Snejana Krasteva

You are doing great

The Wrong Theory 

From, in and around Asia

Female artists to watch

Dream - knife or scissors?

Someone has stolen my third eye

DOOM

Two Carrots and One Lemon - still life

Satanic Panic (1 of 3)

Santa Muerte (Detail)

"All media have a suicide pact" (E. Jensen and B. LaBelle). 

In 1995, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling made a profound observation about the nature of media. He described it as an extension of our senses, a mode of consciousness, and extra-somatic memory. This highlights the critical role that media plays in shaping our understanding of the world and our place in it. It also emphasizes the importance of preserving media for future generations, as it represents a crystallization of human thought that survives the death of the individual. 

As we continue to navigate the digital realm, blockchain technology may prove to be an essential tool for preserving our cultural heritage and ensuring the longevity of human thought. Nonetheless, in the (inter)net of things, death remains a chilling contract that slips into that extra-somatic memory, despite it having seemingly gotten rid of the shell of the media. Often disguised as rather seductively vivid, psychedelic imagery, edgy dreams or dangerous proximities, it smells death even from the screen. 

Death Given

New Renaissance

Primitive agents of change

I Promised You Nothing, Now Better Believe in It

Mediator

Today, virtual communities, generative, chaotic, self-regulating networks, are the new agents of change bringing with them an idiosyncratic type of existentialism. Cyberspace has been explored as a productive ground for speculative post-human thought, bringing to the fore that which the increasing visibility of digital art has made more widely accessible: the rise of new gods, species, and relations, repositioning the place of the human in favor of positing new agencies of power and effective change. Sentiments related to those agencies have also evolved, from the sense of empowerment in existence as a collective being to diversifying the past with a peculiar digital nostalgia and anxiety. In other words, the production of affect in the digital era has been questioned, who and how affects and is affected is now an urgent matter.

Cybernetic Existentialism

Sentient Sun + Steel

ARTURO #01

WAHALA from the series THIS IS WHAT HATRED DID

Out of Body

Necessary Evil

This small selection of works looks at how the body and materiality in more broader terms can be explored digitally. Coding, generative and machine programming, detailed 3d rendering can be incredibly powerful tools to explore natural phenomena or alternative scenarios of externalization of internal psychological states pushing the boundaries between worlds and dimensions. The digital realm is often spoken as a space where one is liberated from materiality, from our human bodies. Utopian and dystopian at the same time, this imperative to investigate how technology, old and new, can continuously shape “the shell in the ghost” remains an important field for conducting research.

The Shell in the Ghost

Quarantine

Mars House

MIRRORED CITY

Persian Compound

Again

House of Theorem

Layers

7722 puntos

Exudater

Zebra

Edge City

The Sound of The Shadows

Borrowing the title from Italo Calvino’s eponymous novel as a kind of travelogue to imaginary cities, the following selection of works pays tribute to how vivid and detailed imagination can be.

From designers, architects, and artists, we focused here on the idea of a journey or a time capsule into otherworldly cities that defy quantum possibilities – this series of NFTs is set from the point of view of a multiverse adventurer gallivanting from parallel natures to other cosmos and macrocosm.

“Cyberspace is colonizing what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.”
(William Gibson, 2010)

In collaboration with Senior Curator [Anne Duffau](/curator/anne-duffau)

Invisible cities

Paying tribute to otherworldly imagination.

Snejana Krasteva

Boards

4 curator’s choices

Death Given

Cybernetic Existentialism

The Shell in the Ghost

Invisible cities