Miguel Ripoll
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
Miguel Ripoll puts his images together step by step, mixing digital tools with hands-on choices. Each piece starts with research and an idea, then moves through cutting, editing, and reworking until it’s pulled back into something whole. AI helps in the process, but never takes over. What matters is the end result—texture added on paper, all source files deleted, and a single object left behind. For Ripoll, the machine is just the start. The real work happens when it passes through his hands.
Q: Your process begins with AI but always ends by hand. What does that physical finish give the work?
A: The process doesn't begin with AI: it begins with a concept (that I come up with) and a series of texts and images (that I write and curate). The role of the AI here is ancillary at best, akin to what assistants did within Renaissance artists' workshops: mixing pigments, priming the canvases, and doing the boring bits of prepping and colouring.
Here's how I work:
• An AI LLM is fed a large custom database of assets (public-domain texts and images). Human-driven iterative adversarial dialogue (no literal prompting and no style references) produces hundreds of pictures, most of which are useless and only fragments of which are kept for the next step.
• AI-generated images are meticulously curated into a smaller library of partial visual elements, which are manually cut out, edited and digitally modified further. These digital “parts” are mixed with human-made, handcrafted digital media.
• This image is edited again digitally, adding texture, detail, and refinement by hand. Once completed, it is giclée printed on large-scale hand-drawn (ink, pencil) archival-grade Hahnemühle cotton paper 350 g/m2 mounted on 3mm aluminium Dibond.
• A single original drawing gets signed and authenticated with a unique Hahnemühle hologram certificate. All other digital assets and proofs are deleted, and only one inalterable physical artwork, a one-of-a-kind creation, remains.
This entire process is human-led and human-driven (by me): every creative decision and every step is decided only by me. The AI has no agency, and nothing it produces is used "as is", but recycled, reworked, remixed, and cut out into pieces that are then recombined and edited (all of it by hand, by me). What my physical intervention imbues the work with is precisely my personality, my vision, my uniquely human presence, ideas, quirks and obsessions.
Q: You delete the original files once a piece is complete. What’s behind that decision?
A: There is no reason to display digital art exclusively on screen, other than choice and/or intellectual laziness. To me, digital is only the beginning, the starting point. By ending with a physical object, I negate the endless reproducibility of digital and turn transient, bodiless data into something (relatively) permanent.
The paper I use has its own very rough and beautiful texture, which adds depth to the drawings. My AI-assisted art incorporates a unique form of digital texture—the texture of data. The algorithms that help me to generate these artworks are intricately structured, resembling complex digital weaves.
In any case, true art is never finished because it is not trying to solve a problem. That is what I do, I ask questions, and then it is up to someone else to provide their own answers. In my practice, I stop when I look at an image and I cannot respond to that question myself.
Q: You talk about tech fracturing our moral and cultural compass. How does that tension show up in your imagery?
A: I don't see technological disruption as necessarily “bad”: to me, it is part of a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. What shows up in my work is my own vision, which is that of an optimistic misanthropist. There is violence and confusion and pain there, but also light and colour and hope and beauty.
Art must question us and make us try harder to see what is not there. If you understand the thing immediately, what you are looking at is worthless. I like ambiguity, but also clarity, balance, and symmetry. The challenge is to make all this look casual, effortless.
Q: Your pieces remix old narratives with new tools. What makes a myth worth reworking?
A: Most art throughout history can be reduced to the same few themes: sex, power, loss, memory, love, regret, beauty, death, money, and time. Ancient myths and narratives are very resilient because they speak to the temporality of human experience.
If you can understand straight away, it is not art, but propaganda. I see what I do as a sort of cognitive alchemy, a kind of rationalized rite to understand who I am. In short, I am talking to myself, rewriting my own mythologies.
Q: You've worked across code, design, literature, and now painting. What made you return to artistic practice?
A: I started experimenting with generative code and algorithm-driven visual narratives in 1999, but I was very frustrated by the technology available at the time. So I left, disappeared from the art scene, and spent the following two decades working with generative algorithms differently.
Now that technology has caught up, I have been able to transition back into the art world. Since 2023 I have been working full-time on my art again. My current work, "Grand Tour", is a series of large-scale drawings on paper that revisit the tradition of elite travel from the 18th and 19th centuries, in the context of contemporary concerns.
Q: There’s a lot of dystopia in conversations around tech. What makes you keep looking for beauty in it?
A: Technology and art have always been closely linked. New technologies always disrupt market dynamics and question received wisdom. They are also unstoppable: no matter how hard some people try to delay it, progress always ultimately wins.
I am very aware of the past so that I can be relevant to the present. What astonishes me is how artists, critics, collectors and agents can still ignore art made with today's technology. Instead of fighting it, they should learn about technology. A new connoisseurship is now needed to tell the wheat from the ever-abundant digital chaff..
