On July 4, at 6 p.m., the solo exhibition Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously by the interdisciplinary visual artist Natalia Jordanova opened in the "Arosita" gallery in Sofia. It can be viewed every weekday between 3 and 7 p.m. on 12, Vrabcha till 18 July.
To-Do List Piece is an instructional work-projection developed in the context of the solo exhibition. The single work will be shown between July 11 and August 11 as part of the "1m2 art" initiative at the space for culture and social initiatives "TaM" at 16 "Velcho Jamdzhiyat" Street. It is a result of her work as a fellow of the digital arts platform e-valuation 4.0 of the DA LAB foundation.
Over the past 10 years, Natalia has created worlds that address human nature, the human condition, emotionality and relationships to surroundings through technological interplay. Much of this work currently exists as documentation in an archive of digital images, a set of information. For this project, she has categorised the archive and structured it into a set of properties. Then, she examines it and finds ways to reapproach it as grammar, using it to create new work. Thus, it transforms from a carrier of visual and formal qualities, which provoke associations and emotional responses, into 0s and 1s. Reflecting on her archive, Natalia explores what this material would become if used as a dataset.
Commonly, algorithms learn from data with no clear provenance; the source is lost, and the author is anonymised. Developed in collaboration with David Rau—a computer scientist with whom Natalia has been exploring machine learning for several years—"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" uses personal information instead of large generative models. Through the creation of a simple computer program, the work's predefined properties are sampled to make the structural base for new instruction pieces.
To-Do List Piece is a work from her exhibition, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously", and the phrase derives from Noam Chomsky's 1957 book Syntactic Structures. It demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics: an example of how a grammatically well-formed sentence doesn't convey obvious meaning. Chomsky's contribution to linguistics defined the syntax of programming languages and later impacted the fields of computer science, machine learning, and AI, largely influencing knowledge representation and understanding.
A context-free grammar, similar to the system Natalia creates based on her previous work, defines languages' syntax but cannot express any facts about their semantics. This concept is the premise for her instruction works, which she sees as open possibilities. They are "executed" every time the viewer imagines their possible materialisation. The audience becomes the generative algorithm, and the data set it uses is subjective knowledge and human memory.
Commonly, algorithms learn from data with no clear provenance; the source is lost, and the author is anonymised. Developed in collaboration with David Rau—a computer scientist with whom Natalia has been exploring machine learning for several years—"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" uses personal information instead of large generative models. Through the creation of a simple computer program, the work's predefined properties are sampled to make the structural base for new instruction pieces.
To-Do List Piece is a work from her exhibition, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously", and the phrase derives from Noam Chomsky's 1957 book Syntactic Structures. It demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics: an example of how a grammatically well-formed sentence doesn't convey obvious meaning. Chomsky's contribution to linguistics defined the syntax of programming languages and later impacted the fields of computer science, machine learning, and AI, largely influencing knowledge representation and understanding.
A context-free grammar, similar to the system Natalia creates based on her previous work, defines languages' syntax but cannot express any facts about their semantics. This concept is the premise for her instruction works, which she sees as open possibilities. They are "executed" every time the viewer imagines their possible materialisation. The audience becomes the generative algorithm, and the data set it uses is subjective knowledge and human memory.
Natalia Jordanova (1991) is an interdisciplinary visual artist born in Sofia, Bulgaria and based in Amsterdam. As part of an ever-developing quest for possible worlds and the extensive use of speculation, Natalia's artistic practice is a projection of the future, a subjective synthesis and a material proposition of what defines the present moment. Her work engages with the shift between digital and physical and weaves together narratives of past accumulations and future speculations.
Her education includes an MA at the Dirty Art department of Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands (2020), a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2018), a BA in Photography from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Bulgaria (2013), and an Erasmus exchange programme at Central Saint Martins in London (2017).
Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium, Germany, Egypt and the UK.
Her education includes an MA at the Dirty Art department of Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands (2020), a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2018), a BA in Photography from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Bulgaria (2013), and an Erasmus exchange programme at Central Saint Martins in London (2017).
Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium, Germany, Egypt and the UK.
1m² Art is a joint initiative of the curator Martina Yordanova and TaM Veliko Tarnovo – space for culture and social initiatives. For the sixth consecutive year, the project presents artists from the contemporary Bulgarian and international scene within a space of about 1 sq. m.
The project "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" is the result of Natalia Yordanova's work as a fellow of the digital arts platform e-valuation 4.0 of the "DA LAB" foundation. Curators of the upcoming exhibition and mentors in the process of creating the work are the three founders of "DA LAB" - Prof. Venelin Shurelov, Dr. Galina Dimitrova-Dimova and Antoni Rayzhekov.