Pedro Alves da Veiga
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SER-GENERATIVO at Galeria Tratuário, Funchal

Published on the site on 25 July 2024

DIGITALAB 0.1 | SER-GENERATIVO. Galeria Tratuário, Rua da Carreira 119, Funchal, 25 July – 13 September 2024. Curated by Hernando Urrutia.

SER-GENERATIVO

Curatorial text by Hernando Urrutia. English translation under the responsibility of Pedro Alves da Veiga.

Pedro Alves da Veiga's generative artworks – art created with code, using algorithms that determine transformations through a variety of computational techniques – seek, beyond artistic encoding through programming, to affect the scope of creation itself, constantly modified by the feedback arising from experimentation, adjusting the systems to produce new versions of each narrative.

The generative narratives in these works are conceptually grounded in BEING (SER) and in its different forms of connection, internal or external. His works thus focus on the importance of the inner BEING, connected to soul, mind and body, and of the outer BEING, connected to others, to space, to society. With his generative narratives, new experimental forms of digital art, he explores contemporary artistic and discursive creation through the computational digital language of new media. They foster the interconnection of the human BEING with the shifting experiences of contemporary society, as well as the relationships between thought and action, between the creativity and the innovation of the human BEING, which can generate anything. SER-GENERATIVO is an exhibition that comes from BEING and goes to BEING, materialised in works traversed by technology and by digital aesthetics, stimulating in character, involving different digital media, and offering constant reflections.

At its origin, SER-GENERATIVO presents a rebirth of BEING, itself also generated through generative processes. As a contemporary creator, Pedro Alves da Veiga embraces the media of his time, as Machado (2007, p. 10) explains: "If all art is made with the means of its time, electronic arts represent the most advanced expression of current artistic creation and the one that best expresses the sensibilities and knowledge of the human being at the turn of the third millennium". We therefore regard this artist as a creator of the third millennium, of restlessness, who uses the different areas of his creation to expand his legacy as a driver of new artistic narratives grounded in conceptualisation, in the word, in the idea, in the generation of knowledge that contemporary art allows, and in the many forms of propagation and production of contemporary thought in the free creation of the human mind – because contemporary creation, as an act in itself, is art traversed by thought.

As Gilles Deleuze states in his lecture "What is the creative act?" (1987), "... there is a fundamental affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance. That, yes. It has something to do with information and communication as an act of resistance."

Contemporary art is associated with everything radical and unsettling, where a dialogue is established that leads us to reflection and to the deepening of thought, which is one of its finest qualities. As Barbosa (2006) notes, "the creation of contemporary art is concerned with establishing a dialogue with the public and making it think"; thought allows reflection and is a sine qua non condition of the evolved human being, a condition without which there can be no true evolution of humankind. As Victor Hugo puts it, "Thought is more than a right; it is the very breath of man", as presented by Robb (1999).

We therefore place Pedro Alves da Veiga as a contemporary creator, a disseminator of thought and resistance, an artivist "who reflects on the subject's experience in the world in which they live and offers different ways of explaining the environment in which subject and work are immersed", as Giannetti (2006, p. 69) puts it.

In his exhibition project SER-GENERATIVO, the artist seeks through his research not only to generate new narratives of digital aesthetics in the generative process, but also to BE a generator of knowledge which, in turn, sets out to prompt new ways of seeing and to spark debate on problems of subjectivity, consciousness and the construction of culture in our society, as part of a generation that seeks change towards an evolution of the human BEING.

Hernando Urrutia

CIAC researcher
Lecturer in Multimedia and Arts, DAMG, Universidade Portucalense
Research Coordinator, Multimedia Area, CIAUD-UPT

SER-GENERATIVO talk, 6 September 2024

On 6 September, the SER-GENERATIVO talk took place at Galeria Tratuário, where the generative art exhibition of the same name was on show. It was moderated by Hernando Urrutia, curator of the exhibition and director of the DIGITALAB project – Laboratory of Digital Aesthetics (New Media – Digital Media Art), with the participation of Maurício Marques, Chairman of the Board of APCA – Agência de Promoção da Cultura Atlântica.

With an approach centred on generative art, the works on show were presented and discussed from technical, aesthetic and functional points of view, together with the evolution many of the pieces underwent for this exhibition. The rebirth of BEING (SER) is the motto, used as a metaphor for generative artefacts with digital-aesthetic narratives, as knowledge-generating BEING(S), able to prompt new ways of seeing and to spark debate on problems of subjectivity, consciousness and the construction of culture in our society, as part of a generation seeking change towards an evolution of the human BEING.

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