"Machines, those sentinels of alienation, now stand as silent witnesses to our creative endeavours."
The New Organic
Iskra Velitchkova wants to present humanity the way machines see us, to see if we learn anything about ourselves from their perspective. Her generative code often riffs on man-made objects. Fallopian Visitor (2023), for example, began as a study on lamps. Along the way, organic forms emerged – like a phallic tower rising out of undulating curves. Iskra asked “what does eroticism signify within an artwork generated by code? Should it, or indeed, must it, be subject to the same scrutiny as human expressions of sensuality?” These questions point us back to ourselves, and the meanings we impose on...
Iskra Velitchkova wants to present humanity the way machines see us, to see if we learn anything about ourselves from their perspective. Her generative code often riffs on man-made objects. Fallopian Visitor (2023), for example, began as a study on lamps. Along the way, organic forms emerged – like a phallic tower rising out of undulating curves. Iskra asked “what does eroticism signify within an artwork generated by code? Should it, or indeed, must it, be subject to the same scrutiny as human expressions of sensuality?” These questions point us back to ourselves, and the meanings we impose on our bodies and the world around them.
Architecture is a continual reference point in Iskra’s work. In ESCAPE (2023), she strips the world of colour in a series of generative renderings. Compositionally, they are a sophisticated evolution of the shapes children sometimes draw – lines over lines that create an illusion of depth but are actually impossible in three dimensions. Despite being 2D, the structures toy with the idea of weight – some appear as brutalist concrete buildings while others are caught in gravitational freefall, like a satellite (ESCAPE #132). These aesthetics were also explored in Iskra’s retrofuturist series ToSolaris (2022), which pays homage to Stanislaw Lem’s space age novel Solaris (1961). By transposing it into narrative images with the aid of a joint algorithm, she merges the cutting-edge technology of the present with historical imaginings of the future. Iskra’s version of the world is a liminal space, caught between reality and science fiction.
Bio
Iskra Velitchkova currently lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
Photography
Iskra is an avid analogue photographer. She captures scenes from everyday life and makes short films of her travels. She also created self-portraits while working on Fallopian Visitor (2023) in her studio. The resulting photographs were sold as NFTs in conjunction with the wider project.
Collaboration
Iskra worked with fellow generative artist Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez on the installation PAL (2022). It consisted of a VHS video of generated images played on loop on an analogue television. A magnet placed next to the screen slowly corrupted the video over time.
