TOSOLARIS BY ISKRA VELITCHKOVA
This was part of an ongoing series of articles that released was digitally in November 2022. They were first published in the print edition of the Bright Moments Quarterly that was distributed at NFT ART CDMX in Mexico City.
Malte Rauch: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview, Iskra! Your professional background is in data visualization. I would like to begin by asking how you got started in generative art?
When I went to university, I decided to study economics. My aim was to understand the world around me. I had actually been deciding between economics and physics, and that felt like the choice between understanding the social or natural world. And I eventually decided to study the social world.
Studying economics was great, but I also felt that I need a more creative outlet. In my third semester at the university, I met a professor who knew my background and understood this need. He suggested data visualization as an opportunity to combine economic analysis and creativity. It was a perfect fit and I quickly immersed myself in the field.
In fact, we eventually created a studio together. He was very good with the statistics and I was really good with the design. The studio was quite successful in Spain. Due to personal reasons my partner could not continue the project at some point. And since it made no sense to continue the studio without him, I decided to close it and moved on. I owe him a lot.
Subsequently, I joined a team of mathematicians and physicists at a bank that did very interesting explorative work with data. Working with this team, I became increasingly interested in the algorithms themselves. And I began to think about how algorithms are shaping our societies. The more time I spent with these questions, the more I realized that I would actually like to explore algorithms without any kind of external constraints. And that, essentially, led me to generative art. Generative art, you could say, is the same thing as data visualization but you are not dealing with data. Eventually, I quit my job to dedicate myself fulltime to art.
In one of your interviews, you laconically state that generative art is about humans, not machines. Could you elaborate on that?
Yes, that idea is quite important to me. Most of the algorithms that are built today are aimed at bringing humans to machines. The algorithms are built with the aim of increasing human engagement with these tools.
For me, generative art offers a different way of dealing with algorithms, one where we can discover something about ourselves. In generative art, you teach and engage with the algorithm to discover something that you didn’t design or intend, but that nonetheless deeply resonates with you. We can encounter a unique kind of emergence that is not aimed at bringing humans to engage with machines, but that mirrors us in a profound way. I am constantly thinking about what this alternative way of engaging with algorithms can teach us about ourselves and our relationship to machines. In the future, we may realize that there is an artificial intelligence that can gather emotions, history and an infinite amount of other data to answer some of our oldest questions. How can machines express and explain who we are? That is a question that fascinates me. And for me, something of this is foreshadowed in generative art.
The majority of generative art is dedicated to delicate abstract compositions. While formal concerns are at play in your work, you also seem very interested in exploring representational or even narrative elements. I am thinking of works like “Birds” but also of your stunning “Uninhabitable” series – which has a lot of narrative references.
Yes, I think that I absolutely need narrative in my work – and in the work that I collect.
There are two approaches to generative art, in my opinion. On the one hand, there is a neglect of narrative for the benefit of a pure display of technical skill. I think these projects are extremely interesting, but they don’t resonate with me as deeply. In my opinion, meaning is, on some level, constituted by narrative, and this gets somehow lost in purely technical projects.
On the other hand, you can have different ways of storytelling in generative art. Narrative is essentially about the expressive potential of a generative art project. It allows you to guide your audience through the output space. And the first step in each of my projects is concerned with this guiding story. This is why I love to play with the title and the description. The long-form generative art projects lend themselves to narrative, I think, because they allow you to have this variety of outputs that can be connected by a single story. And I am convinced that narrative is something that we, as the generative art community, need to think more about.
What is your creative practice like? Do you have a routine for your coding practice? Or do you work in sprints? Do you listen to music or do you have to be completely focused?
My practice is – like my life – chaotic. I do not have any structure in my coding practice. But I could also say that I work all the time – and this is my structure… For better or worse, I love what I do, and I am completely dedicated to it. So generative art is quite present in my life.
I don’t like waking up early. So I usually get up with no alarm, make myself a coffee and start coding on my terrace. When I am working on a new project, I work very intensely for several days in a row. Then, I need to take a break, step back and decompress. So, the rhythm of my creative practice is marked by periods of intense activity and moments of decompression. I also combine my coding practice with plotter work. It’s a nice way to find balance by switching between these two realms. If you are working with the plotter, you can touch the paper and pen, and the process has its own, quite calming temporality.
There is no clear pattern in the way new ideas emerge in my practice. Sometimes I am just playing around and sketching – and new projects simply emerge organically from these experiments. At other times, I have a clear direction, and that is currently the case with my work for Bright Moments.
In your work for NFT ART CDMX you seek to incorporate the narrative of Solaris. What does the novel mean to you and what would you like to achieve with the work?
The Bright Moments event is quite important for me. There are many great artists in the show and I want to do something very special. When I began to think about my project, I was inspired by the creative prompt for the event and the concept of afterlife in particular. But I began to have doubts that I cannot adequately deal with the concept of afterlife in Mexican culture; that it would feel like an appropriation.
Instead, I decided to do something that deals with this theme in a more indirect, less culturally specific way. While I was preparing a show in London, I picked up a few books that deal with the afterlife from a science-fiction perspective. Rereading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, I tried to keep the images of Tarkovsky’s movie out of my head – and I could really see the story in a new light.
The book is essentially about the choices you make in life and the consequences they carry. The narrative is about a scientist who travels to the planet Solaris, which he has been studying for years. The planet is almost entirely covered by a large ocean, which is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing entity – a strange, non-human intelligence that confronts you with everything you think and do. For me, there is something profoundly poetic in this confrontation. It is about the multiple lives you have within your life. All the trajectories that you could have taken, branching off into a variety of possible lives.
After I had read the books several times, I began to sketch scenes with code. The different sketches are not directly representational, however; they allude to scenes. It feels like the next step in my personal exploration of narrative in generative art. My goal is definitely not to represent the story with code; rather, I want to create an algorithm capable of expressing the central themes of the narrative in a condensed form.
The last two years have been an incredible period for generative art. Where do you see the space headed and what would you like to do next?
Well, to be honest, I have no idea. A few years ago, none of this existed. And who knows where we will be in a few years?
In comparison with the hype of last year, things have slowed down quite a bit. And that is a very positive development, in my opinion. Going forward, I expect that we will continue to see a less aggressive pace and a more settled way of doing things. As an art movement, generative art will become more accepted, I think. And it’s just a beautiful time to be alive. It’s great to be part of the fight to find recognition for this art form.
Personally, I would actually like to slow down. In the future, I would prefer to have only a few projects each year: major projects that I can dedicate a lot of time to.
