DESMA 9 Event 2 -- Eli Joteva’s solo show

    This Thursday I went to Eli Joteva's solo exhibition -- mnemoawari, which is the second of the cycle over the course of three days. The show was themed on the concepts of memory, dream, and how they connect with past, present and future, through her uniquely made artifacts, and what I saw and felt was absolutely astounding.

Picture of the exhibition table I took at the entrance of EDA

    In the upstairs area she created three beautiful spheres of ice which were suspended by ropes and frozen in layers. Although to be honest, I did not realize they were iced balls at the first sight, because this is what I saw:

Pictures I took of the actual iced balls

    Since I went to the show on the second day of its cycle, and these iced balls were melting, the outer iced layers were completely gone, according to Eli herself. However to me this was a good thing because at the time I could have a better look at these artifacts in a unique way. The one to the left, as we could see, was made with agarics and mushrooms. Eli said she had a dream about mushrooms, which inspired her with this one. The picture in the middle shows one made with flowers, grass and leaves. All these materials were taken from a bush near Eli's house. As it melted, clear red liquid dripped from it and collected into a bowl beneath it. The right one was made with wildflowers from the desert and sand. The bowl the ice melted into was connected to a sound system that filled the room with a beat, which was actually synced to the sound of the water drips. There was also a light projection of the bowl onto the wall behind the ice sphere, showing reflections of the drops of melted ice and ripples they caused in the bowl. 

Picture of the VR goggles I took

    In front of the iced balls there were VR goggles suspended for us to try on, which provided an entrance into the sphere. Every time there was a drip (which could be heard by sound) the landscape in the VR goggles glitched, as the entropic release effectively interrupted virtual memory. This reminded me of Professor Vesna's lecture about art and technology, and this exhibition certainly confirmed my belief that new technology will inspire new ideas as well as new approaches in art field, vice versa.

What the inside of the goggles look like

    At the downstairs area, the spheres were projected on three huge walls. Although It seemed like a video of them rotating 360 degrees, it was actually photogrammetry. Eli said she took hundreds of 3D photos of them from different angles. This stage represented the 'past' because they show a memory of the spheres form when they were perfect and not melting. Their past appearance will be preserved through these images/video.

Pano picture I took of the three walls with the spheres projected on them

    The concept of dreams and desires of future was also demonstrated in Eli's creative digital picture. The piece was called " Dream Augur, and it was a projection of her roommate's brain waves. To create the art piece, she had put a glass of water next to her roommate as she was dreaming and thinking and Eli had then frozen that water. She had also recorded her brain waves at the same time, and then decoded the color harmonics of her brain waves. The colors were then superimposed on the image of iced water. So the whole picture looked like a ball (or better called a person) which was radiating away its dreams.

    Overall, the project was relevant to our present world as our ice caps and glaciers are melting. It illustrates our impact on the environment as her show is connected with geological material. She spent a lot of time and energy (months for the 'future' project!), and then had to let it go as the three spheres literally disappeared/melted. Sometimes, we need that kind of awareness to see the entropic beauty of the world. Dreams were also a theme and integral to the making of her show; she used new imaging tools and biofeedback technologies to capture her roommate's dreams in art-form and also was inspired to create some aspects of the other spheres through her own dreams. I highly enjoyed her solo show and her pieces, and would definitely recommend others to see it if the spheres are ever recreated. 

Picture of me and Eli at the beginning of the show.