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Public Spam
Since the 1980s, billboard art has emerged as a significant medium within both the contemporary art scene and public spaces. This form of art, encompassing murals, paintings, and digital displays via smartphones, serves as a dynamic platform for artistic expression that engages with its surroundings and often conveys provocative messages. However, these messages frequently face censorship due to public scrutiny, limiting the freedom artists enjoy in private galleries or museums, where contextual explanations can foster greater understanding.
When art is located in public spaces, particularly without mediation, it transcends the artist’s original intent and becomes subject to public interpretation. In these contexts, the audience’s personal experiences, biases, and emotions shape the artwork’s meaning. This shift in ownership—from artist to public—creates an open-ended dialogue where the art may elicit diverse, even conflicting, interpretations. Thus, the artist’s role evolves into that of a catalyst, sparking thoughts and reactions, while the ultimate meaning is shaped by the collective perception.
Artists/pioneers like Jenny Holzer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and John Fekner brought art to the walls of public buildings, engaging unwilling participants. Today, figures like Banksy compel the public and auction houses to seek out his work. The intersection of art and commerce is further exemplified by brands commissioning artists for striking street advertisements, as seen in the viral Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton campaign. This phenomenon blurs the lines between art and commerce, raising questions about the commodification of art.
Moreover, billboard art challenges traditional notions of public space by transforming commercial structures into venues for cultural expression and social reflection.
Spam-index has strategically chosen to rent photo and video billboards in the heart of Bucharest for a month during the 2024 presidential electoral campaign to showcase their artists’ works. Leveraging this high-profile and politically charged moment significantly amplifies the impact of these artworks, especially as they stand in stark contrast to the commercial and political messages that typically dominate public spaces during election campaigns.
Our intention is to create a form of visual disruption, devoid of scandal, that serves as a commentary on the nature of public space, political discourse, and the commercialization of political campaigns. This initiative aims to serve as commentary on the nature of public space, political discourse, or even the commercialization of political campaigns.
✧･ﾟ:*[Artist Index]*:･ﾟ✧
|Vitaly Yankovy|-o-|Ema Motea|-o-|Irina Bako|-o-|Thea Lazăr|-o-|Cezar Mocan|-o-|reVoltaire|-o-|Marta Mattioli|-o-|George Crîngașu|-o-|Nicoleta Mureș|-o-|Dragoș Dogioiu|-o-|Anastasia Manole|-o-|Taietzel Ticalos|
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.
3Delusional is an alias used in the online art environment by Ema Motea (b.1998) 3D artist based in Bucharest, a graduate of The National University of Arts Bucharest, currently experimenting especially in the animation and installation area. Its work focuses on conflictual connections taking place at the intersection of social constructs and freedom, using the virtual space as storytelling in the context of a digital culture increasingly becoming the dominant culture.
Irina Bako, also known as Datejuice, is a 3D artist from Romania, currently based in The Hague. As a freelance artist, she specializes in both still and video digital creations, while also maintaining her physical art practice through a blend of traditional and modern technologies. Her recent work has been showcased in a series of digital and physical art exhibitions, where she explores themes central to her creative vision: the realms of dreams, femininity, intimate memories, art history, mental well-being, and the intriguing aspects of social media addiction.
Thea Lazăr lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her artistic practice spans a wide range of mediums, including textile and embroidery, multimedia installations, video, and 3D animation. With a focus on storytelling, her work explores the intersection between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technology, creating a dynamic dialogue that reflects both personal and universal narratives. Through the juxtaposition of nature and technology, she highlights the tension between the organic and the manufactured, prompting contemplation of their coexistence.
Nature, particularly local and endemic plants, holds a significant place in Lazăr’s artistic inspiration. Through the incorporation of botanical elements, she constructs a symbolic language that transcends geographical boundaries, inviting viewers to contemplate the interconnectedness of all living things. In addition to her botanical motifs, she often turns her attention to cars and car parts, examining them through a nostalgic lens. By delving into this theme, she prompts viewers to reflect on the historical and cultural significance of automobiles, emphasizing their symbolic role in notions of technological progress, mobility, and personal freedom.
Cezar Mocan is a Lisbon-based artist and computer programmer interested in the interplay between technology and the natural landscape. Using narrative generative systems—animated videos of infinite duration, real-time simulations built in game engines or other software—he creates worlds that recontextualize aspects of digital culture we take for granted, often in absurd ways, while investigating the power structures which mediate our relationship with technology. He is interested in the built infrastructures which enable our digital lives, as well as the ways in which their presence in the natural landscape affects our perception: the moments when utility becomes nostalgia. Drawing on media archaeology and art history, his research process traces the origins of our current thought patterns around (technological) progress.
