Generative Practices in Creative Industries: The Phygital Aspect of Artistic Design

Abstract

The concept of phygital (from the words "physical" and "digital"), as the name implies, involves the synthesis of physical and digital components. This concept originated in the field of marketing; however, today it is increasingly used in various fields of science, including art history, and reflects a new trend in the world of art and design when the boundaries between offline and online environments are blurred. Earlier, the Internet was used mainly as a tool for promotion and communication, whereas in recent years the virtual and the real are beginning to interact more closely. The transformation of the virtual into the real and vice versa is becoming one of the key areas of contemporary art; more and more works exist "at the junction" of artistic expression and design solutions. In this regard, researchers of modern culture and art are faced with a number of questions about the nature and aesthetic potential of phygital. The purpose of this study was to analyse a number of representative projects of creative industries created at the intersection of analog and digital representation, to identify their specifics and expressive possibilities, as well as to clarify the specifics of image transformation during online-offline transgression. The results of the study revealed that today a special place in the field of phygital projects is occupied by works made by designers and artists using generative models. This is facilitated by the active development of machine learning. In particular, we are talking about artificial intelligence and its capabilities, which have recently become the focus of attention of artists, designers, and researchers of contemporary art. In 2019, the work Neural Street Art appeared on the wall of a multi-storey building in Yekaterinburg (Popova St., 9). With the help of machine algorithms, a mosaic, created by an artist in the 4th century AD to decorate the Spanish villa La Olmeda, was recreated. The image was applied to the building by a robot printer developed by the STENOGRAFFIFA creative team. The work of a “distributed author”, a meta-author [6] according to P.Galanter (an unknown artist of the Flavian era, the Yandex neural network, a robot-printer, creative teams that made the corresponding technologies and software), raises questions about the connection between digital and physical and the prospects of a generative human - machine creativity. Increasingly, representatives of creative industries are using neural networks to create works: for example, Scott Eaton demonstrated sculptures created “in collaboration” with AI at the Artist + AI: Figures and Forms exhibition, in particular, the bronze Human Allocation of Space (2019). At the same time, digital copies of their works are often created for artists using NFT technologies. For example, Filipino artist Bjorn Calleja, known for his NFT projects, creates tiny sculptures of his animated characters and then digitises them again as NFT tokens (in .glb format for 3D models). More and more works of artists and designers created with the help of neural networks (GAN - generative-adversarial neural network, CAN - creative-adversarial neural network) acquire not just a physical but a phygital embodiment. This is not only about "twinning", i.e. NFT twins of physical copies of objects, but about hybrid works and installations that exist simultaneously in digital and physical spaces. Thus, we came to the conclusion about the special role of artificial intelligence in modern phygital projects in creative industries, as well as the importance of the development of virtual and augmented reality as a space for the existence of works of this type. This study outlines the advantages of the phygital format for the designer's work, as well as the expressive possibilities of online-offline transition in the space of contemporary art, classifies art spaces at the intersection of physical and digital, features phygital as a means of communication relevant to today's visual culture.