Katja Novitskova

I would say my work centres around the entanglement of all three and us in the middle: what we know of nature and cosmos is connected to scientific paradigms and technological tools of vision and discovery; all our technological tools are assembled from minerals extracted from Earth’s crust and the global system that generates them directly affects natural ecosystems; scientific understanding of the world is a cultural construct that keeps shifting and is deeply mixed into our other beliefs, contemporary biases and ancient structures within our minds.
Altogether, we have a dynamic system that tells as much about the world as it does about human role in it. Production of knowledge itself affects the planet. I always use the same example to explain this in simple language: in some cases there are more digital images of certain species than there are animals of that species left in the wild. An image is a cultural construct but also physical energy that is activated by servers, screens and electricity. A digital image of nature eats at the wilderness that is left, because it also needs this fuel to exist, a fuel that needs to be extracted. I find this nature-technology stack deeply important for the understanding of in which direction the world is moving.

At the root of my art practice was this challenge of creating art without a studio, in a small bedroom with a laptop as my only tool (my reality as a student). It resulted in me attempting to generate personal artistic visions through widely available consumer technologies like Photoshop or any image or video editing software and things like print-shops, 3D printing and whatever process that allowed to produce art outside of costly and obscure artisanal expertise and a large studio. This approach set a vector that controls my process until today. I believe any generic platform or software can be used in an artistic way, even things like so-called AI slop, or Photoshop templates (many great artists proving that). It's about tinkering and experimenting with the medium long enough until something weird happens, something unexpected that leads to the birth of an art work, or an artistic gesture.
On the other hand, as soon as I was able to, I got myself a physical studio, I discovered that physical media is not so different from digital in the sense that it takes some playing around with the materials to discover a personal approach. My exhibition Mirror Life is about approximating synthetic life-forms, and it’s also about combining very digital and very physical synthetic craft-based processes. This vision of potential life-forms is generated, filtered, and translated by me through a set of steps that I think makes them ultimately very one of a kind. To me, an artwork is successful when I still find it strange after having completed it.

I feel a paradoxical affinity towards synthetic materials. I feel an urge to explore the space of them within art, although I’m aware that a lot of them are poison to the environment. In my daily life I’m sticking to wood, wool, linen, and other natural materials within my living space, I love greenery and plants. But when it comes to making work, I really want to go deep into the uncanny of contemporary manufactured materials, be it 3D printing in resin, electronic baby swings, aluminium, self-drying epoxy clay, silicon wafers, or ink from the plotter printer. There is definitely some inner conflict within me about this, and it hasn’t been resolved.
I’m generally a self-conflicted person, always having arguments with myself in my own head. As I’m aware of the whole stack, I’m often thinking about the energy footprint of a generated image or what happens to the chemical waste from my studio. Recently I’ve become more interested in artificially created but environmentally friendlier materials, something I have good access to living in the Netherlands. So perhaps my work process will change, and I will feel more inner peace.

I often think of digital photographs and now also generated images as kind of zombies. They embody an echo of a creature that was once there before without actually being anything like it but a shell, or a translation. At the same time, these digital zombies get a life of their own as images, and they become cultural entities that people engage with and distribute. In this new form, they also become the reflections of us and the technologies that create them. So the resurrection does take place, but it can only happen if the creature morphs with us, the humans, and gets re-embodied through many of our material inventions.

I think more of a translator, remixer, and synthesiser. Despite studying graphic design, I’m not a good designer. My process is deeply intuitive, but it’s difficult for me to create systems or models of things from scratch. I’m much more comfortable taking existing stuff, be it physical or digital, and transforming it into new forms. And it’s crucial that the end result still has some continuity with the initial material, the continuity and change are the point. I think speculation is also a form of extrapolation of the current trends. I guess I do that but more hands-on, rather than rationally. For me, approximation and speculation are deeply connected concepts, perhaps with speculation being more about narratives and approximation more about (also subjective) data points.

The beings are in the process of brooding their eggs, and perhaps also brooding emotionally. Personally, having gone through the experience of being pregnant, giving birth, breastfeeding, and so on, I couldn’t not notice how slimy and wet so many aspects of that were. Life emerges from within the slimy wetness of cells coming together, the wetness helps life to form, protects the skin, the embryos and eggs, feeds them, and so on. I wanted the sculptures to feel real like that, to give them this semi-aquatic appearance that would also create a link between them and the cephalopod wall-pieces in the exhibition. Additionally, currently possible models of artificial biological life can exist in a form of a biofilm, a thin layer of cells that covers surfaces, something similar to an accumulation of bacteria. Going beyond hardware and software, biological wetness approximates a potential medium for technology that we are only starting to really approach. Wetware has been a term in biopunk since a novel with the same name, written by Rudy Rucker, was published in 1988 (I haven’t read it though).

Perhaps I was exposed to classic sci-fi a bit too early. I remember watching Alien and Aliens on VHS with my parents. Besides making me feel terrified, the art direction of those films made a big creative impact on me. Later, I found out about H.R. Giger and his work has definitely been a great subliminal inspiration.

To me, my body of work is a process. Nothing is ever fully finished or completed, it’s a beast that evolves over time in response to opportunities and constraints of my life. Since my work is rooted in re-using existing materials, it can also be done with the images of my previous artworks, as they can be found online just like all the other stuff that is out there. Since 2022, I’ve started to actively bring this concept into my work as an additional input stream.

Estonia gave me a chance to experience wilderness and a light pollution-free night sky. Estonia has had a great music scene for such a small country, I grew up seeing many amazing concerts and electronic music acts, I’ve met a great amount of very talented passionate people. After graduating high school I studied semiotics and culture studies at a small but highly specialised department that stretched my mind and thinking beyond my socio-economic origins. I think all of these things have culturally shaped me in a unique way. Amsterdam and Berlin, on the other hand, linked me to a global community of artists, expanded my ideas of what’s possible and became my second home.

I think with all the discussions about AI sentience we tend to ignore the richness of non-human sentience that surrounds us. The marvellous thing about cephalopods (octopi and squids) is that they emerged on a parallel branch of life from our own, developing very specialised nervous systems that operate in very different ways from our brains. At the same time, our eye structures are both camera-like, albeit with some key technical differences. Looking at an octopus who is looking at me is perhaps the closest to meeting a sentient alien I can get in this life. Within this anecdotal setup there are many layers of philosophical and cosmological significance. I find it also interesting that all the animals whose photographs were taken were not looking at a person, but rather at mechanical cameras, these bizarre extensions of our eyes.

I have a very bad memory and brain fog, to the point that I feel incapable of doing certain things like writing longer texts, remembering the texts I’ve read or projects I’ve worked on. My main way of preserving some sort of mental continuity is the documentation of my previous works, my texts, and the research folders on my laptop where I collect images and screenshots of phrases and quotes I find relevant to my work. Each time I embark on a new major project I kind of scan through the last couple of years of my work, to remind myself what and why I’ve done before. So, usually my new works emerge from some sort of combination of older elements, and in that sense there is a unbroken thread that goes through the whole close to fifteen years of my art practice.
For me, evolution is not a reductive term that refers to survival of the fittest, but a general idea of survival and perseverance of living and cultural forms on the planet through many generations and cultural exchange. I’m interested in how something as fast-moving as technology is clashing with these billion-old processes like photosynthesis, vision, or hormones of emotional bonding. I think my work has been an open-ended attempt to explore this clash.