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Creativity Clinic

At King's there is an enormous creative energy, with staff and students interested in producing artistic outputs even unrelated to their professional or educational aims. We felt that King's Institute for Human and Synthetic Minds, with its focus on creativity, was the perfect setting to create a mechanism to support, both theoretically and financially, such creative energy.

The Creativity Clinic will be hosted by three academics - Carmine Pariante, Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, and Zoran Cvetkovic. We asked them to answer some questions about their motivations and the clinic.

Tell us a bit about yourselves and what you will bring into the clinic?

Carmine:

In parallel with my clinical and academic experience, I have trained as a moviemaker and writer, and I have had experience as a theatre actor. I have always felt that this creativity knowledge, while helping me in being a better academic communicator, was really untapped in terms of helping others fulfilling their potential. The creativity clinics give me this opportunity.

Gabriele:

I started out in the arts, spending much of my youth trained in painting and drawing - preferably in black and white. I later studied art history at the university, before curiosity took her towards languages and textual studies.

Today, I teach, research and create with XR media, and has curated programmes and exhibitions across the arts and memory making. I am particularly interested in what happens when art, technology, heritage and unruly ideas are put in the same room.

Somewhere along the way, science fiction became part of the toolkit. A lifelong fan of sci-fi in both film and literature, I often borrow its favourite question “what if?” for work that calls for experimentation, speculation and imagining things otherwise.

Who should be attending this clinic?

We want staff and student that are, basically, stuck at any stage of development of an artistic project: a movie, a script, a novel, a picture, a statue, digital arts...

They should be at a crucial point where they feel they cannot move forward in a clear direction – narratively, stylistically, aesthetically – and they need a “clinic assessment”.

All will receive feedback, and some will also receive pilot funding needed for the next stages.

street artist 368x208 (shutterstock)

What is the format of the clinic?

We plan a monthly clinic, with the first three dates being 21 October, 18 November, and 9 December 2026.

We want this to be an opportunity for everybody to learn about the creative process, by receiving direct feedback, listening to the discussion on other projects and providing their own feedback and comments to the members of the group. Throughout all sessions, the tone will be supportive and respectful, but invariably people will need to be open, and indeed receptive, to criticism.

In addition to the feedback provided by the three tutors (Carmine, Gabriele and Zoran), we will be seeking specialist help by experts within or outside King's, if and when needed.

Do participants need to attend every session?

We expect this to be an open group where people attend as few or as many sessions as they need; however, we would advise that 3-4 sessions at a minimum would allow people to present the project, receive and act on the feedback, and bring it back for further discussion.

Also, because of the interactive learning, people are encouraged to attend sessions even if they have not made any progress on their own project, or while waiting for their turn to present.

In this story

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene

Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities

Carmine Pariante

Carmine Pariante

Professor of Biological Psychiatry

Zoran Cvetkovic

Zoran Cvetkovic

Professor of Digital Signal Processing

Mindset

Thought pieces from the King's Institute for Human and Synthetic Minds

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