Thought Experiment

Aksiniya Peycheva

Structura Project Room is a special space in the gallery dedicated to showcasing young artists and curators. Curator under 35 selected by competition will realize 4 exhibitions per year. The initiative is supported by the National Culture Fund.

This year the competition for curator was won by Aksiniya Peycheva. Expect the first exhibition in June. Here we introduce the curator and the main aspects of the idea to be developed.

The term “Thought Experiment” describes an experience that “tests” the validity of a theory in the search for a concrete (or in this case, possibly abstract) answer. The project consists of conducting a series of informal conversations in which an artist talks to an expert in a given scientific field. This creates a kind of flow of information that may (or may not) influence the subsequent creation of an artistic product presented in a solo exhibition in Structura Project Room.

Conversations happen under certain rules that are in practice completely relative, aiming only to put the parties in a state where an exchange – of ideas, of concepts, of directions of thought – can be created between them.

After the conversations, the artist goes on to work on a solo exhibition that is (or is not) influenced by the discussion.

It is possible to declare the experiment successful at a harmonious or disharmonious level of communication. In the same cases, it is also possible to pronounce it unsuccessful.

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Aksiniya Peycheva (b. 1990, Kyustendil, Bulgaria) lives and works in Sofia. She graduated in mural painting at the National Academy of Art Sofia., where she later received a PhD (2019) and is currently a lecturer, majoring in mural painting. Graduated from the educational program for young artists “Close Encounters – Visual Dialogues school4artists” of ICA-Sofia (2017). She is a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art since 2021. Her solo exhibitions include: PROCESS ANATOMY#1: A Tale of the End (2022), curated by Vasil Vladimirov, Structura Gallery, Sofia; A Tale of the End (2021) at Heerz Tooya Gallery, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria; Bioreconstruction (…of a future moment) (2019), ICA-Sofia Gallery curated by Nedko Solakov; Cartography of Trauma (2018), ICA-Sofia Gallery curated by Luchezar Boyadjiev. Her works have been exhibited at Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; Drugomore Gallery, Rijeka, Croatia; Ars Electronica Festival, Austria.

The focus of her work is the process of “visual translation”, where she explores possible ways of moving pieces of information between different fields of knowledge – “how one or several scientific fields can be combined to answer a question important only for art”. She often collaborates with scientists, and her projects are accompanied by a theoretical part, resulting from a long research on certain topics, which include the subject of the visual translation of music or pain.

Thought Experiment #4
Veneta Androva. The Secret Life of Mushrooms (VIDEO)

Curated by Aksiniya Peycheva
Art manager: Teodora Dzherekarova

21 December 2023-10 January 2024, opening December 21, Thursday, 6-8 pm

In the project “The Secret Life of Mushrooms (VIDEO)”, Veneta Androva and Tsvetomila Mihailova focus their attention on disinformation and the so-called deep fake – highly widespread attributes of today’s media world. Coming from two different fields – Veneta – from that of visual art and Tsvetomila – that of computational linguistics, in the context of the project “Thought Experiment” they communicate remotely using the Python programming language, focusing on different models for recognizing computer-generated content and in this sense – on the fight against mass disinformation.

Veneta’s interests lead her to a phenomenon specific to Bulgaria – that of “mushroom” sites. These are pages that look like a typical news site. They are created with the sole purpose of spreading propaganda and fake news. They are called “mushroom” sites because they appear on different occasions, multiply and grow whenever there is an active campaign. When the “rain of dark money” ends, the website disappears or becomes inactive until the next disinformation campaign (https://sensika.com/blog/disinformation/what-do-we-call-mushroom-websites). Mushroom sites are generated by the “Mushroom Machine” – over 370,000 anonymous sites with almost identical design and identical content. They have four main common domains – dnes24.eu, zbox7.eu, bgvest.eu, allbg.eu, from which subdomains are cloned (for example – novini24.allbg.eu).

