Creativity Support: Insights from the Practices of Digital-Atomic Artists

The support of human creativity by information and communication technology is an important and interesting area for research. To advance our research in this complex area our approach has been to go back to first principles and study examples of creativity in action. In this paper, we describe in some detail the creative practices of two artists. Their work is particularly interesting to us because of the way it straddles the digital-atomic border. Their creative practices involve not only manipulating paint atoms but also manipulating digital bits. From these studies we identify a number of interesting creativity support areas that suggest further investigation.