Nicoleta Mureş

Nicoleta Mureş (b.1996) is a graduate of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. By using photography and 3D human bodies, she creates digital collages representing individuals trapped in virtual realms.
Her artworks predict a dystopian future, where people have to deal with unreal emotions, isolation, desembodiment while being influenced by the way in which technology fuels humanity’s desire to consume.

My project reflects on how the Internet distorts reality and the profound changes that affect humanity. The lack of reactions from reality is what made me think that we are heading towards a “numbness” of senses and personality. As we spend more time searching for content on the Internet, we increase the possibility that we become like the objects around us: still, fixed in appliances, immovable.

Starting with the way I was affected by the digital age, I worked with elements that influenced the Romanian post-internet culture in combination with an element that the viewer can identify with or even find himself in it: the 3D representation of the human body. The characters mirror the way we are controlled and domesticated by technology, leading to a numb existence for unconscious beings incapable of adapting to their environment. They take refuge in the digital space as a place of voluntary exile in which each social network is made up of a personal profile, with the user’s own information, along with an avatar and a timeline of posts, as well as a feed, in which the posts are generated by the other users I follow.
Interactivity on the Internet gives us powerful new tools to find information, express ourselves and talk to others, but it also turns us into laboratory rats, which constantly interact with devices to receive small pills of social or intellectual nutrition.