For Veneta, it becomes interesting to dig into the processes of their functionality. The principle turns out to be the following – in the established platforms (for example, the most famous http://share4pay.com/) any user can register using an email address. Veneta, of course, does it right away. You log in and choose the name of your site. Within just 30 minutes, your own mushroom site has already been generated. All these mushroom sites are hidden behind Cloudflare (cloud cyber security) and nothing about them can be traced, but the main platform hosting is in Bulgaria. After that, an avalanche of links from the new site begins – they are present as posts on social networks, forwarded to friends, acquaintances, posted in groups, etc. In this way, profits are generated in the platform, which at some point, are paid to the user – i.e. the main income comes from referring the links. On the other hand, the people behind the platform earn from the ads that are everywhere on the site. Most of the news’ content is conservative, mildly propagandistic, pro-Russian, not always faked, but certainly intended to tilt attention to certain topics and, through mass distribution, create the impression that this is “the news of the day”. Processes that are extremely dangerous for society and can be exploited in any information aspect.

In her work, Veneta focuses specifically on news related to the so-called “gender propaganda” and archives all news with the word “gender” from her new “mushroom website” – their titles, as well as the images to the articles. The video that the author presents is a 3D animation, showing a ‘mushroom-protagonist’ reciting all these clickbait headlines from the mushroom website. Hence the title of the exhibition, which ends ironically with the word VIDEO, as often these titles contain the word “VIDEO” or “PHOTOS” as an additional element of advertising. Headlines as well as images on the site are tested (with the help of Tsvetomila) using various NLP and LLM models*, and this process checks whether they are generated by artificial intelligence or not. These tests appear in the video as glitch moments. Thus, they manage to visualize what the code “looks at” and recognizes as a fake. The second video focuses on an interview of a person who earns extra income from the mushroom websites, his image has been anonymized. This video explains the scheme and how it works. Veneta questions not only technological, but also purely human mechanisms for dealing with disinformation, with control over communities, with manipulation. In her work, these social phenomena are read not only as a function of technological progress, but also as an opposition to values, as an anti-utopia.

*Technologies based on artificial intelligence, or in particular machine learning, for recognizing deepfakes are developing dynamically, in an eternal race with the development of basic models such as BERT, GPT or Stable Diffusion. Each deepfake detection model works conditionally, with one known inaccuracy. In their experiment, Veneta and Tsvetomila decided to investigate the pattern (or what exactly it focuses on when recognizing false or misleading information). They do this using the models bert-deepfake-bg for recognizing deepfakes and bert-desinform-bg for recognizing disinformation, pre-trained specifically in Bulgarian and made available for general use on the HuggingFace platform by The Big Data for Smart Society Institute (GATE ) in Bulgaria.

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Veneta Androva graduated History of Art and Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin and also obtained a degree in Fine Arts/Sculpture from Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. In her artistic practise she is combining diverse media and sources such as archival, documentary or computer-generated material and painting, all related through animation in simulated environments. She took part in numerous shows in Germany and Bulgaria, as well as Austria, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Czech Republic, Spain and in Israel, where she did part of her study at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2016-2017. Androva is also the recipient of several scholarships, such as Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship, Artist Scholarship from Cusanuswerk, Mart Stam Scholarship and was nominated in 2020 with her work ‘From My Desert’ for the German Short Film Award. She received Prix Ars Electronica 2021 – Award of Distinction for her film ‘AIVA’ in category ‘Computer Animation’, as well as Golden Horseman for Animated Film and LUCA Gender Diversity Award at Filmfest Dresden. Her short films have been selected to screen at numerous international film festivals, including: International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film; ARS ELECTRONICA – Festival for Art, Technology and Society; MONSTRA Lisbon Animated Film Festival; FILE Electronic Language International Festival; European Media Art Festival (EMAF); Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, Sofia International Film Festival, Short Waves Festival, 25FPS International Film and Video Festival, Short Film Festival Hamburg.

Tsvetomila Mihaylova is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Machine Learning and Robotics at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. She has a PhD in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing from Instituto de Telecomunicações in Lisbon, Portugal.

