(b. 1988)
Iskra Velitchkova is a Bulgarian self-taught artist currently based in Madrid.
Her work explores the present and potential interactions between humans and machines and how instead of making technology more human, this relationship can push us to understand our limits better.
She believes that roots and tradition can nurture her work with greater truth. Bringing together her Balkan origins with the influence that Mediterranean culture has had on her over her own history, she uses this context for building upon her work. After a proven record on tech and artificial intelligence industry as visual thinker, Iskra decided to apply her knowledge and experience at the service of her own research.
Her work is based on mixed techniques: she explores new media combining digital formats and physical nature. She uses generative technology, artificial neural networks, plastic arts, she plots on canvas and plays with clay.

Statement
Science today is more present than ever in our daily lives. Understanding the way we interact with our context, the unknowns that lie before us, the access to people or to ourselves by carrying or making use of technology, is about more than just a question of interpretability. It is about a dialogue. And we need to include people in that dialogue. And do it in a beautiful way. This is the time for art as the major tool we have to see beyond — to make connections, to understand what is not yet here, to bring questions to people and to invent. It’s time for inventors.
My work is about limits and roots. By mixing techniques: from physical to digital and back, I fuse technology to discover, color to express and sculpture to touch. I try to tell a story about where Balkan fury meets Mediterranean warmth. I am sure that tradition can push stronger than anything the limits of what technology can do for us. And working on understanding my own traditions allows me to tell that story with greater truth.
So I focus on questions, answers and tools to create my work.
Questions - Roots
Why do roots make us shiver? What is folklore? What does the distance between us and our folklore and tradition mean? What does the distance between two traditions mean? Where do two emotions intersect?
Answers - Technology for understanding
Life is not just about digital. Or physical. Life is Nature and its laws, where humans have like a mission: discover step by step those laws and meanings to get somewhere. To unlock something. /Or something like that./ Can algorithms, instead of just optimize, scale our capacities to discover things about us? I think yes.
Tools - Dirty hands
After serving for several years the pulse of Technology I decided to focus on tangible elements. I still use technology as a collaborator but always with a clear vision to transform it in the end into something physical, touchable and playable.
I use generative techniques to explore through abstraction different patterns and ways of representation. Then I train different kinds of artificial neuronal networks to find relationships and new shapes and spaces. This leads me to finally set it all up on new media digital pieces, physical paintings where I mix acrylic, oil and ink, plotted generative works and sculpture pieces of clay.
Every stage of this exploration generates an independent collection of pieces. All together will take me somewhere.