Varvara & Mar

We are Varvara & Mar, an artist duo established by Dr Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet in 2009, working at the intersection of art, technology, and society. Technology is not only our medium but also our subject: we use it as a tool while simultaneously questioning its promises, ideologies, and blind spots. Our practice asks how our lives, perception, communication, togetherness, and environment are altered by rapid technological development and what it means to be human inside these shifting conditions.

Currently artificial intelligence is a central focus in our work, as both a cultural phenomenon and a material to think with. Our projects aim to provide case studies for creative and meaningful uses of AI and other emerging technologies. We explore the vast wilderness of data produced by contemporary society and look for ways to transform it into experiences that generate reflection rather than just more information. As Jean Baudrillard noted, we inhabit a world where there is “more and more information and less and less meaning”; for us, art is a way to resist this condition by slowing down, contextualizing, and re-embodying data. We are particularly interested in how the cultural sector can open critical conversations about AI, new forms of image and text production, and our growing dependence on high tech infrastructures.

Equally important to our practice is our relationship to the natural world. We approach nature not as something opposed to technology but as a collaborator and tension field. We investigate possible symbioses between the organic and the artificial, asking how coexistence—and even hybridization—might look in today’s neural age. Through artificial landscapes, environmental motifs, and speculative ecologies generated with AI and other digital tools, we explore how technological systems rewrite our ideas of landscape, ecology, and the “natural”.

By engaging with these issues in practice rather than only in theory, we seek a deeper understanding of the processes shaping our time. Our installations, interactive works, and synthetic environments invite audiences to step into scenarios where nature and computation, bodies and datasets, material and virtual spaces collide. In doing so, we hope to create spaces for contemplation, dialogue, and renewed sensitivity to the intertwined futures of technology, culture, and the environment.