https://newdegeneration.xyz/ Recent content on Nikola Stoyanov Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sat, 03 May 2025 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/even-trolls-sleep/ Sat, 03 May 2025 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/even-trolls-sleep/ Troll noun (in folklore): an ugly creature depicted as a giant or dwarf. verb (fishing): a fisherman luring fish by pulling bait behind a boat in motion. verb (on the internet): to provoke (other) people online by deliberately posting inflammatory, inappropriate or offensive comments or other disruptive content. Although the original origin of these creatures comes from ancient lore, the modern root of the online slang “trolling” was borrowed from a technique in fishing, which itself was later borrowed by military pilots during the Korean War. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/petro-drift/ Sat, 03 May 2025 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/petro-drift/ In Petro-drift (2025), the Black Sea becomes both witness and archive—an ancient body absorbing the toxic residues of contemporary geopolitics and petro-capitalist collapse. This video installation captures the aftermath of the 2024 oil spill in the Kerch Strait, where a decaying Russian river tanker—repurposed for open sea operations as part of the so-called “shadow fleet,” built in 1969—ruptured during a storm, releasing petroleum products into the sea. Filmed along the Varna coast in early 2025, the work documents not only the visible contamination—the sheen of oil combined with the viscous drift of sunscreen and sweat—but also overlays the motion vectors of the digital recording itself. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/black-fax/ Tue, 28 May 2024 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/black-fax/ “Black Fax off the Hook” is an insurrectionary transmission—a cultural guerrilla operation leveraging the destructive power of spam. In its most basic sense, a black fax can be defined as a malicious transmission, specifically a sheet of black print sent in rapid succession to a fax machine. This simple act overwhelms the machine’s ink and paper supply, a material assault akin to a digital denial-of-service attack, disrupting the machine’s functionality and rendering it impotent. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/the-first-ten/ Tue, 12 Mar 2024 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/the-first-ten/ The second showing of the now upgraded exhibition took place in Sofia. The exhibition had two sites: one at the Harta Gallery and another installation piece, “The First Ten” by Nikola Stoyanov, on the window display of Posta art space on one of the capital’s busiest boulevards. “Postcards and Contraband” has its inception in an incidentally found archive from the Bulgarian Customs Agency, Directorate “Struggle Against Narcotics Trafficking,” from the period 1975-1985. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/youll-know/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/youll-know/ As part of the Buna 2 (2024) visual arts festival, You’ll Understand when the Time Comes emerged as an urban intervention and installation, interrogating the boundaries of art, repair, and decay it navigated the murky territory between spontaneous urban repair and conspiratorial paranoia. You’ll Understand when the Time Comes an illegal destructive growth in the hearth of a city, that is always being built up and never accommodates its inhabitants. Constructed entirely from discarded, abandoned and readily available construction materials—metal brackets, fasteners, and discarded fragments—the piece embodied Bulgaria’s deeply ingrained DIY repair culture. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/fever-dream/ Sun, 05 Nov 2023 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/fever-dream/ This is a diary of fevers, a cut-up traversing people and time, unfolding across the labyrinthine tapestry of personal histories. Through frenzy, it brings purification; through heat, it elicits moisture. Unfolding across the month of February, it has been woven within a labyrinth of fevered mythologies of the self. It is amidst this maelstrom of intense heat that we first bore witness to the goddess Febris. Throughout history, every age and culture has had its own responses to viral diseases, plagues, and epidemics. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/cards/ Thu, 07 Sep 2023 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/cards/ “Postcards and Contraband” begins by examining a work archive of the Bulgarian Customs Agency, Directorate for Combating Drug Trafficking from 1975-1985. The service notes, photographs, negatives, summaries and reports found mark part of the routine of the Customs Agency work, such as inspection and regulation of transit, but also the diplomatic image the Customs Agency must maintain to the international community. The leading suspicion here is that the found archives give only a partial insight into the organized “hidden transit” - a term behind which the communist government of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria concealed the smuggling trade carried out by the State Security through commercial enterprises and organizations. