Just One Click Away

Issue number 5 of Artsens revolves around art and technology. 

Technology implies hyperaccessibility. For instance, this newspaper can be read in print, but you may have noticed the QR code in the corner of the page. If you scan it, you are just one click away from its online version, wherever you are.

This issue provides a better understanding of the art-technology relationship through critical approaches, artistic perspectives, research, group and association activities with references to the past, present and future. Throughout the texts, one can feel a tension generated by contradictions, searches, experiments, advantages and disadvantages. In the flow of information, technology viewed from several angles captures various nuances and the dynamism of personal and professional opinions.

The many facets of the theme addressed in this issue cover practices, media and definitions that may be not so well known, such as biorobots, neuro- and nanotechnologies, algorithms, new media, virtual reality, augmented reality (AR/VR) and Artificial Intelligence; others, like the internet, online, zoom, QR code etc. may be too well-known. Familiarity with such technologies depends on the generation (X, Y, Z) that uses them, how and for what purpose they use them.

In his introduction, Eduard Enache writes about technology as “the engine of change and the driving force behind the art world.” This “engine” can also be seen at Simultan, a week-long festival that involves continuous activity and effort throughout the year. You can read more details about it in Marina Paladi’s text.

Mălina Moncea presents the Screening programme One day the day will come when the day will not come, which is part of the exhibition Landscape in a Convex Mirror, curated by Mihnea Mircan. At the contemporary art lesson, Xenia Tinca explains video art from the perspective of art history. In Moving Images, Ioana Terheș speaks about an altered perception of reality. Her text is accompanied by Magdalena Łazarczyk’s work The Night of Time (2019), in which all components make a whole and at the same time recreate a complex vision on existence.

Lucia Brînaru makes a major distinction between online culture și Online Culture, showing that the online environment influences the development of our own self and artistic practice. In her other article, hashtag5, she explains how the artist duo Alice Gancevici & Remus Pușcariu works. At the 2021 edition of the Biennial, the two show a new work, The Predictive Conditional.

This issue also contains two dialogues. The first is between Ionela Ghețe and Constantin Vică, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest and a specialist in the ethics of new technologies. The second is between Anastasia Gurschi and Michael Takeo Magruder, guest artist of the Invisible Cities/Imaginary Lands exhibition organised by Contrasens Cultural Association. In partnership with the Faculty of Arts and Design Timișoara, Magruder has created five works that map the historical layers of the city of Timișoara. Using algorithms, he generates infinite imaginary, hybrid variations of these layers. 

Alexandra Mereuți reveals what lies beneath the surface of the ambiguous subject Fiction and Reality: “The Multiple Representations of Reality”, giving examples like Fighting Together (2017) by artists Veda Popovici and Mircea Nicolae, and the installation Raygun (2017) by artist Flaviu Rogojan, displayed at the Our Other Us exhibition under the Art Encounters Biennial.

In kinema ikon: a continuous search for experiments and new technologies, Cătălin Alb makes a presentation of the kinema ikon multimedia group of artists from its foundation in the early 1970’s up to the present.