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The project is realised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund
PROGRAMME FOR RESTORATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRIVATE CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS

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Thought Experiment #3
Nikola Grozdanov. Interferences

Curated by Aksiniya Peycheva
Art manager: Teodora Dzherekarova

29 November-16 December, 2023, opening November 29, Wednesday, 6-8 pm

The exhibition “Interferences” by Nikola Grozdanov creates a space of conditional perceptions. Referring to the thought experiment “Mary’s Room”, the author explores the correspondence between the functionality of the human consciousness and the reality in which it supposedly exists. The experiment describes Mary, a scientist, who lives in an all-black-and-white world. In this world, she has wide access to the descriptions of the different colors, but she has no way of perceiving them with her eyes. Mary has learned all there is to learn about the color, but she has never seen them. The central question in the experiment is whether Mary would gain new knowledge when she steps outside her colorless world. The experiment aims to counter physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical.

In Nikola Grozdanov’s room, the physical objects are glass-metal ones, created entirely by his hand, and their color is conditional because it depends on the light that is placed inside them. Glowing briefly, it charges the pigments with which the glass is baked, so that they themselves begin to glow when the light goes out. Only by fulfilling the specific conditions, their light manages to materialize in the space. With their oval but irregular shape, they appear briefly until their charge runs out, much like signals between the synapses in the brain. These terms refer to the unwritten rules between the viewer and the art object. They are sort of a “contract”. If the first party succeeds in fulfilling them and presenting them in the physical world, then the viewer may be able to see them as well. But their true perception comes afterwards; it is not a product of the physical world, it is simply a consequence of it. And again, their true essence is non-physical, and their true perception is a priori conditional.

In this sense, the objects in the room create a closed system of interactions. Space becomes an experimental site of interfering connections – between the physical predetermination of being and its non-physical imprint in the human consciousness, between truth and need, between absence and presence.

In the project “Thought Experiment” the author worked with Dr. Tina Tasheva, and Dr. Albena Yoleva from University of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy, Sofia, Department of Silicate Technology. The author would like to thank Tihomir Danchev from Omega Light for the help with the lighting fixtures, Petar Manuilov from Lux Nox for the help with the luminous pigments, as well as Mihaela Kamenova for the help with the metal pieces.

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Nikola Grozdanov (b. 1988 in Sofia). Lives and works in Sofia. He holds a Master’s degree (2014) in Mural painting from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia and has previously studied at the Glyndor University in Wells, UK (2011). From 2017 until 2021 he lived and worked in Murano, Venice, as a collaborator in a contemporary glass studio. He has been nominated for the Baza Award for Contemporary Art (2023) and the International Artistic Glass and Design Competition for young people under 35 (2022). He organised a solo exhibition “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (2021), Heerz Tooya Gallery, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. He has participated in group exhibitions including: “Exhibition of the nominated artists for the BAZA 2023 Award for Contemporary Art” (2023), Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia, curated by Marina Slavova; “Emergencies, Refractions, Reflections” (2022), Archivio Emily Harvey, curated by Roberto Mastroianni, Venice; “International Biennale of Glass” (2023 and 2021), National Gallery Kvadrat 500, curated by Konstantin Valchev, Sofia; “MilanoVetro – 35” (2022), Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Grozdanov’s works are socially and politically oriented. He works in the techniques of stained glass, cast glass, fusing and screen printing.

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The project is realised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund
PROGRAMME FOR RESTORATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRIVATE CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS

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Thought Experiment #2
Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova. Waterfall

Curator: Aksiniya Peycheva
Art manager: Teodora Dzherekarova

September 28 – October 28, 2023, opening September 28, 6-8 pm

In the exhibition “Waterfall”, Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova interweaves in an almost poetic narrative the search for answers that excite her, which in a sense affect every artist – how does one get to the essence of the creative impulse? Present a priori in the human consciousness, it is inexplicable, but at the same time she recognizes it as an extremely compelling feature of hers that deserves to be explored further.

