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“Politics of Technology – collaborative investigations into the digital territory” proposes the creation of a space for research and critical reflection on the ways in which technology shapes contemporary affective, cultural, and socio-political structures.
CUTRA collective invited five digital artists to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue with technology consultants (Cristina Cochior, Ippolita, Erin McElroy, Sergiu Nisioi, Agnese Trocchi) and feminist authors (Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Anca Bucur,Diana Manea, Veda Popovici,Laura Sandu), to investigate and seek feminist and critical responses to issues such as: Technology and global militarization; AI and labor; Collective digital infrastructure; Networked feminisms and convivial technologies; Mental health and new technologies.
✧･ﾟ:*[Artist Index]*:･ﾟ✧
|Irina Bakó| -o- |Claudia Brăileanu| -o- |Ema Motea| -o- |taietzel ticalos| -o- |Vitaly Yankovy|
Irina Bakó – Univers semantic (Semantic Universe)
Univers semantic is based on the essay “AI Technology, Labour (Especially Reproductive Labour), and Our Feelings. What Can We Hope for the Future?” by Laura Sandu, which asks what happens when technology takes over human labour. The response proposed here is to let an LLM itself map the language of the essay and reveal how it understands the text.
The work runs the article through exactly the kind of system it warns us about. Before reading the text, the reader can see it transformed into coordinates, distances, and aesthetically appealing clusters, but ultimately reduced to simple relationships of proximity. The galaxy is seductive precisely because it shows how elegantly AI can reduce language to pure geometry.
This is the tension the artist wants to offer the reader as a threshold into the article: to sense how powerful, how seemingly neutral, and how reductive the machine’s gaze is before reading about what that gaze does when directed at workers.
Click here for full screen view! 😉
Irina Bakó’s project is the result of a collaborative exploration of AI and labor, developed with Laura Sandu (research) and Sergiu Nisioi (technology consultancy), within the framework of “Politics of Technology.”
To read Laura Sandu‘s essay “AI Technology, Labour (Especially Reproductive Labour), and Our Feelings. What Can We Hope for the Future?”, please click here: [part I] [part II]
*[All the texts posted on CUTRA are written in Romanian]
Bio:
A multidisciplinary artist from Romania, based in The Hague, Irina Bakó examines our relationship with technology through posthumanism, technological surrealism, and digital intimacy. Her practice encompasses both digital and physical media, including sculpture, installation, video, 3D printing, and AI. Her work has been exhibited in Romania and across Europe.
Claudia Brăileanu – Rewiring The Landscape
In Rewiring The Landscape the digital environment is approached as a reactive system in which each state persists until the next interaction generates a new iteration. This flow is structured by procedural rules, encoded biases, and invisible architectures operating behind the interface. Mapping this configuration reveals both the constraints and the worldview embedded in the original design.
By interrogating these limits from within the context of current technologies, we identify the critical reference points needed to develop new conceptual frameworks and design alternative environments.
Click here for full screen view! 😉
Claudia Brăileanu’s project is the result of a collaborative exploration of collective digital infrastructure, developed with Diana Manea (research) and Sergiu Nisioi (technology consultancy), within the framework of “Politics of Technology.”
To read Diana Manea‘s essay “Cutting Big Tech’s Cables and New Systems of {Co}operation for Digital Infrastructures”, please click here: [part I] [part II]
*[All the texts posted on CUTRA are written in Romanian]
Bio:
Claudia Brăileanu is a Bucharest-based Romanian artist whose practice explores the contemporary realm of painting as a lens to examine the impact of digital technologies on our engagement with the world. Her work investigates how visual experiences and traditional artistic media are reshaped by these technologies, with a particular interest in the interplay between tangible and virtual realities and its influence on creativity, perception, representation, and the transformation of our conceptual frameworks.
Developing a distinctive visual language, she engages in a continuous dialogue with various digital tools and techniques, integrating them seamlessly into her practice. Her work spans both digital and physical media, including 3D animation, extended reality, painting, and digital prints.
Ema Motea – Network Feminisms & Convivial Technologies
This interactive interface is a technofeminist ecosystem inspired by Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and decentralized cyber-feminism. By turning away from the rigid, extractive infrastructures of corporate monopolies and digital enclosures, this project re-imagines the internet as an organic, living anarchy.
Here, digital tools are morphed into bio-mechanical organisms. They are not passive products to be consumed, but autonomous nodes. In a convivial network, power is never fixed, central, or hierarchical; it is a shared, shifting relation.
Every interaction you trigger ripples through the entire grid. By disturbing one organism, you alter the collective balance—proving that inside an organic infrastructure, we are all radically interdependent.
