During the 2020-2021 lockdown misère we’ve literary been stuck on the platform. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call centre and you’re too tired to close down Facebook? “How to get rid of your phone? Wrong answers only.” We wanted to move on, and use the pandemic as a reset, but failed. The comfort of the same old proved too strong. Instead of a radical techno-imagination that is focussed on the roll-out of alternatives, we got distracted by fake news, cancel culture and cyber warfare.

| Text by Geert Lovink from the Performance @NeMe/Limassol, December 11, 2021 |

~ A short incursion into digital-crypto-machine learning art ~

Compared by some with the advent of photography, when someone without painting or drawing skills could capture a realistic depiction of anything, the rising popularity of AI-generated art raised questions regarding where art is headed. Some argue that people create art, not cameras and algorithms and, just as photography added another instrument in the creative toolkit, so will machine learning architectures.

| Text by Andrei Tudose |

A meme is an organism. A meme is alive. It enters the body, it replicates, it jumps to its next host, maximizing its message reach, it mutates to keep itself spreadable.

|Text by Alina Lupu and the ever more expanding flow of embedded references|

Kinema ikon is one of the very rare examples of artists’ collectives whose activity is noteworthy equally for its longevity – the group is continuously active during the last fifty years (!), and an excellent artistic performance – a relentless appetite for research and experiment, doubled by engaging, intelligent visual solutions, imaginative humor and sound conceptual thinking.

| Text by Horea Avram |

If I am to say fashion and the digital, the first thing that comes to mind would probably be the changes that brought the so-called democratization of fashion through online platforms and image sharing, especially the social media impact. ‘Instagram it!’ – you know how that goes. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, the relationship between the two, every so often surfaces in ‘scandals’ over digitally retouched images of celebrities and models – those idealized bodies that here and there lost touch with an anatomical bone structure. What if instead of the digital perfected body or the ‘materialized ideal body of the models’ – as Franziska Bork-Petersen called it – we were to shift the discussion towards touch? Can we treat fashion as an ‘in-process-of-becoming’ digital skin?

| Text by Edith Lázár |

Glitches are everywhere, in every software or hardware that we use. They pop up from time to time but they are all unintended, being only involuntary malfunctions of the software code being run. What are we going to talk about in this essay is intentional glitches, software that generate glitches and artists using machine errors to display their work aesthetically.

|Text by Miron Ghiu |

SPRLQDT presented itself as a capsule space, a backdrop where ideas and practices merging from digital art or derived from it, whether experiments and ‘orthodox’ media, could find a temporary place. For you see, the digital art scene was and still is to coagulate, but back in 2014, finding a platform for it was a constant struggle. Yet, between the hive-mind of the Internet and ideas unfolding in everyday conversations, rummaging through ways of visibility and exasperation, spaces can emerge; like this one, in a dome-like structure, 12 m², an oddity among the artists’ studios and galleries of The Paintbrush Factory in Cluj-Napoca.

| Text by Edith Lázár |