Artist Statement

June 11-16, Auditorium, Centre for Contemporary Art Barcelona. Public Event.

Programme in collaboration with Sónar.

Keywords: glitch, Ornella Muti, random, non-human co-creation

In September 2018 Katerina Cizek invited me to a MIT conference in Cambridge about Co-creation: This was the first time I noticed that there is a theoretic discourse about co-creation. The usage of non-human creation is not new. Analog random-based processes, such as Gerhard Richter’s colour-coat-scratching (“Rakeltechnik”) or Jackson Pollock’s “drip technique” created iconic landmarks. Harold Cohen used fix algorithms to create art, Vera Molnar used fix algorithms as a tool to explore art.

In 2022 I made DanceCubesII. The visual part of DanceCubesII consists of algorithm-based images of 80’s filmstar Ornella Muti, created by an uncontrolled process without human influence. For this process I used the selfcoded software Code9 as non-human co-creation tool. But the artworks rhythm is dominated by a half visible superimposed dance performance of the young Italian actress: an artifact of a Spanish B movie, published in 1974, two years before the end of fascism in Spain. The result of both image streams consists of an unseen visual language.

While the main idea was a human creation and the mix of the visual elements was done by me, the radical colors and the unusual aesthetics came from the uncontrolled non-human co-creation process.

All this is very technical: As an artist, my feeling was that I had to create something which is less representational art than my past works. My feeling was that the blur between abstract and representational art will conduct into something more intense. My ship to navigate there was non-human co-creation.

• Joseph Ayerle is an artist of Europe’s digital generation and explores art in the fields of photography, artificial intelligence, videoart, NFTs. A study conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Joseph a “new generation artist and photographer”, the Royal Photographic Society (UK) described Joseph as an “experimental contemporary artist”. Joseph’s thematic cycles and moving image projects seem to reject any kind of classification and defy often conventional colour schema. Using digital artifacts of advertising and films in addition to his own photography, Joseph distorts in his oevre the coordinates of time, space and conventions. Joseph is regularly invited by universities and Art-Meets-Tech festivals to events such as “ROMBAK” of the Multimedia University of Malaysia, “Audiovisual Frontiers” of the University of California, Riverside or the “Reboot Fest” of the Universities of Porto and Lisbon (NOVA). Joseph was finalist of the exhibition Concorso Nazionale di Arte Attuale e Biennale per le Accademie di Belle Arti di Firenze e Carrara” in Florence, 2017. http://www.joseph-ayerle.com