Some of his past works have been exhibited with Inter/Access (Toronto), Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), Office Impart (Berlin), Onassis ONX Studio (New York), Currents New Media (Santa Fe), Romanian Design Week (Bucharest), and The Wrong Biennale. His real-time simulation work, Arcadia Inc., was recognized as a 2021 winner of the Lumen Prize in Art and Technology. Cezar holds a B.S. in Computer Science (2016) from Yale University and an M.P.S. in New Media Art (2021) from New York University, where he also served as a research resident and adjunct professor.
reVoltaire is a ready-media provocateur, full-time trendsetter at kinema ikon,
senior employee and trickster at the Complexul Muzeal Arad.
Marta Mattioli (b. 1998) is a visual artist and graphic designer. With dual roots in Italian and Romanian cultures, her work reflects a dynamic blend of digital and physical mediums. A member of Kinema Ikon and Atelier 35, Marta actively participates in both local and international exhibitions and projects. She explores a reality suspended between utopia and the potential dystopian future, delving into the concept of organic-digital hybridization.
Marta’s creations simplify the complex interplay between traditional and digital elements, prompting viewers to contemplate the profound implications of this fusion. Her art invites us to consider the evolving nature of our world and the possibilities that lie ahead.
George Crîngașu lives and works between Rome (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). Growing up alongside the first sprouts of internet culture, digital media, and digital tools, his practice is largely focused within these mediums. His works often take the form of digital prints, heavily imbued with a range of motifs, from art history to immediate and intimate surroundings to scenes reminiscent of gaming environments to the bizare plain and simple. They were always intended as idealized installations, spaces that you should navigate given the chance, that being one of the reasons for him to also branch out into video, installation, and object-oriented works.
His formal training is deeply rooted within the traditional paradigms of art making (painting, drawing, etching); thus, we find a constant need for pacing in between these two spaces (analog and digital), not merging them into one but rather looking at how and when one could populate/possess the other
He was born in 1988 in Focșani, Romania, and has studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca. The artist’s work has been exhibited in galleries and venues such as Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest, ArtCologne in Cologne, Digital Art Festival in Athens, CFHILL in Stockholm, and Liste Art Fair in Basel.
Mureș Nicoleta (b.1996) is a Romanian artist based in Madrid. Her practice is a continuous observation of the virtual body under different stress-related situations, anxieties, and fears. Her goal is to further investigate the possibilities and limitations that put the flesh, be it real or digital, in the spotlight.
Her visuals predict a dystopian future, where people have to deal with unreal emotions, isolation, disembodiment while being influenced by the way in which technology fuels humanity’s desire to consume. Her projects reflect on how the Internet distorts life and the profound changes that affect humankind. The lack of reactions from reality is what made her think that we are heading towards a “numbness” of senses and personality. As we spend more time searching for content online, we increase the possibility that we become like the objects around us: still, fixed in appliances, immovable. Nicoleta’s works were also displayed in festivals: Tour de Moon, Simultan, Digerati Emergent Media Festival and art fairs: Liste Art FairBasel and Viennacontemporary.
Dogioiu Dragoș-Ion is a new media artist interested in XR and animation, currently active in Bucharest. As a member of Kinema Ikon, he has collaborated with them in a number of exhibitions and workshops. He has also worked with museums, private galleries, and cultural institutions, including the Ars Electronica Center Linz, where he participated in a group exhibition in 2022. In 2023, he participated in the Boulevart Dubai festival as a representative of the Anca Poterasu Gallery. He is currently teaching subjects related to VR, AR, and world-building at UNATC Bucharest.
Anastasia Manole, the digital avatar of artist Gabriela Mateescu, employs a unique approach to her creative work. She uses a combination of stock images, Google-sourced visuals, and YouTube video clips, relying on basic montage and editing skills.
One of the core themes explored by Anastasia Manole is the online environment. She delves into this subject through video and installations, with a particular interest in post-feminism and the online experience from a woman’s perspective. Her work examines how the virtual realm has, for many, become the primary reality, and as a result, the distortion of images to the point of absurdity no longer sparks doubt. This concept reflects the profound impact of the internet on our perception of reality and the blurring of the lines between the physical and the digital.
Taietzel Ticalos Taietzel Ticalos applies experimental 3D visuals in unusual personal research, mostly with a critical perspective on how technology blurs the line between the real and the virtual and how it reinforces gender biases. Designed for the screen and inclined towards the development of speculative narratives, her projects have shifted from attempting to capture the paradoxes of the online medium to reflecting on the consequences of the algorithmic age.
*From October 1st to October 30th 2024, 21 billboards showcasing digital artworks were displayed at Piața Romană and Unirii in Bucharest, as well as on 7 video billboards at Cocor Mall (26th and 27th October 2024).
**Public Spam is co-funded by the National Cultural Fund Administration and does not necessarily represent the position of the AFCN. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
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