New media artist Yuliia Korienkova creates tech-enabled artwork, inspired by the future

Take a moment. Look around you. It may slip your attention sometimes, but technology and data are significant drivers of your lifestyle today. It did not politely knock on your door and wait for you to invite it into your home but still, it has managed to seep into places you didn’t think was possible. With big data and artificial intelligence omnipresent, our day to day habits like the food we eat, the music we listen to and the advertisements we see are all carefully guided by technology. Artificial intelligence supports our lives in unfathomable ways today and artist Yuliia Korienkova asks the question, ‘Why should art be any different?’.

Originally from Ukraine, Yuliia Korienkova a.k.a. Uliia grew up with a deep fondness for art. “I went to the art school but then under the pressure of circumstances and society, decided to find a more convenient job to make a living. But passion was stronger and eventually I was back at it,” she explains when asked about her numerous degrees in engineering, philosophy and computer programming.

Her work lies at the intersection of art and technology in the emerging space of robotic art. With a long-standing fascination with robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), Korienkova visualises a future where art too can be customised using data and become responsive to the viewer. She references popular culture around these themes with iconic imagery in her artwork, for instance Elon Musk face or the NASA logo. While her artwork incorporates a variety of media, from circuit boards to small electronic devices, she also plays with relatively traditional media like painting and collage. Her works are an extension of her vision of the future with regard to artificial intelligence. She says, “I have always been fascinated by artificial intelligence and robots because of their complexity, the endless tasks they solve, by the hypothetical future it can achieve for humanity. I started to make art that contained images of robots and then I started to make artworks with artificial intelligence as I imagine it. The endless variations about this subject, it takes my imagination very far and that why I am so attached to it in my practice”. 

Korienkova creates artworks that set a new trend for artists in the future – art, which is not only customisable and viewer responsive, but also requires charging like any other device we use on a daily basis. Most of her artworks are interactive and can be controlled via mobile applications. She adds an element of functionality to the installation, enabling it to perform functions like connecting to Siri or playing mp3 files. Korienkova takes art to new places, in a shift of planes, challenging our perception of art as a commodity created by the artist alone. She says, “I think in the future art will be more gadget alike, applicable with technologies and apps, rather fluid than static”.  

The artist finds excitement and intrigue in the concept of holograms and after her series Generating Thoughts, she plans to explore it further as a part of her visual vocabulary in 2020, apart from searching for new technologies to incorporate into her work. Korienkova is currently based in Abu Dhabi, a city she feels fosters and nurtures her artistic practice. “I like to be located in Abu Dhabi: this city is futuristic, constantly developing and giving me lots of inspiration for my work”. In the recent past, she has showcased her work in Dubai, Paris, Cannes and Vienna.

Korienkova’s work is a testament to the changing face of art and how we engage with it. With the advent of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality technologies, the possibilities are wide-ranging and limited only by our imagination.