Cezar Mocan

Through generative video and real-time simulation, Cezar Mocan (*1993) creates digital worlds that question our familiar understanding of technology, digital infrastructure, and their relationship to nature.
„A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy“ follows an endless attempt to establish an unverifiable truth: What happens when a system built to observe and interpret the planet encounters something it cannot explain—a toxic lake that disappears from its images over the course of six hours, only to reappear the following morning?

Explore Cezar Mocan’s full CV and find detailed information on each work in his portfolio (PDF).
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Still Nothing (Bermeja) and Still Nothing (Hy-Brasil) are part of the work series Known Surfaces. It is a series of reliefs and photographs derived from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data collected at satellite calibration sites. These stable terrains—including dry lakebeds and desert grids—provide the reference conditions satellites use to establish their “ground truth.” Drawing on Harun Farocki’s concept of the operative image, Mocan approaches them as operative landscapes: places valued for being measurable, known, and computable. By returning them to an aesthetic register, the series asks what else a landscape might be when its value lies primarily in its legibility to machines.

Arcadia Inc. is a work of speculative fiction which investigates the commodification of nature through computer-generated landscape photography. In a real-time simulation, three virtual agents roam a digital landscape, photographing scenic views that are automatically uploaded to the fictional company’s website as stock images. Arcadia Inc: IPO presents six of these images, each paired with a video showing the moment of its creation and a Synthetic Landscape Asset Partnership Agreement. The series questions how automation and commercial frameworks shape the images through which nature is represented.

You can visit the Arcadia Inc. website at arcadia.photography, or view an ambient slideshow of its most recent photographs on Arcadia Now.

Cezar Mocan
Arcadia Inc: IPO, 2021/2025
Each Arcadia Inc: IPO consists of three digital components:
Arcadia Inc: IPO (Asset) png,
Arcadia Inc: IPO (Provenance) mp4 video,
Arcadia Inc: IPO (Agreement), jpg,
as well as a framed print of Arcadia Inc: IPO (Asset), 21 × 28 cm

Cezar Mocan (*1993, Rumania) 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 that mediate our relationship with technology. Drawing on media archaeology and art history, his research traces the origins of contemporary thought patterns around (technological) progress.

More information to Cezar Mocan here

For further information and inquiries please contact us at info@officeimpart.com or chat with us directly by clicking the blue heart in the right bottom corner.