Iskra Velitchkova
Iskra Velitchkova
How many lines of code are from me to a bird?
But even the most vibrant impulse needs a pause. We all need to stop for a moment, to rediscover why we do what we do. But that only happens when we come face to face with ourselves. When we look around: the walls, the paintings we've hung, the books we've gathered. The desk where we work, the notebooks we've filled. There is an essence within each of us, and, surprisingly, it’s remarkably easy to lose it.
I believe this can be one of the central challenges of the near future. Not simply learning how to use new technologies, but deciding whether our idea of art is spacious enough to accept forms of creation in which control, intention and authorship are shared, unstable or difficult to locate.
For me, there is something profoundly poetic in this confrontation. There are probably as many interpreations of this novel as readers, but for me it is essentially about the multiple lives we have within a single life. All the trajectories that we could have taken, branching off into a variety of possible lives. Are we our acts or our thoughts? I mean, we constantly deal with our past and regrets, with our secrets loves, with our secret hates, dreams and hypothetical lives. And it all happens in the present. So, irretrievably we are all these persons at the same time. We are all these lives together.
I ask myself: What are the new landscapes of today? Having painted everything we can see and represented everything we cannot, we now find ourselves at a moment where this era, the era of information, new distances, and new responses to old questions, can more rigorously reflect what we intuitively perceive. Today, in a world where we create alongside this second self, are these emerging forms in artworks guiding us toward answers? What happens when a combination of random parameters results in a human figure? What is the distance between this emergent figure and a real one? Could this be another way to get closer to the essence of everything? I am certain that we are facing new landscapes, and I am curious to see what we will discover in them.
Then I revisited my own work. The forms, and color, always an ally, began to irritate me. They felt noisy, clunky, childish. They lacked strength. I began to wonder: could I ever break free from the confines of the pixel, the stiffness of straight lines, the harsh angles, the cold glare of the screen? I wondered if I could ever use a computer to evoke the same emotions those sketches stirred in me.
I found it crazy that such a small number of people, equipped with so much knowledge, could design systems that would eventually shape how almost everyone in the world lived. So I began trying to understand algorithms and computational systems from their foundations. Not simply what they produced, but how they thought, how they decided and what kinds of futures were already hidden inside their rules.
You really don’t need to know what it will become to help it get started
When I first approached this project, just after finishing the book, the whole story was a huge mess. A planet, two suns, radiation, a spaceship, a man, a woman, Earth.. After a few days of dealing with that mess, I came up with an initial idea from which I would evolve the story. I needed a vehicle. A spaceship or an illusion of it, with which Kris Kelvin would travel to Solaris. And I came up with this.
The central theme of my work is distance, an evolving concept in our contemporary world. Today, we navigate distances that are no longer purely physical. Just as trains and planes once redefined our sense of proximity, our immersion in vast networks of information, data, and computation is reshaping how we relate to one another, creating new forms of distance.
The sketches of Chillida, which I only recently discovered. His sculptures never absolutely moved me, but in his lines, in these notebooks exhibited, in the work of his left hand, I found a striking vulnerability.
My real fuel is people. Their expressions, the stories they tell me, the way they see something I had not noticed. Long conversations around a table with good food, continuing absurdly late into the night. Journeys by car. I love driving.
I spent a few days iterating on these shapes. I had a really great time playing with these moirées; something not very used in my work. At some point I realized that the project needed some kind of an old, eroded and worn mood for some episodes. Something from the 60-70s, almost a soviet propaganda style, which is how I always imagined the scenes. I decided to explore shaders for that. (Thanks Marcelo for the priceless introduction to them!)
From cave paintings to religious art, from naval battles to Sunday scenes, landscapes, and portraits, technology has always shaped artistic expression. The emergence of transportation allowed us to paint new horizons. The invention of new pigments enabled more accurate representations of reality. The application of science introduced correct perspectives. Photography forced abstraction.
A second self and a shared will.
It all began with a train. Well, not a real train, but an idea: that feeling that something is moving forward, and you need to jump aboard before it vanishes. I had been chasing it for years. I’m not sure if it was moving too fast or if I was simply running too slow, but the truth is, I got exhausted.
