Colourless green ideas sleep furiously

Natalia Jordanova

04- 18. 07. 2024

Over the past 10 years, Natalia has created worlds that address human nature, the human condition, emotionality and relationships to surroundings through technological interplay. Much of this work currently exists as documentation in an archive of digital images, a set of information. For this project, she has categorised the archive and structured it into a set of properties. Then, she examines it and finds ways to reapproach it as grammar, using it to create new work. Thus, it transforms from a carrier of visual and formal qualities, which provoke associations and emotional responses, into 0s and 1s.

Reflecting on her archive, Natalia explores what this material would become if used as a dataset. Sounds are translated into new compositions, text into pictures, and images into instructions to be reimagined.

Commonly, algorithms learn from data with no clear provenance; the source is lost, and the author is anonymised. Developed in collaboration with David Rau—a computer scientist with whom Natalia has been exploring machine learning for several years—”Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” uses personal information instead of large generative models. Through the creation of a simple computer program, the work’s predefined properties are sampled to make the structural base for new instruction pieces.

The exhibition’s title, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” is a phrase from Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures. It demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics: an example of how a grammatically well-formed sentence doesn’t convey obvious meaning. Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics defined the syntax of programming languages and later impacted the fields of computer science, machine learning, and AI, largely influencing knowledge representation and understanding.

A context-free grammar, similar to the system Natalia creates based on her previous work, defines languages’ syntax but cannot express any facts about their semantics. This concept is the premise for her instruction works, which she sees as open possibilities. They are “executed” every time the viewer imagines their possible materialisation. The audience becomes the generative algorithm, and the data set it uses is subjective knowledge and human memory.

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Natalia Jordanova (b. 1991 in Bulgaria, lives and works in Amsterdam) is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist. As part of an ever-developing quest for possible worlds and the extensive use of speculation, Jordanova’s artistic practice is a projection of the future, a subjective synthesis and a material proposition of what defines the present moment. She holds an MA from the Dirty Art department of Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands (2020), a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2018), a BA in Photography from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Bulgaria (2013). Her work has been exhibited internationally in The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium, Germany, Egypt and the UK.

The project “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is the result of the work of Natalia Jordanova as a fellow of the digital arts platform e-valuation 4.0 of DA LAB Foundation. Curators and mentors in the process are the three founders - prof. Venelin Shurelov, Dr. Galina Dimitrova-Dimova and Antoni Raizhekov. The activities of the e-valuation 4.0 platform are supported by the National Culture Fund under the Creation Programme.