CryoLumen Storm Print: Snow Water in a Snow Storm, 1-hour exposure (Rila National Park), January 17, 2021, Archival Pigment Print on Metallic Photo Paper mounted on Dibond, Augmented Reality, 100 x 80 cm, ed. 1/10
> Eli Joteva (b. 1990) (www.joteva.com) is an intermedia artist and researcher based in LA. Her practice is influenced by quantum mechanics, neurophysics and machine vision and aims to shed light on the invisible forces that influence us. Using various photographic, digital and sculptural mediums to amplify the intangible, her work often aims to extrapolate the ephemeral realms of human memory and perception. She holds an MFA from UCLA Design | Media Arts, a BA in Fine Arts from USC Roski and completed The New Normal postgraduate research program at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. She has exhibited internationally in venues like Ars Electronica, Fischer Museum, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Photon Gallery, SciArt Initiative, DC I/O, Culture Hub LA, FakeMeHard, Gogbot, Currents New Media, xCoax, DA Fest, Sariev Contemporary and Queensland Center for Photography. She has been a resident artist at STEAM Imaging III with Fraunhofer MEVIS, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Photo+Sphere and an active member of UCLA Art Sci Center | Lab. She is currently a professor at houdini.school, VR Gallery Director and Curator at SUPERCOLLIDER and Co-founder of current.cam.
~ Her project for the exhibition “Nature Takes Back” is related to the memory of nature, which emerges both organically and through digital methods and platforms. CryoLumen is a project produced in collaboration with the environment. Each Storm Print is a material record of a past weather storm, updated with real-time solar storm data that is viewable in Augmented Reality.
Joteva begins her process by making cryo-sculptures of elements from her local environment: she collects organic materials from her surroundings and freezes them in local water. These fleeting sculptural compositions were placed over photosensitive paper and exposed under various weather conditions for the duration of local storms. They were then scanned and digitally altered to expose elements unseen in the physical paper, revealing a polarity between material and digital spaces: an ice block thaws over silver gelatin paper, to reveal its thermal qualities in a digital landscape. This materially dynamic process further evolves into a digitally immersive space as the prints become digital negatives of organic processes that point to invisible planetary storms. Each print is overlaid with a secondary augmented reality sculpture which uses daily data from NOAA of solar wind storms. This near real-time data alters the digital sculptures differently each day by intensifying the flows of particles and the colors of magnetic lines computed from solar superstorms. In this way, the project connects the deeply personal archive of the artist’s local weather experience during quarantine, with the planetary position of Earth’s realtime endurance of cosmic storms.
Acknowledgments:
Real-time solar wind data by NOAA: swpc.noaa.gov/products/real-time-solar-wind. AR production assistance by Colter Wehmeier. The visualization of the coronal mass ejection is based on the magneto-hydrodynamic simulation described in Fan. Y., ApJ, 824:93, 2016. Visualization data pre-processing by the Advanced Visualization Lab, NCSA. Solar Superstorms simulations by Dr. Robert F. Stein and field line calculations by Dr. Patrick J. Moran, Michigan State University, Physics and Astronomy Department.
