What motivated you to combine your great passion for art with academia and research? Which milestones would you highlight in your scientific and artistic trajectory?
My artistic practice and research have developed in parallel. Already during my undergraduate degree, in which I studied Communication Design, I had a regular artistic practice, mainly making music and audiovisual performances. At that time I was already trying to work with and about computational systems, exploring combinatorial processes, automation, randomisation, fractals, algorithmic and generative systems, and so on. I began using computers to make design, music and art at that time, although they had already been part of my life since, at around the age of twelve, I had access to a ZX Spectrum
on which I programmed for the first time. After my undergraduate degree, during several years in which I combined professional practice with teaching, most of my research developed through practice, doing design and continuing to work in music, increasingly bringing computers and computation into my practice. It was at that time that I eventually abandoned other musical instruments and began to identify the computer as “my instrument”. Later, in the mid 2000s, when I began the work that would lead to my doctorate, I had the opportunity to articulate all the strands of my activity. I did not develop the doctorate as research through practice, but it was accompanied by a great deal of artistic activity developed in synergy with the research. Since that time, researching, thinking and writing have been inseparable activities from my artistic and pedagogical practice. Teaching in a school of art and design is not limited to transmitting technical knowledge, but is, above all, teaching how to think, to criticise, to discover new paths for bringing into existence things that have never existed and that often we did not even know could exist. Very often works of art are not so much things that we design as things that we discover. In order to discover them we need to be attentive, and research contributes greatly to that process, since it allows us to develop precisely ways of thinking and ways of discovering through thinking.
How would you describe the process of thinking about, analysing and even experimenting with art while wearing the more analytical hat of a researcher?
I do not think of the processes of research and artistic practice as being fundamentally different. Both are processes of experimentation and discovery, in which we depart from hypotheses or research questions, and we can never know where they may lead because they are iterative and unpredictable. At least in my practice, I also see both as fundamentally collaborative, although they always need to be complemented by space for individual introspection. Beyond these aspects more directly related to the creative act, it is also important that, in both processes, it is essential to develop relationships with broader communities: audiences, students, other researchers, critics, cultural agents, and so on. Both processes also depend on a continuous dialogue between works, references and people.[1] Both research and artistic production are conversations, flows in which all parts construct themselves and construct meaning in relation to those that precede them and open space for all those that follow them and will ultimately recontextualise and transform them retroactively. Finally, although both processes are fundamentally directed towards other people, we ourselves, artists and or researchers, are the first to be touched by their results. As artists we discover and experience the work during its development. As researchers we have access to the results of the research, we feel the impact of the ideas, concepts, tools or other forms of knowledge that are produced and we are the first people to be transformed by them. Having said this, it is important to recognise that despite the similarities and synergies, the two activities also differ in fundamental ways, for example insofar as art is very frequently situated outside the sphere of what we commonly associate with research and conventionally call rational thought.[2]
Which artistic processes have currently most motivated and inspired you?
I am very interested in exploring what lies beyond us, in working with processes that lead us to question our perception and cognition because they lie beyond them. These are things that can illuminate us and help us to understand ourselves better, and to understand the world better as we become entangled with them.[3] I find it extremely interesting to explore objects, or beings, things, phenomena, that we might describe as more than human, sometimes closer to us, at other times quite distant, but that are also part of our world, or more precisely that exist in worlds that sometimes intersect with ours.[4] It is in these territories of intersection that we are able to approach them and discover them. I am also particularly excited by working with systems that involve uncertainty and continuous change, because they allow us to glimpse types of creative capacities that lie beyond our own, and to discover other perspectives, other horizons of action and intention,[5] other spaces of possibility to which we might not have access without computation. These are systems that create futurity,[6] that expose us to their essence as creators of a “future future”,[7] a possibility that things might come to be different.
Computational aesthetics is one of your interests and it is impossible for any of us to escape digital influence. What limits do you feel can be transcended if we look at the digital not only as a tool but as a medium, a body and a condition of art in itself?
