Estonian-born, Amsterdam-based Katja Novitskova explores how technological tools influence our approach to the natural world, shaping perception and mediating experience. Exploiting the disconnect between physical reality and its digital representations, her sculptures and installations provide an alternative interface where technology and nature can interact in complicated, layered, and generative ways. Online photographs, scientific imaging, and machine-engineered images serve as her starting points, raw materials that combine and multiply, take form, and evolve through AI and artistic selection into sculptural approximations of life that then crossbreed to produce models for future generations.
Through this process, Novitskova recontextualizes technology rather than simply critiquing it, unpacking its entanglement with our understanding of life-forms and the environment while revealing its dependence on models of organic processes. Within her proposed techno-organic exchange, animal meets algorithm in a morphogenic feedback loop in which nature has the power to remodel technology through art.
Robert Preece: In your statement for “Mirror Life,” your 2025 exhibition at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, you described mirror life as “a hypothetical form of life with mirror-reflected molecular structures…it would be very similar to our life, but exist in a parallel space of interaction, with possibly catastrophic overlaps with our own current life-forms. Mirror animals would need to feed on reflected food, produced by reflected plants.” What were you aiming to express with the new forms and materials in these works?
Katja Novitskova: All of these works continue my exploration of the ways that technology reshapes our relationship with nature, especially by capturing, mapping, and remodeling those beings who inhabit the world beside us. I presented a series of sculptures with animalistic forms in various stages of egg brooding. Their wet-looking bodies in various shades of blue do not fit into clear classifications, and their eyes stare back at us. The sculptures softly activate the viewer’s visual memory of vaguely familiar organic forms: an egg sack of an amphibian species, a two-headed snake, a beluga whale, a deer, a snail. . .
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