KATJA NOVITSKOVA
Born in 1984
The relation between nature and technology is at the center of the explorations of Katja Novitskova. The artist employs scientific imaging technologies to explore the composite territory of contemporaneity, complex geographies and implications for potential futures. In the artist’s practice, technological devices, algorithms, and biological organisms contribute to redefining our vision of the world. The art works carry the narrative through a language borrowed from scientific studies, info-graphics and advertising aesthetics. The recurrent presence of automatically generated imagery, often depicting the natural world, as well as devices related to care or reproduction, constantly brings the mind back to the field of human experience, set into a relationship with unexplored systems, mechanisms and balances of the present and future ecologies. For the 58th October Salon, Novitskova presents three works from the Earthware series, part of her most recent production and a collaboration with PWR studio, supplemented by a site-specific graffiti intervention. By tweaking an algorithm originally designed for shape recognition within a large cave art database, the artist sculpts two-dimensional wall tablets from artificial clay which feature automatically shot photographs of wild animals and blurred animal-human stick figure silhouettes, as if captured in a dream. Earthware aims to capture the poetics of numerical seeing as a timeless loop: from early human art to whatever hurricane of changes is happening at the present moment.