Interactive and video installations from students of the Interactive Technologies for Performing and Media Arts MA program at UNATC Bucharest. Late-capitalist themes of eco-anxiety and mass commodification are explored in an urgent yet playful way.
Over eco-anxiety presents two works by Lorena Cocora, an ITPMA UNATC Bucharest MA Student and one by Maria Năstase, an alumna of the same program.
The presented works share feelings of anxiety in which technology serves as a mediator, catalyst or agent. The penetration of technology into our personal lives reveals a strange organic texture to cold interactions. Confronted with eco-anxiety, Lorena wants to share it with people emphasizing the urgent need for collective action and the limitations of individual efforts in the face of a global crisis. Maria collects old toys, figurines and objects. What started as a process of rescuing damaged, uncollectable toys has more recently transformed into a process of curating informed by possible scenes that the playthings can be engaged in.
Videomaking functions as an interface for playfulness as well as a medium for showcasing the collection and an experiment in creating a digital archive of (old) toys. Maria’s practice of video production is based on AI software, and platforms such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, RunwayML technologically bring old toys back into play, patching together broken parts and building digital shrines.
The works communicate in a perceptive manner along the thin line from technological apocalypse to techno-hope.
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DOG GOD
Maria Năstase (RO)
DOG GOD is a series of videos that imagine possible scenarios centered around an arrangement of porcelain figurines from the artist’s personal collection. It includes scenes from a luxury retreat for curing cynophobia, a place of prayer for the health of one’s pet dog or the genesis story of the Dog God itself.
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Help Me, Help You
Lorena Cocora (RO)
In my childhood I often immersed myself in imaginative play with dolls during bath time. As the bathtub filled, I would create a narrative in which the dolls were facing an imminent danger. The suspense would build and I would only “save” them at the last moment, relishing in the anxiety.
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Miss Beautiful Against Capitalism
Lorena Cocora (RO)
In the world of late-stage capitalism, over-consumption, digital addiction and overstimulation, we tend to project our happiness into a future point. Miss Beautiful is a manifest against the new age of social media, against late-stage capitalism and everything in between.
I.L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film (RO)
I.L. Caragiale National University of Theater and Film (UNATC) in Bucharest teaches graduate and undergraduate programs in the fields of theater, cinematography and media. The university has a longstanding tradition of innovative curricula, notably the Interactive Technologies for Performing and Media Arts (ITPMA) MA in the Department of Animation and Interactivity. ITPMA student projects have been exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival, Fête des Lumières (Lyon FR), Mirage Festival (Lyon FR) and many more events.
Credits
Help me Help you: Lorena Cocora
Miss Beautiful Against Capitalism: Lorena Cocora
DOG GOD: Maria Nastase