We already live inside this map. Our behaviour, our tastes and our relationships are constantly being measured, compared and translated into data. And, for now, we mostly use that extraordinary knowledge to sell each other things. Which feels like a rather poor use of it.
This is the most relevant view of the system. How these walls interact and create patterns and voids has been the hardest part to tune. And the most exciting as well. I have explored LOTS of different moods for this and finally came up with a few of them.
I challenge the notion that digital art opposes physical art. In generative art, technology is not just a tool, it is a source of inspiration, shaping both the landscape and the object of creation. The presentation format, often inherent to the work, is merely a medium. The art can seamlessly translate into a physical form, emphasizing that its digital essence is fundamentally informational. Can technology, in a way, be nature communicating with us? Could art be the language it uses? Can machines make us more human?
The raw, blazing chaos of Basquiat, a visual language that once left me puzzled but now resonates deeply.
What is art, after all? Is it the result of someone creating something, or is it the person whose name we attach to that result? If a work moves us, opens a question or alters our perception, does its origin change the truth of that experience? And how much human intention must be present before we allow ourselves to call something art?
But what happens when we, as artists, disrupt these systems? What if we break these new ways of processing information and reshape our understanding of distance once again?
In the context of the exhibition at Mexico with Bright Moments, 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. Even disrespectfull somehow by an outsider of that culture.
Are we a black canvas on a white background? Are we green shadows, cubic sculptures, or a particular shade of blue? Who knows, perhaps we are all of these. Yet this search for truth has always been guided by intuition.
I shared these ideas with Holladay, who encouraged me to write everything down: places, scents, memories, anything that could serve as a starting point. She would find a way to bring it all together, to give shape to the intangible. I took on the exercise, and I have to admit, it moved me more than I expected.
This is also why the physical quality of the work matters to me. I want the image to feel as though it has a body, a weight and a history, even when its origin is entirely computational. I am interested in that moment when mathematics stops feeling abstract and begins to resemble skin, bone, wind or memory.
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 approach this topic from a science-fiction perspective. One of them was Solaris. Rereading Stanislaw Lem’s novel, I tried to keep the images of Tarkovsky’s movie out of my head so I could really see the story in a new light.
Consider how we evaluate books, films, music, or any form of content today, often through metrics that simplify and quantify our preferences. Dating apps operate in a similar way, acting as massive databases that filter and categorize potential connections, bringing people closer in a way that would have once taken a lifetime. This is just one example of how technology compresses distance, whether in relationships, culture, or access to knowledge.
2024 started with a clear ambition: to think.
I realized then that INK could not be a digital work complemented by a physical object, nor a physical creation with a digital extension. INK had to be free. I was furious, deeply furious. I refused to make any concessions. I wouldn’t let it depend on the inevitable decay of ink on paper or the unavoidable obsolescence of pixels. INK would rely on the one thing that truly depends on us: our memory. That would be its foundation. Its container.
The more familiar these tools become, the less interesting it will be to define digital art instead of just art. The real questions will be the same ones art has always carried. Why does this work need to exist? What does it reveal? What does it make us feel or understand?
Once this episode was covered, zooming out from the idea of Kris confined in the planet transformed his memories and an illusion of a house emerged somehow. Was Kris there? Was it the place he chose to stay?
I explore the emergence of a second self in generative art. When you create rules and are surprised by your own rules, you initiate a conversation with a parallel version of yourself. It’s you, but not quite. You’re not you, but you are. In my view, this represents a fundamental shift in the history of artistic creation.
This wasn’t going to be some botanical experiment in my garden; it was Holladay crafting a real perfume. Something that would embody the essence of my work, not as an accessory, but as its shadow, its reflection, its echo.
Within digital art, generative art creates an especially unusual relationship with the collector. A single algorithm can produce an enormous field of possibilities. The work is not only the system itself, but also the act of recognising which image deserves to remain.
Just this once, I wanted the computer to truly hear me.
ToSolaris is a sequential exploration of the science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem written in 1961. Based on a generative system, this project is a research of new ways of going through a story through code. Even if not there yet, I believe there is a strong value on connecting notions from literature and poetry to our systems. A sequentiality on the behaviour of the machine will provide a rich context for the artist to establish a broader conversation with the machine.
