ARIGA - Artistic Research in Generative Arts

David Pirrò & Luc Döbereiner

The Special Interest Group on Artistic Research in Generative Art, founded 2021, (ARIGA) addresses artistic research that focuses on the computational, the algorithmic, and the generative. ARIGA offers a context for artistic practices that create processes whose performance results in the work of art: such performances may or may not be influenced by external factors or agents (the audience, human performers, data, light, the weather etc.). We refer to practices that set the conditions for a work of art to emerge based on the temporal and unforeseeable interaction of an ensemble of agents, objects or rules. ARIGA gathers artist researchers working in diverse media, including space, sound, image, video, sculpture, and language.

The group addresses practices that engage in an interaction with computational artifacts that suspend preconceived functioning — tools or instruments to achieve something — and rather embrace the mutual evolution of technology and artistic thought. It further advocates for a stance towards the computational as a non-atomic and actor integrated in a mesh of irreducible interrelations, as part of an ecology in which technological, historical, social, scientific aspects interact. ARIGA critically addresses fundamental questions common to diverse practices and approaches relating to notation, the textuality of source code, the role of procedures, computation and automation in creative processes, the materiality of algorithms, machine agency, and data as material. Moreover, we seek to provide a context for the critical and speculative artistic exploration of web technologies and their potential to connect and relate people, places, spaces, time scales, data and algorithms.

ARIGA seeks to establish a framework and network for existing communities of artistic researchers working with computational material. ARIGA aims to create a context for exchange, collaboration, publication, and discourse for artists and researchers in experimental generative art. We deem such a platform particularly relevant due to the increasing digitization of our lives, post-covid remote presence mediated by networks of computational agents, and the ubiquity of AI and machine learning in everyday life and the arts. ARIGA provides a space for critical and artistic reflection on these realities.

ARIGA has been proposed and conceived by David Pirrò and Luc Döbereiner. We aim to form a larger group of core organizing members representing a more diverse group of artistic disciplines and practices.

We propose to establish a regularly appearing peer-reviewed online publication medium (e.g. "Journal for Generative Art", working title) hosted on the Research Catalogue, either autonomously or as part of an already established journal. In doing so, we aim to actively feed into the further development of the Research Catalogue by gathering creative coding practices and expertise. In this way, ARIGA aims to foster the development of genuinely generative and computational presentation and publication formats. In addition, we propose to contribute to SAR conferences with panels, presentations, and workshops centered around artistic research in generative art.

The ARIGA Special Interest Group is supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.

ARIGA introduction on the Researchcatalogue

Link to the ARIGA Portal on the researchcatalogue

Link to the ARIGA channel on youtube hosting the recording of the ARIGA sessions. In each session group's members present their work in Generative Arts