Is human creativity the ultimate economic resource? At the For Humanity Illuminated event on June 14, nearly 250 members of the Yale community gathered at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall for a wide-ranging exploration of how Yale faculty, students, and alumni are working to leverage the full scope of creative and technological activity to drive innovation, strengthen communities, and develop the next generation of leaders.
Moderated by Jens Molbak ’84, the event featured four experts from across the university who are harnessing creative ideas to maximize societal impact and address some of today’s most complex and pressing challenges.
New Models for Creativity
In 2021, with support from a landmark gift from Stephen Schwarzman ’69, the Yale Schwarzman Center opened as the university’s new central cultural hub and gathering space. Today it serves 3,000 to 5,000 people daily through its various artistic events, culinary initiatives, and wellness activities.
Rachel Fine, the center’s executive director, shared how the reimagined building and its innovative programs are building community, fueling creativity, and redefining artistic experiences on campus and in the greater New Haven area. Flexible, multi-purpose performance and production spaces throughout the center accommodate a rich array of cultural offerings each season—all with free admission—from photography exhibits featuring the work of local high school students to recitals by world-renowned vocalists.
Frances Pollock ’19 MusM, ’25 DMA, a composer and doctoral student at the Yale School of Music, introduced a vision for a radically reimagined artistic ecosystem that could upend the all-too-common trope of the starving artist. “The simple truth is that we artists are not taught to manage our intellectual property, to cultivate our audience base, or to bring our products directly to market. Instead, we are taught to let someone else handle the ‘business side of things,’ which leads to inefficiencies and inequities,” Pollock explained.
In 2020, she and seven other artists founded the Midnight Oil Collective, a venture studio that “empowers artists and humanitarians with the same tools afforded to scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley to change the world.” So far, the Midnight Oil Collective has launched a pre-seed fund, invested in eleven artist-managed holding companies, raised and deployed $500,000, and generated more than three hundred part-time jobs for artists all over the country. They have also built incubator and accelerator programming that supplements an artist’s graduate education and gives them a vital business foundation that many artists currently lack.
“This would not have been possible without the resources at Yale,” Pollock noted. “Once the starving artist has the means to feed themselves, who can imagine what type of innovation these artists will usher in?”
Creativity as Key to Innovation
The evening’s next two speakers demonstrated that creativity, while long associated with the arts, is a discipline-agnostic process—and one that is essential when developing solutions to our greatest challenges.
Andre Levchenko, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering, is currently working on a creative solution to address the extraordinary energy costs of the AI revolution. In the near future, he explained, all of the energy we produce will be consumed by computers. To solve this energy challenge, he and his team of researchers are studying the capacity of brain organoids—3D tissue models derived from human-induced pluripotent stem cells—to act like computers. Because brain organoids require a minimal amount of energy compared to computers, this research has the potential to change the entire paradigm of computing. “At Yale, we believe creativity is key to innovation, regardless of discipline,” Levchenko said. “Creativity can help us find new and innovative solutions to problems—problems like computational power and sustainability.”
Matthew Suttor, program manager at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) and senior lecturer in theater and performance studies, walked the audience through some of the principles and techniques he uses to teach creativity to Yale students, from combinatory play with words (a practice used by Einstein) to developing new habits and rituals.
Suttor, whose work as a composer explores the intersection of technology and music, discussed his own creative process while developing his recent opera, I am Alan Turing, inspired by the visionary computer scientist who foresaw the advent of Artificial Intelligence. Turing was also known to be fascinated with natural number patterns, from leopard spots to the spiral of petals around the center of a flower. After a serendipitous discovery in the Turing archive, Suttor was able to develop a bespoke version of Open AI’s GPT that transformed numbers in Turing’s studies of nature into music. “The result is both shocking and wonderful,” observed Suttor.
A More Creative Yale
Following a lively panel discussion with the four speakers, For Humanity Campaign Committee co-chair Donna Dubinsky ’77 took the stage to introduce President Peter Salovey ’86 PhD and thank him for his extraordinary contributions to the university. The evening marked Salovey’s last For Humanity Illuminated event as president before Maurie McInnis ’96 PhD assumes the role on July 1st.
In his remarks, Salovey highlighted the university’s progress toward a more unified and innovative Yale. “All across campus, we are preparing students to be flexible thinkers who can draw from the vibrancy of our arts ecosystem, the depth of our humanities departments, the expertise of our social scientists, and the innovation of our engineers and natural scientists,” he noted. “We have, in abundance at Yale, the know-how and the resolve to realize the more perfect world within our reach.”