everything is and isn't at the same time | troika

Out of Place, Out of Time (2025) brings together a series of speculative landscapes in which Troika stages unlikely encounters between geological epochs, digital processes, and speculative memory. An extinct species of Key Largo cactus appears to grow in Arctic ice or take root in tropical swamplands. The imagery evokes projections of a mechanical subconscious, fed by the collective visual memory of the Earth. These images were created using text-to-image algorithms that generate visuals from short language inputs in fractions of a second. Formally, Troika transfers these fleeting visions into a medium of physical permanence: platinum printing. This 19th-century photographic process uses platinum and palladium salts—materials employed in the early days of photography as well as in today's semiconductor technology. The choice of this durable medium gives the image a material presence that extends far beyond the ephemeral input of digital algorithms. A paradoxical alliance that renegotiates the relationship between time, memory, and image production.

The sculptures in the Ultraflora series (2025) appear as intricate, metallic structures whose surfaces seem to have grown organically and yet been artificially modeled. The works combine echoes of plant tissue, root systems, and mechanical processes. Volumetric scans of so-called pioneer plants—such as the Tree Aeonium, known for its ability to survive in extreme climates–are mapped onto a virtual spatial grid, reshaped, and then re-materialized with the help of a robotic arm, layering molten metal filament, allowing it to grow in successive strata into its final form. These sculptures embody a transition zone between the organic and the technological. The resulting “Grenzgänger” or border-crossers belong to Troika's speculative Field Guide to Virtual Botany. These are species that exist in liminal spaces, defy traditional classifications, and actively change their environment. They grow where opposites meet, at the edges of land and sea, between life and death, between reality and fiction.

In Programming Harmony Touching Clear Sky, Troika depicts vast landscapes that initially appear from a distance to be monochrome representations of nature. Green areas seem to suggest a desert, a distant hilly landscape, or the horizon. But as you get closer, the composition dissolves into a uniform grid: hand-painted squares, carefully placed, sixteen shades of color between light and dark, reminiscent of the logic of digital pixels. The image surface acts like a filter that both reveals and conceals the scene. While a landscape appears from a distance, on closer inspection the structure of the medium itself comes to the fore. The series is based on images from surveillance cameras and satellites, which are present even in the most remote regions of the earth. Images from the Mojave Desert or other isolated places become visible—mediated by technical systems that break down the landscape into data before translating it into color. 

Troika's work series Forest Filled with Pines and Electronics (2023) is inspired by the "Internet of Trees" and depicts forest fires in California that were recorded by a network of CCTV cameras attached to trees as early warning systems. These filmed their own demise: how first the forest and eventually the cameras themselves were engulfed in flames. The colors of the base coat seem to flow into each other and the pixel structure is broken by irregularities. In some works of the series, the numbers that define the shade of paint in the process of creation remain visible, as if the paint had been dripped down by heat and only the structure of the image remained. Thus, Forests Filled with Pines and Electronics shows the physical feedback of the fires on the captured image, in that the canvas itself seems to melt into its component parts.

Troika replicates the technical perspective of the camera and transfers its logic manually onto the screen. The discrepancy between the objectification of the destructive event through the neutral, technical recording and the actual destructive content of the image, a natural disaster, potentially arousing emotional associations, becomes clear. Troika's translation on canvas becomes a mechanical act in which the exact color values are predetermined and the color grid is applied by syringe. The painting style is characterized by manual replication and repetition, requiring mechanical precision. The artists investigate how digital information merges into physical reality and how both worlds interact with and influence one another. 

Installation view Pink Noise, Langen Foundation Neuss (2024)

The work series Obsolete Landscapes (2024) shows fragments of desktop backgrounds printed on aluminum that Apple Inc. has been using for its operating systems since 2014, with the tech company drawing on impressive landscape images of mountain ranges, deserts and islands in California. Beginning with Yosemite (10.10.5) and El Capitan (10.11.6), the naming has expanded from the titles of individual peaks to entire mountain ranges such as Sierra (10.12.6) and High Sierra (10.13.6). The Mojave Desert (10.14.6) followed, as did Santa Catalina Island (10.15.7). Troika deliberately removes the iconic images from these backgrounds, leaving only the sections depicting the sky. The collective thus breaks with the aestheticized depictions of landscapes that show a view of supposedly untouched nature, which runs counter to the extractivism that is practiced to supply computer-based systems.

Evolutionary Composite (2023) is part of a series of works in which Troika focuses on salt crystals as the driving force behind certain inventions and technologies, without which human civilization would not have developed in the way we know it. In the wall works, the collective juxtaposes two objects vital for human civilization: The oldest tool of mankind – a flint hand axe and a silicon wafer – are both used in the manufacturing of computers. Salt also plays an important role in the production of both, which has been refined as a material over the course of 3.3 million years. In light of this, it seems that salt, unto itself and by its own power, has continuously driven human progress. With Evolutionary Composite, Troika builds a bridge between the millions of years in which salt has been utilized as a tool for controlling and domesticating nature as well as changing our environment, and salt as a contributing factor to today's technological progress. At the same time, the works question the constant urge for growth, the status quo of modern life.

Terminal Beach is an animated film depicting a futuristic end-time scenario in which an ape-like creature fells the supposedly last tree on Earth. With the help of motion capture, the movements of a person swinging an axe were recorded and transferred to a production robot arm with long dark hair. As a result, the robot generates an animalistic or humanoid appearance, conveying a strangely enraptured feeling. In this scenery, the robot ends what humanity began a long time ago – the progressive destruction of our planet. The title Terminal Beach is a reference to J.G. Ballard's collection of science fiction short stories, which focuses on the bitter paradox that the extraordinary creative power of the human imagination is surpassed only by its ruthless destructive instinct.

Reality is Not Always Probable (2021) is a series of wall object with a lopsided wave-shaped pattern, a result of thousands of dice stacked upon and beside one another. Based on Troika's interest in the relationship between chance and control, the work represents the materialization of a computer simulation. The algorithm, which is based on the model of the cellular automaton, generates random systems, the starting point of which is determined by Troika. The order of dice in each row determines that of the next, creating complex sequences that are based on the binary principle of color and non-color. 

In Unstable Constructs, analog and digital techniques are combined. By integrating the computer-based RGB color space into the development of analogue slide film, the digital and physical worlds overlap. Troika question habits of reception and demand a state of active perception in real space.