Andrea Mikyska is spotlighted in the New Voices series, which highlights emerging artists who showcase their art on ArtConnect.

Prague-born, Berlin-based new media artist Andrea Mikyska examines the role of humans in relation to plants and the broader biosphere. Her work proposes new alliances between species and worlds colonized by hybrid beings, dramatically altered by technological pressures.

She aims to celebrate a new communion with non-human entities and to cultivate kinship between the organic and inorganic, the living and the non-living. Her projects includes animations and visuals inspired by natural imagery and contemporary visual technologies.

Curious to gain more insight into her artistic approach and perspective, we asked a few questions.

The relationship between nature and technology is central to your practice. Where did this interest originate, and how has it evolved?

The relationship between nature and technology has always been central to my practice. My background lies in working across moving image, storytelling, and digital environments, often exploring dream scenarios and studying the structures and inner mechanisms of natural organisms. I use technology as a tool to convey these investigations, capturing them as hybrid forms or partial archives that sit between the organic and the synthetic.

Over time, this interest has evolved into what I describe as a kind of reverse archaeology, the process of uncovering and reinterpreting fragments of the future, rather than the past. Through this lens, I explore how machines and living organisms experience different biological times and perspectives, and what it means to be alive within increasingly technological ecosystems. I’m fascinated by how technology can both reveal and obscure life’s processes, and how digital systems might allow us to reimagine ecological cycles, alternative rhythms of time, and speculative futures beyond human perception.

Proust’s book In Search of Lost Time remains a touchstone for me in understanding memory, time, and temporality ideas that continually surface in how I work with archives and time-based forms. I’m also drawn to theories that challenge how we perceive consciousness and identity: the Third Man Phenomenon, where an unseen presence seems to guide individuals in extreme situations; the Proteus Effect, which reveals how our digital avatars can shape behaviour; and Metanoia, the profound transformation that arises from crisis or reflection.

Together, these ideas reveal the fluid, often hidden ways our minds and technologies interact and how shifts in perception can fundamentally change the way we experience the world, and how both nature and machines become mirrors for those transformations.

“I’m fascinated by how technology can both reveal and obscure life’s processes.”

Can you tell us more about the process of “reverse archaeology” and how it functions within your artistic process?

At its core, this approach connects to my fascination with the nonlinear nature of time. How past, present, and future coexist and influence one another in ways that feel almost quantum. I’m interested in how a future vision can echo backward and alter the way we perceive the present, or how memory can project itself forward, shaping what has not yet happened. In this sense, reverse archaeology feels like working within a temporal loop, where the object and the idea, the ancient and the not-yet-born, overlap in the same moment.

This perspective informs how I build my art projects across mediums like video, 3D illustration, and sculptural forms. My process often begins abstractly. I collect fragments, images, and pieces of information around a subject until they start to form a visual and conceptual constellation. I can float with just a picture in my head for a long time, allowing the idea to mature intuitively. But eventually, I feel the need to anchor it, to delve deeper into the research, the material, or the phenomenon that the work wants to address. That’s when reverse archaeology becomes a structure for me. It’s a way of navigating abstraction, giving form to the intangible, and connecting seemingly unrelated temporal or conceptual fragments.

In practice, I often begin with natural specimens as photos or scans of plants, textures, or small organic structures, which I reinterpret. I usually look for new forms through AI models or 3D software that allows me to get a new perspective on materials, light and shapes. Each translation distorts and redefines the object, creating an echo of something that feels both familiar and foreign. These distortions are not errors but archaeological gestures in reverse: instead of preserving the past, I allow the material to evolve toward an imagined ecology or speculative future.

Ultimately, reverse archaeology becomes a way of thinking through time, not linearly, but as a field of simultaneous possibilities.

You often design “life armour” for plants. What are living organisms being protected from? What does this look like?

My interest in creating “life armour” began with an exploration of prosthetics, not only as functional extensions but as forms of care and material experimentation. The prosthetic fascinates me because of its maternal quality. It unites design with protection, tenderness with adaptation. About two years ago, together with Balázs Ágoston, we began developing a series of prototypes constructed in 3D and printed in resin. This process opened a new space for me to explore how materials, forms, and functional shapes can merge in a dialogue between human intervention and natural transformation.