Contemplating contemporary landscapes, I question whether the era of information and new distances can more rigorously reflect our intuitive origins. The history of art teaches us that humans have always reflected on their surroundings to understand them. However, what has always propelled us forward, and always will, is the desire to understand who we are within those surroundings.
For personal reasons that aren't worth taking up your time with, I finally allowed myself that luxury. I left behind codes inherited over the years, those chained projects, those familiar lines of work that, though reliable, no longer felt like my own.
It begins with distance. I have become slightly obsessed with the idea that distance is no longer simply about where things are, but about how they relate to us. How close is a person to you? A book? A fear? A desire? Not physically, of course, but within that invisible map that makes you who you are.
Visiting the ouptuts from the radiated tower, I realized there were these little caves emerging from the shape, clearly an element to play with. I found them so beautiful, and the perfect link to the base and the dimensions I needed to visualize the thoughts and memories of Kris. His whole new world.
I worked in parallel with my notebooks and code, constantly printing pieces and pouring ink over the drawings. The results amazed me. The ink would flow across the drawing, following the grooves of the printed lines to recalibrate its path. Once dry, depending on the amount of ink, the drying method, exposure to direct sunlight, or simply letting the drawings air-dry, the compositions created a sense of confusion that I found fascinating. The distinction between what was digital, what was printed, and what was real ink completely dissolved. Once again, the medium didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter what surface the work was built on. Only the lines mattered.
Black on black. What does black smell like?
Vera Molnár, one of the central pioneers of generative art as a movement, is fundamental to that history. I was fortunate enough to meet her shortly before she died, just before turning one hundred. What stayed with me was not only the importance of her work, but the woman herself. She showed me the beauty of continuing to play at ninety nine. I think that may be one of the most important lessons an artist can receive.
Then, that scene from Truman's Show came to my mind as the perfect vision of Kris dealing with his own torments, and I made this mirage of a rain to appear occasionally.
Maybe it would help me understand, to unlock certain discomforts I still feel when interacting with the machine. Maybe the mistake lies in always being so rational. Perhaps I would grasp it through scent. Either way, I didn’t overthink it. The decision was made.
Looking back, the path now seems very coherent. Generative art is, in a way, the visualisation of chaotic data. And I enjoy chaos far too much.
After going several times over the book, I broke it up into episodes and I began to sketch scenes with the code. The different sketches are not directly representational, however; they allude to scenes. It feels personally like the next step in my personal exploration of narratives 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. It's a sequential base of rules, a growing form based on a common element: a base (a platform), from which different elements grow and navigate through Solaris. I find certainly powerful the idea of exploring the whole context of an algorithm, preparing the viewer for an introduction, conflict, climax and denouement of the system.
But the idea of creating a perfume was both electrifying and terrifying. How could I distill the essence of my work into something so fleeting? How could I capture its soul? And where, exactly, does one even begin to conjure a scent from nothing? Future problems, I told myself.
I wanted the act of remembering to trascend the act of seeing.
Selection, therefore, is not an administrative step that comes after the work. It is one of the central artistic gestures. The system can generate, but it cannot decide what matters to me. It does not know when an image has touched a memory, opened a question or acquired a certain emotional weight. That responsibility remains entirely mine.
Maybe it was a fleeting madness, I don’t know. But I wanted to feel that stroke, to experience the marks paper carries: the snap of a pencil tip when anger takes over, the way paper softens when a tear falls mid-process, or how my fingers stain with ink because pens always seem to break. Just this once, I wanted the computer to truly hear me.
There are many. But honestly, what inspires me most tends to be much smaller and closer to life. A song. A sentence. The final scene of a film. A conversation that suddenly changes the direction of a thought.
I wanted to start again from scratch. Free from pressures, markets, or any gaze. The dreaded blank page. And from there, to build something. To release it into the world and, with a little luck, find some peace. So I went through my notebooks and photos from over the years, moments that stayed with me from museums, galleries, even hotel rooms.
I called the work Wind because we never see the wind itself. We only recognise it through what it transforms. The surface of the water, the movement of leaves, a body leaning against it. The algorithm is similar. It remains invisible, but for a moment we see it through the form it has moved into a kind of existence.
