Eli Joteva

Biography

Eli Joteva was born in 1990 in Sofia, Bulgaria. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Sofia. She earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from USC Roski in 2013 and an M.F.A. from UCLA Design | Media Arts in 2018, where she is currently a lecturer. She is an active member of the UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab since 2016. She has exhibited solo shows in North America, Europe and Australia and has curated numerous art shows in Los Angeles.


About

Eli Joteva is a visual artist and researcher working at the intersection of fine arts and sci-ence through the use of new imaging tools and biofeedback technologies. With a practice rooted in photography and new media, her work often aims to to expand the intangible experi-ence of the human and non-human body. The core of her current research explores biologi-cal and technological memory systems in relationship to imaging processes of the past and future.
She works in the mediums of photography, installation, video and performance: often using the interaction of technology with her body or material processes in a per-formative manner. In many of her works, she questions the formulation and inefficiency of memory: its decentralization across the senses of the body, its relationship to physical spaces and its confinement within the image plane. She often seeks to challenge the western myth of perpetual growth and instead point to larger universal cycles that incorporate the potential of entropy to create new possibilities and perspectives. Many of her artistic investigations are bridged between the decomposition of organic materials and the use of contemporary technology to reference that same fragmented corporali-ty within their virtual traces. Through the use of new media imaging and biosensor tools, she investigate the promise and limitations of technology to fully index and capture the livelihood of material processes. Her recent photography, 3D, and interactive projects attempts to reveal the intra-active relationships within material cycles, providing a wider frame to see beyond the human-centric eye.


 Gallery

Eli Joteva

mnemoawari, 2017.

Installation

Details

  • Photographer: Eli Joteva
  • Material: 3D models, organic materials, ice, sound, VR
  • Sizes: dimensions variable

  • Property of: Eli Joteva
  • Description: The interactive multimedia installation "mnemoawari" deals with the processing of memory as a physical and virtual phenomenon. The projected 3d models, generated through a photogrammetry process, captured ice sculptures composed of plant materials at their original frozen state. Despite materially melting away, their digital artifacts remain in an eternal virtual rotation while occasionally receiving visual interruptions from live sound data from the melting cryo sculptures.
  • Copyright: Eli Joteva
  • References: http://www.joteva.com/mnemoawari/

Eli Joteva

Biogram Blueprint: Field 1.1, 2018.

Photography

Details

  • Photographer: Eli Joteva
  • Material: dynamic cyanotype, 3D scan
  • Width: 97.00 mm    Height: 127.00 mm    Depth: mm   

  • Property of: Eli Joteva
  • Description: Biogram Blueprints is a body of work that explores the digitalization of organic structures through the invisible spectrum of light. At its core, the production process uses measurement techniques from the two ends just outside the visible spectrum of light to contemplate the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the virtual and the actual. The 3D capturing involves IR depth laser scanning technology to compute digital data points of spatial information about the physical dimensions of four live plants. The print series “Biogram Blueprints” uses these 3D scans to explore the other end of the invisible light spectrum through one of the oldest methods of photographic printing - the cyanotype. All prints on view are partially developed, rendering portions of each image to remain sensitive to UV light, and thus undergo physical changes over time. By flattening the digital scans into dynamic topographic maps, the project aims to decode the translation of material and digital memory systems.
  • Copyright: Eli Joteva

Eli Joteva

Zero Point Field, 2018.

Video installation

Details

  • Photographer: Eli Joteva
  • Material: light installation, video, 3D scan data, glass
  • Width: 84.00 cm    Height: 84.00 cm    Depth: 3.00 cm   

  • Property of: Eli Joteva
  • Description: Inspired by quantum mechanics research on subatomic field fluctuations, “Zero Point Field” attempts to expose the inherent agency of non-human beings. The capturing process uses IR depth laser scanning technology to compute virtual data points of live plants. The video piece is installed as a rear-projection on a suspended disk of frosted glass with a custom-built diffraction filter on the projector lens. As the white light breaks through the visible spectrum of light, it depicts these now-virtual plants as determined to emerge from a slowly shifting inter-exchangeable field of subatomic noise. Perhaps in this way, the piece provides a wider frame for us to bare witness to our environment beyond our human-centric eye.
  • Copyright: Eli Joteva
  • References: http://www.joteva.com/biogram-blueprints-zpf/2018/8/11/zero-point-field-2018

Eli Joteva

Inelimental, 2016.

Photography

Details

  • Photographer: Eli Joteva
  • Material: multiple exposures on 35mm films, presented in stereoscope-viewable slides and light boxes
  • Sizes: dimensions variable

  • Property of: Eli Joteva
  • Description: Is it possible that the future has the power to pull the present?

    The project INELIMENTAL employs light to offer a new way of seeing through the shadows of two worlds. The images are selected from hundreds of double exposed analog films, shot as a personal record of experience over the last three years in 13 countries including Australia, Bulgaria, Italy, Thailand, Spain and the USA. The improbable combination of elements captured on film, brings life to a series of phantasmal memories and impossible mixtures of experience and vision. Nature and cityscapes merge with human figures, monuments and rituals, thereby conceiving a documentary un-reality made possible only by the meeting of two separate time-spaces. The spontaneous decision-making in the shooting process transcends mental logic by instead relying on an elementary intuitive response. Ultimately, this trust in a subconscious mechanism allows for the synchronistic alignment of spaces across points in time, while pointing to a metaphysical interconnection between the undeveloped film and the undeveloped aspects of the collective and personal memory.
  • Copyright: Eli Joteva
  • References: http://www.joteva.com/inelimental/
    http://www.bulgarianphotographynow.com/en/Portfolio/inelimental

Eli Joteva

inter i, 2017.

Video installation

Details

  • Photographer: Eli Joteva
  • Material: light installation
  • Width: 155.00 cm    Height: 365.00 cm    Depth: cm   

  • Property of: Eli Joteva
  • Description: inter i considers the sensory composition of the body as a cyclical ground of transmission beyond its materiality. Composed of a myriad of fluctuating light patterns, the female body form fills and empties in volume, shape-shifting its gestures and essence in the perceptual field of each viewer.
  • Copyright: Eli Joteva
  • References: http://www.joteva.com/inter-i/