Research-creation

Creation Lead: Dr. Grégory Chatonsky

Imago’s research-creation consists of confronting art history and artistic creation. While the latter is usually the object of study of the former, If art history usually takes artistic creation as an object of study, it is a question here of reversing and disturbing this relationship.

Imago’s research-creation aims to give artists the opportunity to use and divert the results of historical research in order to produce new possibilities. The core of research-creation consists in proposing alternative or counterfactual versions of the art history.

Indeed, recursive neural networks can be used to analyse large stocks of data, but also to generate new data resembling the data being studied. Moving from analysis to generation means sharing tools with different and complementary objectives in order to invent a method that truly articulates research and creation.

Research-creation wishes to address the following topics:

• The relationship between Europe and image.
• The representations of the body and gender.
• The representations of nature.
• The metamorphosis of images: their circulation, repetition, transformation and influence.

Research-creation wishes to address the following technologies:

• Generation, i.e. the ability to produce alternative data from an existing dataset.
• The completion of pursuing a document beyond its limits.
• Draft-machine, i. e. the automated production of drafts that are reworked by the artist resulting in new ways of working and imagining.
• Transduction : linking functions and translating data into other data. For example, translate a text into an image.
• The contextual relationship between the image and the text in the context of big data and new narratives.

Imago wishes, for the research-creation, to set up a singular methodology combining research in art history and artistic creation based on the tools and statistical results of these, while clearly differentiating the outputs.

The expected results are the production of critical methodology in artificial imagination, artworks and exhibition about alternatives art histories in european context.