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/nature-morte/ Thu, 22 Jun 2023 23:05:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/nature-morte/ Nature Morte is a multimedia project that plants the philosophical question firmly into the ground - on a part of the country’s highly restricted critical infrastructure. In an attempt to find different approaches to reach the excavation and its visualization, open data from satellite and geological surveys and measurements were used, through which the digital topography of the mines has been built. The visuals obtained from satellite images can be called operational, as a continuation of the “operational image” coined by the German director Harun Farocki, denoting “images that do not represent an object, but are part of an operation”. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/destructive-sensuality/ Sat, 17 Dec 2022 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/destructive-sensuality/ “Humor is the politeness of despair” in a meditaion on how the demonically possed inhrent strange channel switching powers and compulsions. Technically the piece is a video collage investigating the specifics of commercial video codec degradation. Based on key moments in Bulgaria’s visual subconscious, it uses various methods of controlled image destruction and degradation based on structural compression in videos. It is part of the “Destructive Sensuality” an exhibition by Sofia Dimova and Nikola Stoyanov, where the two artists romanticize the destructive dynamics of sensual experiences that imperceptibly become part of our everyday lives. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/latent-space/ Fri, 09 Sep 2022 23:15:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/latent-space/ Latent space is where the gaze of artificial intelligence alone draws the picturesque horizon, delving into the hidden rooms of secret research centers, intelligence organizations, and classified databases. An imagined space that the machine illuminates, exposing the postmodern subject’s built-in subversiveness of aesthetic experience in its internal mechanics, referentiality, and element of incompleteness. The so-called noise in communication theory is a recognized information field that does not lend itself to systematization. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/re-process/ Sat, 21 May 2022 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/re-process/ “RE:PROCESS” exhibits photographs of everyday urban objects. In the construction and deconstruction traces can be found upon the urban surface, a peculiar language, through which different modalities of appearance are formed and unfolded. Easily found but tough tо comprehend the signs, grilles, and hanging cables will be our entrance to a forgotten archive of urban fabric. What remains hidden here is the photographic eye behind the camera obscura, looking at the image-reality, in a stance not of drifting in the world but being seduced by it. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/grey-zone/ Thu, 28 Apr 2022 23:30:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/grey-zone/ The city - transfigured into a gray zone emptied of people, of lights, immersed under water or discarded in the wild cosmos, folded beyond practicality, it represents a capsule emptied of its nature, emptied of its structures of power, emptied of its social bodies. A dispositive without practice, without knowledge and expertise, withoout our institutions and without time - a pure assemblage. The project presents a virtual city-scape assembled out of distorted models of our familiar urban environment, rearanged into a non-euclidian vista. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/i-ixa/ Mon, 18 Oct 2021 23:00:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/i-ixa/ The exhibition is nomadic in nature, led by the Black Sea, which is without harbour and without shore, far from the clear squawk of a sea bird. A malevolent curse, brought where it does not belong - in the mountain foothills. This preliminary note outlines the possible geography of pictorial existence, beyond concrete space. I-Ixa is an expressionistic turn towards pure abstraction. A move that preserves the artist’s technicality while hiding his gesture in the finished paintings. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/in-process/ Sat, 16 Jan 2021 23:05:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/in-process/ The drive to capture the city as an affective totality was what led to the inception of this project. Thought, structured and implemented over the urban grid it draws a hyper-fiction. Its origins lie in the delirium of government documents, their leaks and their inaccessibility. Its target, the return to the archive. In:Process aims to present photographs of objects from the everyday urban space. In the processes of construction and disintegration, marks are found on the urban surface, a kind of language through which various modalities of appearance are formed and developed. https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/music-for-a-new-nighlife/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 23:05:59 +0200 https://newdegeneration.xyz/work/music-for-a-new-nighlife/ Music for a New Night Life deals with Mark Fishers concept of hauntology and lost futures. It visually shows a cymatic matrix of a city in flux, of its dreams and nightmares and finally of its reality filled with nostalgia. The tidal feeling of turbulence wroth by the ancient currents of the Black Sea returns us to a state of Freudian unconsciousness, a downcast euphoria, somatically revealing the subject to the base nostalgia of Oedipal separation.