WIP recently had a chat with Gianluca Maffoni and Marta Robiglio, a duo of artists from Italy. With a shared passion for collaboration and experimentation, they've been exploring new aesthetic codes by combining different forms of expression.

Their artistic journey has been influenced by their fascination with technology and coding languages, leading them to incorporate tools such as JavaScript, P5.js, Three.js, and Max/MSP/Jitter in their work.

Gianluca and Marta continue to push the boundaries of art and creativity, constantly seeking new and innovative ways to express their unique perspectives. Their artistic process is centered around the exploration of data manipulation and human-device interaction, resulting in art that is both visually striking and thought-provoking.

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Where do you get ideas for creating something?

From everything. On our journey we have had experiences that have somehow changed our view of the world. Everything is interconnected and once you understand this it is easy to bring your perception and experience back into what you do. We try to understand the world and reality through direct experience and experimentation, this makes us discover new things and new ideas.

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You are actually a duo of artists, which is interesting. In which way do the creative sides of each of you contribute to the final art piece?

We are complementary, we do not overlap but complement each other. The underlying creative research is common and this has led us to join forces. We each have our own aptitudes and skills, which we also make available to each other's ideas, we each do our part and we share the work. After all, working with others is better than alone.

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You incorporate code in your artistic process. Could you share how your creative process unfolds and which tools you utilise to write code for your art pieces?

First of all there is experimentation, what can I do with the code? This opens up endless avenues and possibilities that often risk being just an exercise in style. This is where intuition is needed, that feeling of having discovered something unknown. That vision that allows you to find in your experiments the potential to create something new. We must then confront ourselves with our real capabilities, it is easy to have ambitious ideas but you have to come to terms with your means. If ideas are not realised, they do not exist. This is why it is important to start with experimentation, because once you have experimented, you have also learnt. We enjoy developing with textual coding languages such as JavaScript, in particular we are having a lot of fun with P5.js and Three.js because of their potential for interaction, 3D visualisation and wide diffusion. We also use visual node programming languages such as Max/MSP/Jitter.

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Do you think in an artwork is more important the How or the Why? 

Neither. We are in the age of social networking, it only matters likes or not likes. Works of art, especially digital ones, today have an audience of users amplified by the internet and therefore the context has changed compared to the past. There are two characteristics of the Internet that, in our opinion, have marked this paradigm shift: speed and quantity. The criticism has passed into the hands of users, who cannot help but express what they feel or think in a superficial and immediate way, but it is also more honest and inclusive.

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Do you find yourself returning to any specific themes in your work?

Technology has always been an issue, particularly the human-device relationship and active-passive interaction models. We try to have a natural and social approach to technology by putting our knowledge into practice and making DIY (Do It Yourself) a way of life.  Aesthetically, we explore datamoshing, filtering and manipulating data from a file, colours become psychedelic and shapes distort into glitches and abstract signs.

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Are you using Artificial Intelligence to create your artworks? How do you incorporate it in your creative workflow?

We have done several experiments with the complex models that are used now, but we prefer a different approach, one that is more concerned with structure rather than generation. We ask ourselves how it works instead of asking what we can do with Artificial Intelligence. For example, we designed an intelligent musical instrument, CONTATTO, that uses Markov chains (a probabilistic stochastic process) that learns to play autonomously from the person who is playing it (machine learning).

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How do you see the role of AI developing in the creative field in future years?

It is certainly an excellent tool for those with little technical ability. We are in the early days of something destined to grow and develop more and more. It is a booster for productivity but runs the risk of flattening originality as it currently makes a remix of already created works.

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As artists, what's the one piece of advice you wish someone had given you at the beginning of your career?

Be as brave as possible.

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