Holly Veselka is a new media artist and researcher whose work poetically studies the entangled relationships between humans, technology, and the more-than-human world in an era of rapid environmental change. For over fifteen years, she has developed an interdisciplinary, collaborative practice that combines installation, animation, AI, and ecological fieldwork to investigate biodiversity loss, climate change, and the role of art in imagining shared futures for human and non-human life.
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 site features a selection of projects created since 2019, presented in reverse chronological order.
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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 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 at Dallas Aurora and featured in the Gulf Coast Literary Journal.
The project has been presented at Dallas Aurora and featured in the Gulf Coast Literary Journal.
lost thicket
Reflections of Nature,
San Antonio Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX
March 8, 2024 – October 27, 2025
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 meditates on the incompleteness of ecological archives, focusing on the southern pine forests—an ecosystem where rapid logging caused many species to disappear before they could be documented. This temporal compression—industrial extraction collapsing millennia of biodiversity into mere decades—renders the archive of the Piney Woods as a site of absence.
Intended to be a subversively disquieting environment in which sacred architectures, ecological loss, and digital artifice converge, Lost Thicket reflects on the shifting direction of reality in the digital age. It suggests that just as ecosystems were once erased before their complexity could be fully grasped, so too does digital technology reconfigure how we apprehend, remember, and even imagine the real.
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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, installation shot, wooden panels and 3D printed relief in bio plastics, Piney Woods Cabin, Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artist
Piney Woods Cabin, Botanical Garden, San Antonio, TX; courtesy of the artistfried eggs
and rockets
Experimental Response Cinema
Hyperreal Film Club, Austin, TX
Sept 17, 2025
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 weaves explores fragile ecologies, technological mythologies, and the relationship between care and destruction.
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 weaves explores fragile ecologies, technological mythologies, and the relationship between care and destruction.
selkie
Apeirophobia, Fotofest, Houston, TX
October 5-November 17, 2024
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.
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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.