Under the Water

2019
Chromalux
70 x 70 cm



What do we see under the water? Beautiful marine life or domination of plastic trash, which reaches everywhere and stays there forever becoming a fossil of man age? 
About 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all our planet’s water that are getting full of plastic waste. Water birds, animals and fishes have microplastic inside them. We are eating plastic. Soon we become PLASTIC!
Under The Water is a series of dye sublimation prints on aluminium produced with machine learning algorithm. We have worked with AI neural network that generates speculative images of the Anthropocene, images that have never been seen before.  
We have created a data sets of plastic in the ocean, which were used for training Progressive GAN algorithm to generate images of trash under the water. 
The artwork casts a figurative look at the plastic trash as an element, which has become a part of nature and future geological layer. The aim is to let machine to imagine what our surroundings will look like soon if society would not change their lifestyle. The artwork calls to stop and think about what we are about to lose. 
AI, similarly to a plastic – a wonder material, which has lots of potential, but we are still not sure what are the capabilities and consequences of this technology.
“Once plastic was invented it solve many of our problems connected to the shortage and character of natural materials. What we did not anticipate back then, was what a problem plastic waste would become. But now we have to take responsibility and find the solutions which as Varvara & Mar acknowledge can only lay in future technology”  Indrek Grigor (curator and art critic)

Exhibited:
group show Ecodata curated by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Yvonne Volkart, RIXC Art Science Festival, National Library of Latvia, Riga (8 Oct – 17 Nov’20)
JustMAD Art Fair, Palacio Neptuno, Madrid, Spain. In collaboration with Alalimón Gallery (26th Feb – 3th Mar’19)