In “Thought Experiment”, Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova chooses to look at the topic from a different perspective – that of the artificial intelligence. In a conversation with Mariana Todorova, she tries to clarify for herself whether rethinking this desire to create through a more rational point of view – that of technology, could help her understand what has been happening to her all her life. Is it possible that the AI, having the task of becoming a mirror image of the human consciousness, can really accomplish the creation of art, and thus “explain” how this process actually works? The intersection between her inner impulses and the new facts she discovers after the encounter find visual form in a 10-minute video, a frequently used medium used by the author, which becomes a diary, a personal reflection incorporating hesitations, concepts and moods. Based on an old video filmed in 2006, in which she paints on a mirror (referencing Elena Karamikhaylova’s painting “In front of the mirror”) and then repeatedly wipes away her own reflection, leaving it unclear whether she wants to clarify it or erase its image, the gradation of its appearance goes through various metamorphoses. It is almost theatrically covered with masks that become objects, separating independently in space, beyond its original source – a “mold” that can multiply her image ad infinitum. Other times, part of her face disappears into the background entirely. All these manifestations swirl in a game of searching for answers “from” and “for” oneself. The whole action of constant erasure and rediscovery is reminiscent of iridescence – a repeated internal reflection characteristic of the marine organisms, in which the object manages to merge with its environment and perform mimicry. In the case of Nadezhda, the attempt to merge is not only with the environment, but also with her own essence in its most inner manifestation, and it turns out to be impossible, because the process of self-discovery is complicated, due to a single fact – her essence is not static, it changes over time. In this waterfall of states, an alarming thought also appears – is it possible, after this game of rationalization of our consciousness and its recreation in AI, that we might not so much gain as lose something human along the way, and whether the task of the artist is not exactly this – becoming its archival.

Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova was born in 1960. She is author of videos, installations, actions, objects. She works with paper, tin, nails, spoons, soap, sand, ice, ice cream, cotton candy. In the recent years she uses camera as her main tool. Her more important solo exhibitions are: “On the kitchen table”, Little Bird Place, Sofia (2020); “How are you?”, Structura Gallery, Sofia (2019); “Ctrl+Z”, Arosita Gallery, Sofia (2016); “Frames“, Sofia City Art Gallery (2013); „eco stories“, The Warehouse, Sofia (2011); „Globally and long term the situation is positive“, Sofia City Art Gallery (2009); „Moderate optimism“, ul. 6 September No. 9, Sofia (2008); Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova, Centre for Contemporary Art, Pančevo, Serbia (2008); „Sofia Lions“, Artists‘ Association fabs, Warsaw (2006) and Goethe-Institut, Sofia (2005); „Vanitas“, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2004). In 2009 she won the Gaudenz B. Ruff prize.

Dr. Mariana Todorova is a futurologist, associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Public lecturer and author of books. She has specialized in leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, the International Leadership Program (IVLP) and the Chinese Academy of Management. In 2019, Todorova co-authored a book, “Future studies and counterfactual analysis. Seeds of the future”, together with the famous American futurist Theodore Gordon (one of the creators of the Apollo project to land on the Moon. In 2020, she is publishing her own book in Bulgarian:” Artificial Intelligence. A brief history of the development and ethical aspects of the subject”. Todorova is chair of the Millennium Project and a member of Hera city, as well as a member of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 Todorova represented Bulgaria at UNESCO in the intergovernmental meeting to develop an ethical framework for artificial intelligence.

The project is realised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund
PROGRAMME FOR RESTORATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRIVATE CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS

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Thought Experiment #1
Luchezar Boyadjiev. Public Space, Private Size

