holly veselka

a portfolio site 
Holly Veselka is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who creatively studies the entangled relationships between humans, technology, and the natural world. Her projects theorize that technology acts as an unintentional mirror that reflects the values and limits of the culture that creates it. When directed toward the natural world—to digitally capture or simulate organisms, geologies, or ecologies—thech often produces distortions, erasures, and hallucinations, revealing more about the cultural values of tech’s creators than about the entities they depict.

Veselka’s process involves feeding diverse archives—such as natural history collections, found organic and cultural objects, field photographs, and historical images—into emerging technologies including photogrammetry, AI image generators, simulation software, 3D printers, and CNC machines. Her practice is experimental and open-ended; rather than seeking predetermined results, she searches for evidence of how these systems engage with, translate, and misinterpret non-human life. The resulting works become visual artifacts of the biases and blind spots inherent in the tools themselves. These technological misreadings of non-human life reveal how contemporary Western humanity situates itself both within and apart from the more-than-human world.

For over fifteen years, Veselka has developed an interdisciplinary, collaborative practice that combines animation, AI, sculpture, installation, and ecological fieldwork. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with exhibitions at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Fotofest (Houston, TX), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Artpace (San Antonio, TX), Lage Egal (Berlin, Germany), and the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY). She has participated in residencies and fellowships such as the British Council’s X-Change program (Scotland, UK), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), and ACRE (Steuben, WI). Her work has also received support from organizations including the Puffin Foundation (Teaneck, NJ) and the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation (New York, NY).

This portfolio site features a selection of projects created since 2019, presented in reverse chronological order.

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u/digital_smarthome



Gulf Coast Journal, 37.2 Summer/Fall, 2025 Nocturne for Dallas Aurora, 2025


u/digital_smarthome, 2025, 5:38 minutes, 4K video (web 1080p), courtesy the artist
u/digital_smarthome traces the extractive practices that reshaped the southern pine woods of the United States into the future of digital technoscapes. In this experimental video, AI-altered archives reveal continuities between ecological erasure and contemporary digital realities. By animating and distorting historical photographs, the work destabilizes the archive, oscillating between documentation and generative iteration, asking what happens when memory is mediated by AI and the past is continually remade.

The project has been presented as a site specific projection through Dallas Aurora and featured as a cover and portfolio spread in the Gulf Coast Literary Journal.


lost thicket

Reflections of Nature,
San Antonio Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX
March 8, 2024  – October 27, 2025


Lost Thicket
is a multichannel new media installation commissioned by the San Antonio Botanical Garden for the 2025 exhibition Reflections in Nature. Installed in the Garden’s preserved nineteenth-century East Texas log cabin, the work reflects on the incompleteness of ecological archives, focusing on southern pine forests where rapid logging erased species before they could be recorded. This compression of time—industrial extraction collapsing millennia of biodiversity into mere decades—renders the Piney Woods archive as a site of absence.

Merging sacred architecture, ecological loss, and digital artifice, Lost Thicket creates a subtly unsettling environment that questions how digital technologies reshape our ways of perceiving, remembering, and imagining the real.



Lost Thicket, installation shot, wooden panels and 3D printed relief in bio plastics, Piney Woods Cabin, Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artist

Lost Thicket, 15:30, multichannel HD video and 3D printed relief on panel, Piney Woods Cabin,
San Antonio Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artist


Piney Woods Cabin, Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artist


fried eggs
and rockets





Experimental Response Cinema
Hyperreal Film Club, Austin, TX
Sept 17, 2025





Fried Eggs and Rockets, 2025, 6:45 minutes, HD video, courtesy the artist
Working from a home office, a woman is programmed to either talk to an AI about eggs and rockets, or look out the window where she sees a deer dying in childbirth in a hot landscape. So, she talks to the AI. She says…

Fried Eggs and Rockets
reflects on the futures we are programming into being, and the fragile lives that hang in the balance. Inspired by a SpaceX rocket launch, the dialog is an edited version of a long-term conversation with ChatGPT. In this work, AI is a tool of production and a concept. An experimental film created with 3D modeling, CGI, and generative AI tools, this video explores fragile ecologies, technological mythologies, and the relationship between care and destruction.


selkie

Apeirophobia, Fotofest, Houston, TX
October 5-November 17, 2024


Selkie, 2024, 4:00 minutes, UHD video (web version 1080p), courtesy the artist
Selkie, a short video created with AI generated text to video and AI generated speech, considers themes of identity, interspecies friendships, objecthood, and creative acts. 

Selkie was included in the exhibition Apeirophobia, an exhibition of the artist collective Omnigenesis at Fotofest in Houston, TX. Omnigenesis is a self-identified network of artists, educators, writers, and practitioners invested in research and practice surrounding artificial intelligence in the arts. The group was established in 2024 through the organizational efforts of Christopher Meerdo.

Selkie was selected by Prospect Art for the upcoming exhibition Affective Territories, Alternate Belongings in Los Angeles, CA and Lisbon, Portugal.

Selkie installation shots, 2024, images courtesy of FotoFest.