I find this question very interesting, because I see computation as being very different from other artistic media, since in addition to being a medium, computation is almost inevitably also a body and a condition for art. I prefer to speak of computation rather than of “the digital”, because although the digital is an excellent vehicle for computation, it is by no means the only substrate at our disposal for exploring computation in art. As a medium, computation is capable of absorbing the contents of several other media and remediating them in contexts that intersect and hybridise them. This is far more than what is evoked by the idea of multimedia and can be better described as a metamedium that can contain all media, including those that have not yet been invented and those that are not physically possible.[8] The media that arise from this substrate also cross various practices and traditions and may in many cases result in something absolutely without precedent. Yet what in my opinion makes the relationship between computation and art immensely interesting is the way in which computational works of art may be endowed with agency, which they reveal through their behaviours and through interactions with humans or other systems, leading causality and intentionality to become sources of aesthetic pleasure. As a body, computation exists in an almost paradoxical way, because although it is immaterial and cannot be reduced either to hardware or to software, but exists between and beyond both, it is also something that always exists in a situated form,[9] in an auratic here and now[10] that is contingent and potentially unrepeatable. Finally, as a condition, computation engages us through our capacity to intuit some of its processes and to develop empathy with it.[11] This leads to a transformation of the intersubjective relationship that we develop with art, a relationship that traditionally takes place between a person and an artist, real or imagined, through the work of art but that, with computation, becomes triangular and expands to include the work itself as subject and agent.[12] Computational works exist in a state between objectivity and subjectivity[13] and lead us to experience that condition as well.
How would you describe your relationship with music and sound? What gives you the greatest pleasure in the creative process: the discovery of a new harmony between sonic vibrations, the editing, the combination between media, or perhaps the final result?
I studied communication design and visual arts, but music and sound art have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is their relationship with time. If the visual arts tend more to represent time than to incorporate it, music, like cinema or comics, is an art of time. An art that sometimes captures it, sometimes produces it, but that always exists in time and as time. Music is ineffable and demanding because it requires a reading that is also temporal. Music asks us to spend time with it. And time is the most precious thing we can offer to a work of art when we engage with it. When we experience a temporal work of art we give it a little of our life, in a measure that cannot be controlled solely by us. Music is also a territory in which causality is explored very frequently, which is something that interests me greatly, because of the relevance that the discovery and reading of causal processes has for computational aesthetics. Finally, if I may put it in these terms, music is an abstract art and that abstraction often results in a sense of estrangement that may act as a catalyst for artistic experience and that gives it the capacity to reach what is most profound and enigmatic within us. Music is mysterious.
Could you walk us through the process of creating an audiovisual performance? Is the final product generally more the result of chance or of an organic inspiration or would you say it is the methodical result of an assumed intention?
In general, I think I find the starting points for creative processes in concepts, mechanics or ideas of processes that are more or less abstract and that lead to an exploration that may be both systematic and intuitive. It is through that experimentation that I am able to discover and evaluate the formal and expressive potential of systems, which develop progressively and iteratively. Factors determined by the characteristics of a commission may also weigh here, for example for theatre or another multidisciplinary context, or by performance or exhibition contexts, or even by collaborators. I like to work around an idea, a process, a set of possibilities, a hypothesis or a question. I like to develop those ideas over time, over several working sessions, over several days during which I allow them to ferment and to develop relationships with other ideas, people or things, to grow and to acquire form, body and identity. It is a period during which they transform and during which I discover them. Some of the pieces on which I worked with Pedro Tudela[14] had very long development periods, sometimes lasting years, from the first sketches to their final form in a recording or on stage. The book we published about our sound installations[15] brings together pieces developed over sixteen years, but it does not present them chronologically but kairologically. This is also one reason why I like to revisit works, even those apparently finished but which are simultaneously in states of flow and may be expanded or continued. An example of this is the audiovisual performance that I created with Pedro Tudela and Rodrigo Carvalho and that we premiered at the end of 2024, a work that began from sonic objects and concepts initially developed in an installation in 2005[16] but that in this new context were entirely reinvented and taken in absolutely new directions, in a stage performance and a series of editions associated with it.[17]
It is fascinating to realise that you hold a portfolio in which the human figure simply does not exist. Instead, we experience an abundance of light, colour and movement. What lies behind this choice, which we might describe as conceptual and aesthetic?