Click here for full screen view! 😉
Ema Motea’s project is the result of a collaborative exploration of networked feminisms and convivial technologies, developed with Veda Popovici (research) and Agnese Trocchi (technology consultancy), within the framework of “Politics of Technology.”
To read Veda Popovici‘s essay “Rage WITH the Machine. Convivial Technologies and Networked Feminisms in the Technofascist Present”, please click here: [part I] [part II]
*[All the texts posted on CUTRA are written in Romanian]
Bio:
Ema Motea is a Bucharest-based visual artist working under the alias 3Delusional. Through 3D animation and interactive media, the works merge digital culture with narrative experimentation, creating subversive spaces that explore bodily fluidity, vulnerability, and the deconstruction of normative structures.
taietzel ticalos – High Odds
High Odds examines the rise of a probabilistic regime and the way prediction shifts from a method of interpreting the future to a process that actively organizes the present. Influenced by Paul Virilio’s writing on speed, war, and perception, the narration moves through architectures produced by war – bunkers, anti-drone nets, and memorials. It traces how predictive logics are embedded within these defensive and commemorative structures, reshaping vision and reorganizing how time, threat, and memory are perceived. The title refers both to statistical probability and to what is at stake in a world governed by autonomous decision-making systems.
*[High Odds is designed for desktop only]
Click here for full screen view! 😉
taietzel ticalos’s project is the result of a collaborative exploration of technology and global militarization, developed with Anca Bucur (research) and Erin McElroy (technology consultancy), within the framework of “Politics of Technology.”
To read Anca Bucur‘s essay “Plundering Nature: Between Imperialist Technological Militarism and Essentialist Ecofeminism”, please click here: [part I] [part II]
*[All the texts posted on CUTRA are written in Romanian]
Bio:
taietzel ticalos is a Bucharest-based visual artist whose work employs experimental 3D visuals and speculative narratives to explore the paradoxes of the online medium and reflect on the consequences of the algorithmic age. Between 2014 and 2016, she coordinated Nucleu 0000 alongside Gabriela Mateescu. Since 2019, the two have jointly managed www.spam-index.com, a digital art platform dedicated to Romanian digital art.
Vitaly Yankovy – An Ordinary Daydream Of A Machine
Like a modern city obsessed with order and control, the AI server room presents itself as a utopian and sterile structure, defined by its efficiency and logical functionality. Ultimately, the dark side of AI is a room—a windowless cave filled with the hum of fans and the blinking of LED indicators. Is there anything beyond the fluctuations in voltage within this structure? Where does its self-awareness reside? What is this machine’s most daring fantasy?
Click here for full screen view! 😉
Vitaly Yankovy’s project is the result of a collaborative exploration of mental health and new technologies, developed with Yasmeen Al-Qaisi (research) and Ippolita (technology consultancy), within the framework of “Politics of Technology.”
To read Yasmeen Al-Qaisi‘s essay “It’s Raining in the Blue Cave”, please click here: [part I] [part II]
*[All the texts posted on CUTRA are written in Romanian]
Bio:
Vitaly Yankovy (Vinnytsia, Ukraine / Bucharest, Romania) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, designer, researcher, and experimental musician. Finished Contemporary Art course at School of Visual Communication (Kyiv) in 2014 (curated by Catherina Badianova and Lada Nakonechna). Finished Indie Lab documentary school in Kyiv (2018) and American Art Incubator, organized by Izolyatsia and Zero1 (2020). Works with video essays, animation, 3D, drawing, readymades, sculpture, and sound. Artistic practice builds around hybrid landscapes, which consist both of physical and digital objects. Currently interested in creating objects from leftovers of material culture and relations between digital and material matter through optics of non-human and post-human studies. Also, in recent works, he has researched performative ways of interaction with non-human species and developed a way to understand them better.
Click here for full screen view! 😉
CUTRA is a queer feminist magazine — an online platform and, from time to time, a print magazine featuring original content.
CUTRA is the result of our collective care and effort. It is a platform where intersectional feminist voices find space for self-expression, where yet unwritten thoughts, expectations and new perspectives are brought to light.
Our Bucharest-based editorial team stands for antifascist, anticapitalist and antiracist values, as well as for the empowerment of those who are most negatively affected by the current socio-political climate. Through our work, we attempt to bring forward sensitivity, intimacy, solidarity, and sexual liberation as radical political acts in a world that seeks to dismiss them or paint them as weaknesses.
*[A project curatd by CUTRA – Nanci Nanculescu, Ali Venir, Lav]
**[Design: Robert Blaj]
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