This work carries a quiet gesture of gratitude. Whether in its lyrics or titles, their influence lingers within INK, a testament to how music shapes us, holds us, and transforms us.
Are we basically trapped in crystal jails?
There is a great deal of fear surrounding art created in collaboration with machines. Although we could speak until tomorrow about what we actually mean by a machine. Which machines are we talking about? Which technology? The word is used as if it described a single, autonomous creature, when in reality it contains an enormous number of systems, decisions and human histories.
As always, I began at the origins. Would this project respond to my eternal questions? Would I find something in the sketches that brought clarity? Perhaps I could deconstruct the forms to shape their randomness. Would the perfume smell like my places? My past? Would we blend it with the present? Would it be a scent that spoke of identity?
There are, of course, other artists who continue to fascinate me. Chillida, with the raw physicality of his sculptures and drawings. Basquiat and his provocation. Malevich, whom I have tattooed on my arm as a permanent reminder of form and color.
When I finished, I opened the window in my studio. The air smelled of ink. I couldn’t tell if it was the perfume or if it was something else. I only knew that, for a moment, the world felt clearer. And as the wind came in, I realized that it didn’t need to be seen to exist. That was, really, more than enough.
When a recognisable form emerges from one of my systems, I often return to the exact sequence of code that produced it. I cannot help wondering whether this could be anything like the way a bird first came into being. Or a tree. Or a flower. A few simple rules, repeated, disturbed and allowed to evolve until suddenly there it was.
These questions had haunted me for years, but in that moment of shadow, when clarity emerges from despair, they all felt irrelevant. There are times when the shadow, with its sobriety, allows you to think more clearly. Like Junichirô Tanizaki taught us: it is in the shadow that we see the light. And in that light, I found purpose. Or something like it.
Eventually, I understood that I would devote myself entirely to art. Art was, and still is, the only space in which I can ask the questions I genuinely need to ask without having to reduce them to a useful conclusion.
But then, one day, in its infinite contradictions, the universe delivered a lesson. In the middle of my creative process, I experienced a profound personal loss. It consumed me entirely, leaving no space for anything else. The ink, once confined to my notebook, began to spill, onto the table, the walls, even the streets outside. The sky itself seemed to absorb its weight, heavy and suffocating. It felt as though I could no longer contain it, as though black demanded more space. Each uneven stroke became a branch reaching toward the surface. And then, suddenly, everything somehow came together.
This has completely changed my relationship with image making. I no longer create an image with the intention of producing that particular image. I create the conditions, I observe, and I wait. Then, through that waiting, the image appears.
Each composition is anchored by a song from Travis, a band that has unknowingly accompanied me through every chapter of my conscious life. Their music has been there for everything, a constant witness, perhaps understanding me better than I understand myself.
Perhaps technology is simply nature finding another way to speak through us. I cannot think of another reason why humanity has felt so endlessly compelled to keep pushing it forward.
What fascinated me most was the feedback loop between processes. The prints of the digital work inspired how I poured the ink, and the way I poured the ink completely influenced the tones I would create with the code. It was during this piece, when I spilled an entire bottle of ink, left it to dry, and illuminated it with a warm light, that I saw the color of rust. And I coded it, in my own way.
Once I have constructed a system, I begin to break it. I undo my own decisions, disturb its logic and move things for no particularly clear reason. I build the game and then dismantle it, simply to see how the pieces find their way back to one another.
For years, I had been captivated by the world of scents. My shelves were filled with books on perfumery, biographies of master perfumers, and studies on plants, dyes, and pigments. I thought of Marrakech: its vibrant streets, the colors, the sweet warmth, the air heavy with fruits and spices. I remembered the rose fields of Bulgaria and Turkey, places I had always dreamed of visiting, the plants in my garden, and that alembic I impulsively bought without any idea of what I’d do with it.
I find that quite extraordinary. The image is not fully imagined in advance and then executed. It arrives. It makes itself visible. My role is to remain curious and patient enough to recognise the exact moment when it has become present.
