Ioana Vreme Moser

This is a good question that many contemporary artists ask themselves. Alongside the refinement of AIs that both panic and fascinate people at all levels, climate emergencies have prompted many intellectuals to deconstruct the manufacturing elements of electronic objects, which are seen as one of the sources of ecological and social imbalance. Ioana Vreme Moser is among those who question the use of materials and their functioning through sound works. Her installations, performances and workshops revolve around these themes and put our practices and uses of technology into perspective.

Many would say that Ioana was predestined to follow an artistic career. Born in 1994 in Timișoara, she comes from a long line of creative minds and is immersed in the cultural milieu. Her parents open one of the first graphic design studio in the city in the 90s, which allows her to have exceptional contact with computers from a very young age. Exceptional because at the time these objects were not very accessible to the general population, and particularly in Romania which was undergoing socio-economic reconstruction. But as a child, Ioana loves dancing and drawing; she is a ballerina for almost ten years and is fascinated by the movement in space that she associates with the gesture of drawing. During her high school years, she specialises in graphic arts, studies photography, video and philosophy while continuing with contemporary dance. She already mixes disciplines and mediums, and one day, by chance comes across an electronics workshop. The circuit is a drawing on which the electrons circulate, dance, creating different moments of interaction with the components which can be expressed by sounds or movements.

She continues to study art at the University of Timisoara; the one who wanted to touch interdisciplinarity spends a difficult first year there due to the rigidity of the teaching staff. But the following year, she flies to Krakow thanks to an Erasmus partnership where she feels freer, and where she discovers electroacoustics while taking courses on the sly at the Academy of Music. Her third year is split between the two universities, and she begins to integrate sound into her work by creating a first work based on mechatronics, an engineering field at the crossroads of mechanics, electronics and computer science. That year she also writes her degree thesis on Synthetic Sound, a movement that originated in Russia in the 1920s, initiated by artists and scientists who realised that drawing a pattern on film could generate sound.

Freshly graduated in 2016, she is looking to move away from the Romanian cultural scene which she feels is too conservative for her practice. She sets her sights on Berlin where she hopes to learn more about electronics, sound art and the interdisciplinary approach. Through a member of the Simultan festival, with whom she is close at the time (and still is today), she makes contact with an artist there and joins the scene. For almost three years, she takes on a series of small jobs as an artist's assistant; the pay is meagre, but she learns a lot and looks back on this period with a kindly eye, which gave her independence and self-confidence. Gradually, invitations to participate in exhibitions and festivals arrive, and as time goes by, they become more and more interesting.

Based on the knowledge she acquired, she produces a first series of works that she calls On the peripheries of electronic wastelands in reference to the salvaged objects she uses; these are printed circuits or electronic components donated by other artists, which she reconstitutes with organic materials such as earth or leaves. She imagines that in the distant future these objects would have formed creatures that would have been stranded on the periphery of an electronic wasteland and that over time would have continued to pile up and superimpose themselves to crystallize into a geological layer. At the same time, she is developing Coquetta, a work linked to her childhood as a ballerina; she is an alter ego, a sort of diva who wears a lot of make-up and responds in a very exaggerated way to the heteronormativity that is so deeply rooted in our society. On stage, her lipstick, hairbrush and eyelash curler have become musical instruments.

Ioana exhibits her electronic creatures, the Coquetta performances follow one another, she conducts workshops and her own research at the same time. Her pace of life is inordinate and so is her carbon footprint. In addition to the stress, she no longer feels in tune with her stage persona and decides to turn the page, in favour of a slower, more serene life, and to further her research into computer systems. By this time, she had already dabbled in fluidics and designed the Fluid Memory installation. Then the pandemic strikes; the last tours are cancelled, as are the exhibitions and workshops.

This is a difficult period for the artist, but she takes advantage of it to refine her concepts and experiment; deeply affected by the climate crisis, she goes through several phases, sometimes nihilistic, sometimes optimistic, and from which she emerges with the Fluid Analog Computer project. Revisiting one of the world's best-selling objects with its mysterious functioning, symbol of neo-colonialism and ever more exponential growth, in order to turn it into a futile, transparent object, deemed ineffective and at odds with contemporary history, is a provocation. Because, as we all know, it is much easier to continue to sell the same product dressed in eco-labelled materials than to change our ways. It is like switching to cardboard straws, it is not a solution, nor even an alternative. Not only does it not solve the initial problem, but it makes it worse by perpetuating harmful behaviour. The environment is fluid, let's learn to become so too.

In the manner of an engineer, therefore, pragmatic, she lets the process dictate the final result by testing different ways of constructing her idea until she finds the most efficient modality. At the end of the lockdown, she focuses on the workshops that allow her to advance her research and give her financial stability. When doing her research, Ioana is always careful to diversify the sources; she looks around the world because she knows that the idea that technologies are created and developed by Westerners is only received. She brings the history of inventions to light by breaking down the image of the old, wise, white-bearded scientist in school textbooks, and by extension deconstructs the concept of white male supremacy over the scientific field. Integrating this information into the theoretical part of her workshops is important to her, as is researching the source of a discovery, and then all the parallel paths of development. The most fascinating period in history for the artist is the 1970s, and fluidics is a testament to this. But above all, it is a first in the history of humanity that a catastrophe scenario allows us to project solutions and the hope of building a better future.

At this early stage of Form for Fluid Computer, she combines the theory of the latter with the practical part of Politics of Parts, her workshop series developed earlier in 2022 on semiconductor materials. For the time being, therefore, she is leaving the performances aside and focusing on the conceptual part of her work. At the beginning of 2023, she is working on Mineral Amesia, a sound installation made of obsolete electronic components that erode in contact with light until they fall silent and question the longevity of digital objects. The work will be visible on 26 May 2023 at the Sonic Narratives event organised by the Simultan association as part of the Timisoara European Capital of Culture programme, then at the Galerie Nord in Berlin on 17 June.

Her career is the proof: Ioana Vreme Moser is courageous. She constantly touches on complex, painful and debatable contemporary issues.

And in turn, she en-courages us in every possible way; the courage to embrace a vision that breaks with a predestined future, and the courage to act on it.