From this foundation, my research expanded toward nature’s self-regenerative capacity, its ability to mutate, adapt, and endlessly reconfigure itself. My work on prosthetics gradually evolved into the concept of life armour, which reimagines protection not as an act of defence but as a poetic and functional adaptation to changing environments. This duality between human-made structures and organic resilience mirrors how human activity continuously alters natural processes. The idea of armour becomes symbolic: just as medieval knights wore metal shells to protect their flesh, my chromatic, metallic constructions become a romanticized metaphor for shielding life from environmental disturbances, for example, from light pollution to the disorientation of nocturnal pollinators.

This concept also resonates with the medieval dreamcore aesthetic, where mystical, surreal atmospheres evoke both vulnerability and transcendence. Medieval dreamcore merges the sense of mythic protection with dreamlike ambiguity, ethereal light, reflective surfaces, and suspended temporality. By weaving this aesthetic into my illustrations and objects, I aim to evoke a feeling of timelessness.

“The idea of armour becomes symbolic: just as medieval knights wore metal shells to protect their flesh, my chromatic, metallic constructions become a romanticized metaphor for shielding life from environmental disturbances.”

Has the emergence of generative AI influenced your practice or thinking in any way?

I think that in the next decade, we will move more and more from imagining the future into living the future. The sentence “Ahh, that’s like from this movie” will become truer than ever, as all the philosophical questions once raised by transhumanist thinkers and cyberpunk storytellers begin to be answered by the majority of humanity. Ethical dilemmas and economic structures will divide society even further, as we may soon face humanoid robots for labour and romantic companionship, robotic wounds that heal faster than flesh, anti-aging mechanisms, and military enhancements. Yet these advancements won’t be accessible to everyone, creating a new social “AI gap” between the privileged and the dispossessed. So far, I don’t see those in power preparing for this future of exclusion, how to make technologies accessible while also responsibly restricted and regulated.

In art and design, I use AI creative tools mainly for technical enhancement: creating new plug-ins, remeshing 3D models, improving image quality, or performing retouching. So far, these algorithms cannot fully realize the specific visualizations I imagine; they serve only as technical assistants rather than true collaborators. And that’s something I appreciate. I value the unpredictability and intuition of my own creative process far more than perfect replication. Lately, I find myself in a somewhat displaced position when engaging with current visual AI tools. I also feel the economic pressure growing alongside the expansion of AI-driven creative toolkits. 

We must look at AI as both a tool and an archive in itself a vast, powerful library of melted images and ideas. It has emerged from layers of human innovation, censorship, and collective authorship. Yet the roots of this giant archive, the countless works, gestures, and cultural traces it has learned from have never been truly uncovered. What we now call “machine intelligence” is, in truth, an accumulation of human imagination, a blurred mirror of creative history that continues to evolve through reinterpretation. And those who never gave consent to be part of this vast dataset, their works, images, and voices must be acknowledged and protected.

You’ve exhibited your work across various media and contexts. Is there a particular mode of presentation you’d like to try next?

As technologies like robotic companions, memory-erasing devices, or sensory prosthetics become more accessible, I find myself questioning what it means to live within this accelerating landscape. How do these extensions reshape our sense of self, emotion, and memory? What kind of timeline are we really inhabiting when our tools begin to perceive, predict, and even act for us?

In my own experience, I already feel positioned somewhere in between by using AI tools and digital systems that expand my capabilities, while also realizing how these same tools make me more mechanical in process and perception. This tension between becoming and resisting the machine is where my next works are growing from. 

At the moment, I am developing an immersive audiovisual performance that embodies these questions. It will use motion tracking and real-time body mapping to explore what it feels like to exist as a digital–mechanical avatar, a body freed from physical limitation yet suspended in artificial time.

Through movement, sound, and visual synthesis, I want to ask: If we could become unlimited, would we still recognize ourselves as human?

See more of Andrea Mikyska’s work

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New Voices highlights emerging artists who showcase their unique perspectives and innovative techniques on ArtConnect. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. If you would like to be featured in a personal interview on ArtConnect Magazine, read through the open call and apply here.