The Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators (gRig) was a group of European artistic and cultural operators gathered around a mutual purpose; to research and create meaningful situations in hybrid (or mixed) reality, where digital media and physical materials, objects and spaces are increasingly intertwined.
Generating inspiring and playful situations in this reality requires skills from a variety of artistic technological and scientific disciplines. Most complementary collaborations in this context tend to happen on the edges of knowledge-fields, where different perspectives and approaches can be synthesized into hybrid forms of creative expression. Hybrids between artistic interventions & scientific experiments, responsive installations & audio-visual performances, film & games and many more. It is on these fuzzy edges that experimental technology and contemporary culture truly amplify each other's potentials. We have found these edges to be the most fertile ground for innovative advances in current artistic practices. In a not so distant future, digital technologies will become seamlessly woven into the fabric of daily life. Technologies able to adapt to different situations, be aware of each other and can even be considered companions. Technologies that are inspired by nature and more in harmony with the environment. Already today, we can see unprecedented forms of communication, presence and expression emerging on the edges between physical and digital, biological and technological worlds.
The technologies for mixing realities are becoming increasingly accessible and available. The people of today have the ability to steer their future deployment, towards green, fair and inspired realities. For several years the gRig partners have worked together, exchanging information and resources; in European projects, informal networks and symposia, working towards a sustainable and extendible conceptual, organisational and technological support structure for artistic expression in hybrid realities. With gRig we will formalise our collaboration over a longer time-span, strengthening the bonds between the partners through a joint research, production and presentation programme.
gRig is a guild with the common pursuit of integrating and generating realities. It is an ecological guild - a group of species that have similar requirements and play a similar role within our community. It is a guild for: (1) Those who generate realities: bringing that which can be actually experienced into existence; (2) Those who integrate realities: combining one world (or state of affairs) with another so that they may become whole. After an unknown time of underground activity, the guild has decided to become more public in its existence and formally support its members. gRig found this necessary as present consensus reality is becomming thinner and grayer, with a pressing need for reality generation and integration in all spheres of human activity, while imagination still exists.
The project which ran 2007-2009 was supported by the EU Culture 2000 program.
The guild consists of: FoAM from Belgium, InterMedia from Norway, Nadine from Belgium, KIBLA from Slovenia and Time’s Up from Austria.