New technologies are rapidly changing the way humans create and consume art and culture. Yet how do they affect human creativity? If you work in the creative field, most likely you are no stranger to these changes. After all, the arrival of new technologies has always had an effect on creative processes. Although creative fields experience constant change, technological innovation in the last five years has brought a cardinal shift – in industrial design, photography, graphic design, film production and everything that has to do with creative practices. The appearance of artificial intelligence (AI) has added a new dimension to the creative process, enabling artists to explore uncharted territories and to expand the boundaries of their imagination.

The integration of AI in visual art marks an important transition from traditional methods to digital innovation. Historically, the making of art was a manual process which, to a large extent, relied on human technical knowledge and skills. Analogue photography likewise depended on the mastery of a specific photographic process, including manual image processing and manipulations in a photo laboratory or elsewhere. Yet with the appearance of AI, photographers now have access to even more powerful tools. Artists can employ generative applications to bring to realisation what they’ve envisioned with previously impossible speed and quality. This shifting landscape has brought new challenges and raised questions on what it is that actually defines creativity. How is creativity manifested in the medium of photography, which is undergoing ceaseless technological change? What defines the relationship between creative practices and technology?

Describing technology as a symbolic form, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) in his essay Form and Technology (1930) stressed that it transcends the simple functionality of tools or instruments; it acts as a medium through which humans shape their symbolic realities. Similarly to other symbolic forms, such as language, art, religion and myth, technology embodies the human mind and serves as a catalyst for self-realisation, reflecting our curiosity and creativity. Furthermore, Cassirer stressed that technology possesses the ability to transform human consciousness and worldview by creating new symbolic worlds, thus influencing the ways we perceive and understand reality.

The aim of the conversation “Creative Self-Realisation: Analogue and Digital Technologies” is to discuss the artworks and the creative process behind them. Artists of different generations – Jānis Knāķis and Jurģis Peters – will present their works to retrospectively dwell on the course of their making. The creation of photographer Jānis Knāķis’s photomontage Genie Appearing from the Bottle (1981) and new media artist Jurģis Peters’s video Memories of the Distant Future (2023) is separated by a period of more than 40 years. During the conversation, Jānis Knāķis will present copies of analogue photographs made in the 1980s and reveal his original photomontage techniques. Meanwhile Jurģis Peters will offer an insight into his work – the making of AI-generated visualisations. In creative work, it is important to be aware of techniques and creative methods suitable for one’s visual idea, to be familiar with the course and realisation of the creative process and to remain open and search for original practical solutions. This inter-generational dialogue will consider not only the radical contextual differences in the artists’ works, but also stress the common denominators of the medium. The conversation will investigate the intersections of art, technology and visual imagination, wonderfully accentuated by the authors’ works and the accompanying commentary about their creative concepts, the context in which they were made, and the technologies used, as well as original techniques and methods.

Participants: Jānis Knāķis (LV), Jurģis Peters (LV)
Curator: Baiba Tetere (LV)
Language: Latvian
Image: Jurģis Peters, ‘Encounter on the Other Side’, interactive installation, 2023