Curated by Aksiniya Peycheva
Art manager: Teodora Dzherekarova

22 June-29 July, 2023, opening June, 22. 6-9 pm

In the exhibition Public Space, Private Size Luchezar Boyadjiev presents “projects” for monuments in public space, in which various material/semantic carriers are incorporated. The figure of the person for whom the monument is intended, is replaced by an animal, a rhetorical figure referring to specific connotations encoded in the larger context of the subject. The artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, for example, are represented as a sheep and a tiger, since Frida Kahlo is considered to be the “black sheep” of the 20th century art and Diego Rivera was a notorious womanizer. Both were Marxists by conviction, and so below these figures appears a Soviet booklet of the “Atlas of the World”. The spread seen by the viewer is the map of North America, where they lived and worked. At the base of their “monument” one can find a decapitated lead soldier toy from the artist’s childhood. It is a “Soviet lead soldier from WWII”. Humor creates other associations – Mother Teresa is presented as a “giraffe”, because according to the author “her face looks like one”; also, her birth name is Aneza Gonja Boyadziu, resembling the family name of Luchezar, which is Boyadjiev. That, according to the author, makes them “namesakes” because both names are etymologically rooted in the Ottoman (via Arabic) word “boya” which means “paint”. Jean-Claude’s monument has not one, but two horses “because she deserves it” being a “power girl in public space”, and other monuments refer to common clichés – such as the “proverbial blonde” who stands on a golden egg frying on a stove, or the “proverbial macho” – a ‘rooster’ equipped with an ax suspended above a mirror that aims to secure his narcissism. The elements in these objects are a part of the art world, as well as a part of the public space, but also a part of the personal life of the artist, and of the family-material environment, which carries a completely different energy in the sense of being imprints of everyday life. Such personal associations and references are most often found at the “base” of the monuments. These are incorporating bowls and plates used long before by the artist’s family. Thus, the public and personal aspects cross paths intentionally at the base of the “construction”, much like the scull (of Adam) seen in icons and murals at the basis of the Crucifixion, which subject has held a fascination for the artist ever since the late 80ies and the beginnings of his career and work.

The choice for animals to replace humans separates the viewer from the direct relation to the person and changes the overall situation in which the notion of interspecies justice is applied as means to reconsider social structures. The likely perception of such monuments in a real-life public space would most probably be allegorical, but in fact one can argue, that there is a literal reference about biological predisposition and how determining it is in a wider scope.

To what extent the personality, losing its natural a priori meaning, remains living in a conditional situation of time and is limited by the discourse of its presence? In this new system the biological factor becomes an optional condition. The individual is detached from their anthropocentric context and becomes a constituent part of a larger system in which the urban space is an emanation of the symbolic rather than the biological order of things. These models for monuments, at first glance intended to become real ones in the public environment, are in fact multi-component art objects that create a closed circle of meaningful parts related to a common play of extrapolated meanings.

Thought Experiment is a curatorial project which consists of conducting a series of informal conversations in which an artist talks to an expert in a given scientific field. The term “thought experiment” describes an experiment that tests the validity of a theory in search for a concrete (or in this case possibly abstract) answer, ultimately meant to be “dressed” in visual form at an exhibition.  This creates a kind of an information flow that could influence (or not) the subsequent creation of an artistic product, or if the artwork is already produced, to help rethinking its purpose. The conversations take place following certain rules, which are completely conditional, having the sole purpose to put both parties in a state in which an exchange between them could be achieved – exchange of ideas, concepts, and lines of thought. In the context of the exhibition Public Space, Private Size Luchezar Boyadjiev spoke with the philosopher Margret Grebowicz.

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Luchezar Boyadjiev (b. 1957, Sofia, Bulgaria). Lives and works in Sofia. He graduated in Art History from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia in 1980. Founding member of ICA-Sofia. Artist and curator. He is interested in personal interpretations of social processes, in the interaction between private and public, in urban visuality and in the world today, situated between utopia and dystopia. His media are installation, photography, drawing, object, text, video and performative lectures.

Margret Grebowicz (b. 1973, Lodz, Poland). Grew up in Texas. In 1994, she received a BA in German literature, philosophy and art history from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1998, she completed her Master of Arts degree at Emory University. In 2001, she received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University. She is an associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Grabowicz is a philosopher known for her work in feminism, queer theory and radical democracy, and in recent years has been concerned with the philosophical aspects of our relationship to nature and coexistence with wild and domestic animals.

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The project is realised with the financial support of the National Culture Fund
PROGRAMME FOR RESTORATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF PRIVATE CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS

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