s electronically aggregated outcomes. And those are among the qualities that we have always strived and will continue to nurture at Ringling College of Art and Design.
One of the keys to accessing and exercising our human cognitive strength lies in creative visualization. Traditionally, creative visualization involves generating detailed mental imagery, including shapes, textures, colors and even sounds, movements and emotions. By then manipulating those images in our mind, we can mentally explore different artistic styles and emotional responses, as well as hypothetical outcomes for all kinds of real-world situations—artistic and beyond.
Creative visualization is the part of the creative process that happens before we even engage with our physical medium. At the same time, creative visualization helps us to evolve our own responses, affecting not only how we see the world, but how we feel it. In short, it helps elevate our understanding.
Where AI, in its rawest applications, focuses on producing an end product, creative visualization emphasizes the active “creation” part of creativity. Therein lies our strength and our humanity—the ability not only to imagine, but to focus, analyze and adapt, all while guided by our experiences, our intellect and our emotional feedback.
In September 2024, Ringling College hosted our first annual AI Symposium, empowering artists and designers to thrive in the AI era. Among the symposium’s featured speakers was Kurt Paulsen, a media consultant with Spawning.ai, an organization that focuses on ethical AI training as well as tools to help artists exert more control over how their works are used.
Paulsen argues that, with the right tools, artists can use their entire body of work to build—and, crucially, to own—a personal AI database representing their own artistic style. From there the technology can be applied to the artist’s creative visualization as a way to experiment with, explore and expand one’s own artistic potential.
As with traditional creative visualization, the key is that we actively guide the creation, analyzing and adapting based on our personal emotional and intellectual responses. In essence, it becomes a digital extension of our mind’s eye.
In order to grow as artists, as leaders,and as problem-solvers in any context, we must forever explore how our own potential intersects with the potential of the world around us. Creative visualization hones that skill. The more we practice it, the more adept we’ll be at navigating our lives, expanding our imaginations, and generating new and wonderful ideas.
Dr. Larry Thompson is president of Ringling College of Art & Design.
Photo courtesy Ringling College of Art & Design.
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