In fact, I do not usually work with representations of the human figure, or with narratives that involve humans, or even with the human voice, although here there are some exceptions. What I particularly enjoy is creating contexts or fields of possibility for humans to engage with the pieces, creating spaces in which we may develop aesthetic relationships with the other, whether that other is the work itself, other people or systems, but fundamentally with ourselves. In that sense we might say that the human is always there, not as representation but as an essential condition for the realisation of the work and for the experience of art.
Which other artists, performers or musicians inspire you? Are there forms of art that you particularly enjoy that might surprise us?
I am especially drawn to the work of artists who question and challenge the boundaries of art. Artists who understand that today art develops at the confluence of aesthetic traditions that inform both creative acts and the aesthetic relationships that we can develop with works. These artists also understand that the actions of the artist who develops a work of art are not absolutely prescriptive actions, but rather contributions to the definition of a field of possibilities in which aesthetic relationships and the experience of art may develop. Some references, in alphabetical order, of authors who are active and whose work I admire and that inspires me are Agnieszka Kurant, Aram Bartholl, Domagoj Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf from !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Eliane Radigue, Eva and Franco Mattes from 0100101110101101.org, Florian Hecker, Hito Steyerl, Ian Cheng, Jan Robert Leegte, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans from JODI.org, Olia Lialina, Pedro Tudela, Pierre Huyghe, Rob Brown and Sean Booth from Autechre, Rosemary Lee, Ryoji Ikeda and Trevor Paglen. Although that was not a criterion for selecting this list, it is interesting to note that several of these artists also have very significant work as thinkers and theorists.
[1] Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Hill and Wang, 2015).
[2] Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard University Press, 2007). [3] Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton University Press, 2023).
[4] Rosemary Lee, The Limits of Algorithmic Perception: Technological Umwelt (2018). [5] Brian Upton, The Aesthetic of Play (The MIT Press, 2015).
[6] Timothy Morton, Spacecraft (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). [7] Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013).
[8] Alan Kay e Adele Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media," in The New Media Reader, ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort (The MIT Press, 2003). [9] Miguel Carvalhais, Art and Computation (V2_Publishing, 2022).
[10] Joanna Zylinska, Ai Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020).
[11] Miguel Carvalhais e Pedro Cardoso, Empathy in the Ergodic Experience of Computational Aesthetics (Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, 2018).
[12] Miguel Carvalhais, "…, Magia, Ritual, Techné, Subjetividade," Interact, Revista Online de Arte, Cultura e Tecnologia, no. 39-40 (2024), https://revistainteract.pt/39-40/magia-ritual-techne-subjetividade/.
[13] Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
[14] Num coletivo em que colaboramos desde 2000 e que designamos por @c: https://at-c.org
[15] Miguel Carvalhais e Pedro Tudela, Installations / Instalações (Crónica, 2022).
[16] A instalação 30×1, apresentada na Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, em Vila do Conde, em 2005. https://at-c.org/installations/30x1.php
[17] A performance 30×N e as três edições associadas que foram produzidas até este momento, 30×N — VRD1, 30×N — LRJ1 e 30×N — LRJ2. Estas são parte de uma série em desenvolvimento e que se expande também a colaborações com outros artistas como, até ao momento, Jordan Rita Seruya Awori & Marc Behrens, Joana de Sá, Jos Smolders, Matilde Meireles, Síria. https://at-c.org/performances/30xn/
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