Katja Novitskova Fries Museum, Netherlands

Katja Novitskova’s solo exhibition “Model Earth” is on view until September 3, 2023 at Fries museum, Netherlands.

Novitskova's Earthware series is included in the exhibition. Earthware is based on databases of large numbers of images captured by wildlife cameras for research purposes. Placed in the middle of nature, deep in forests or sometimes even in oceans, these cameras produce massive amounts of photo sequences. Before an algorithm can process the bulk of the photos, it has to learn pattern recognition from humans, who index the initial images.

Novitskova dove into these databases and helped with indexing. She also discovered beautiful examples among the automated images, although that isn’t the primary function of wildlife cameras. She transferred these images to epoxy clay, making a reference to clay tablets and other prehistoric image carriers.