Natalia Yordanova Presents a Solo Exhibition in Two Venues—Arosita and 1m² Art, Tarnovo
The exhibition is titled “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously,” and “To-Do List Piece” is a single artwork on display in the old capital
The solo exhibition “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” by interdisciplinary visual artist Natalia Yordanova opened at the “Arosita” gallery in Sofia. It can be viewed every weekday between 3 and 7 p.m. at 12 Vrabcha Street through July 18.
“To-Do List Piece” is an instructional projection work developed in the context of the solo exhibition. This one-of-a-kind work will be on view from July 11 through August 11 as part of the “1m² Art” initiative at the “TaM” space for culture and social initiatives, located at 16 Velcho Dzhamdzhiyata Street.
The project “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” is the result of Natalia Yordanova’s work as a fellow of the “DA LAB” Foundation’s digital arts platform e-valuation 4.0. The curators of the upcoming exhibition and mentors in the creative process are the three founders of “DA LAB”—Prof. Venelin Shurelov, Dr. Galina Dimitrova-Dimova, and Antoni Raizhekov.
Over the past 10 years, Natalia has been creating worlds that explore human nature, emotionality, and our relationship with the surrounding environment through technological interaction. Much of her creative work exists as documentation in an archive of digital images. For this project, the artist has categorized the archive and is using it to create new works. Sounds are transformed into new compositions, text into images, and images into instructions that can be interpreted.
In most cases, the algorithms are trained using data of unknown origin; the source is lost, and the author is anonymized. Developed in collaboration with David Rau—a computer scientist with whom Natalia has been researching machine learning for several years—“Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” uses personal information instead of large-scale generative models. By creating a simplified computer program, the predefined properties of the works are sampled to create a structural foundation for new instructional works.
The title of the exhibition, “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously,” is a phrase from Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book *Syntactic Structures*. It illustrates the difference between syntax and semantics: an example of how a grammatically correct sentence does not convey an obvious meaning. Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics defined the syntax of programming languages and later had a profound impact on the fields of computer science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, significantly influencing the way knowledge is perceived and reproduced.
A context-free grammar, similar to the system Natalia creates based on her previous work, defines the syntax of languages but cannot express facts about their semantics. This concept is the premise for her instructional works, which she views as open possibilities. They are “performed” every time the viewer imagines their possible realization. The audience becomes the generative algorithm, and the dataset it uses consists of subjective knowledge and human memory.
This year’s e-valuation scholarship recipients also include two teams whose exhibitions were presented simultaneously at the Depo and Harta galleries in June: Raina Teneva and Aaron Roth with the project “MIS DEMOCRACY (Not Politics!)” and Vulko Chobanov, Marina Genova and Tsvetomira Borisova with their collaborative project “Drama Class.”
Activities on the e-valuation 4.0 platform are carried out with the support of the National Culture Fund under the “Creation” program.
e-valuation is a platform of the “DA LAB” Foundation for the development and support of Bulgarian artists working in the field of digital arts. The platform’s mission is to produce works by Bulgarian artists and present them on the professional stage. The main objectives are the professional development of artists and the promotion of contemporary art forms created using digital media and technologies.