Ink, the universal symbol of permanence, became the centerpiece of it all. A vessel for capturing loss, for anchoring stories in time. For generations, ink has carried the weight of memories, experiences, and histories. It has written names that defy erasure, holding them safe from the tide of forgetfulness. Ink declares: you were here. It fades, it smudges, it weathers. And yet, somehow, it persists. Perhaps this is what existence is, the audacity to insist on being, even when unseen.
While I was curating the project, I was pregnant with my daughter. Then, quite suddenly, I saw the body of a woman emerge from the system. A mature woman, carrying the traces of time, of her children, of her skin and of herself. The image went straight through me with a force I cannot fully explain. It felt like a wink from life.
I sketched aimless shapes. I ran systems to unravel what might emerge from them. Would silhouettes appear? Connected elements? Recognizable patterns?
But quite quickly, I became more interested in the rules than in the data itself.
The canvas vanished. It evaporated. Strip everything away, I thought. Remove the background, the shadows, every distraction. Leave only the line. That line, drawn on paper or screen, demanded its absolute space. Once again, the eternal question arose: what holds a greater truth? The tangible weight of the canvas or the infinite expanse of the screen?
Every so often, something appears that feels familiar. It may be a bird, a tree, a face or something I cannot name at all. The form is never completely defined, yet it carries a presence. Among thousands of possible relationships between parameters, something suddenly clicks.
Because collective urgency, no matter how noble, can dilute us. The richness of what we build together will only be genuine if each of us has the courage to reveal what we carry within, to express it in our own way. So, I turned off the engines.
In essence, I am deeply inspired by moments of transition. The space between one thing and the next, when something has ended but the new thing has not yet fully begun. That uncertainty holds enormous force for me. It is usually where I find the work.
INK would speak to the human desire to leave a mark, the pursuit of permanence in a world destined to fade. Each stroke would reflect fragments of the human experience: figures, letters, dreams. But none of it would be purely tangible. It would be memory, shaped by contradictions.
Yes, although I do not experience the digital and the natural as opposites. For me, technology is not something cold or external to nature. It comes from us, and we come from nature. The separation feels artificial to me.
Slowly, I let myself explore again. My thoughts, my readings, my sketches. Then one day, staring at those sketches, it hit me: the beginning was already there. It was always the sketches. Sketches.
What I want to ask is whether we might one day use it for something else. Something more intimate, perhaps even spiritual. If we could map every distance that constitutes a person, everything they love, reject, remember, fear or desire, would we finally know who they are? Or would the most important part be precisely what escapes the map?
There was something about my own search for the essential that inevitably led me to the purest of instincts: scent. There was something beyond shapes, something abstract, intimate, personal. Something we might poetically call an aroma. Then let’s do it.
Sometimes they become almost like collaborators. This does not erase the role or authorship of the artist, but it creates a different kind of intimacy with the work. Some of the most meaningful relationships I have with collectors began in precisely this way. They did not simply acquire an image. They were present when it appeared.
So I am not interested in controlling every mark, nor in disappearing behind the machine. I am interested in the space between those two positions. I like to call this space, distance. A distance between what it is and what is looks like. I establish the order, I introduce the disorder, and then I wait for something neither of us could have produced alone.
I do not really think of it as delegation. The system has agency, but that agency exists inside a world I have built. I decide the rules, the limits, the language and the conditions in which something can happen. Then the algorithm responds, and very often it contradicts me. That conversation is the work.
Still, the fear is real. We are frightened by the idea that a machine might produce a work of art. And I keep wondering why. Is our concern purely artistic or philosophical? Are we trying to protect the meaning of art? Or are we frightened because, somewhere in that process, we may no longer appear in the credits? Perhaps what we are confronting is not only a crisis of authorship, but our own ego.
I think technology will gradually move into the background. This has always happened. A new technology becomes the protagonist while the object it enables is still trying to acquire enough body, language and meaning of its own. Once that happens, the technology becomes what it should be: a structure of support. It remains fundamental, but it is no longer the subject.
I spent the following year at home, surrounded by all kinds of machines, toys, musical instruments and even a pottery wheel. I wanted to give myself the greatest possible freedom and see what direction emerged from it. I did not want to decide in advance what the answer should look like.