The Rom(AI)nians
Anca-Simona Horvath and Mihai Aureliu Savin
This installation investigates the transformation of contemporary political advertising into an algorithmically optimized visual product, situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence, the attention economy, and collective imaginary. The materials circulated online in Romania between October 2024 and May 2026, starting during the period of the country's cancelled presidential elections, and following a period of turmoil, are approached not only as ideological vehicles, but also as symptoms of a new political aesthetic in which nostalgia, spirituality, social anxiety, nature, and national identity become reusable visual elements.
The starting point consists of an archive of images and texts collected from algorithmically targeted social media feeds. These materials function simultaneously as historical documents, exposing political imagery at an important time in the country's history, and as indicators of the technological state of AI image generation during that period. Many of the images occupy a zone close to the uncanny valley: mixing the familiar and affective, while remaining sufficiently artificial to produce ambiguity and discomfort.
The project proposes relocating these images from the digital sphere, volatile, accelerated, and semi-public, into the exhibition space, where the feed becomes object, archive, and installation. Through this remediation, the images lose their immediate persuasive function and become available for visual analysis and critical contextualization. Contemporary materials are juxtaposed with historical aesthetics of political advertising and representation in order to highlight continuities and mutations in the construction of the collective imaginary.
Starting January 2026, we created two surrogate profiles of Facebook with the aim of observing informational bubbles "from within" and to analyze the ways algorithms personalize and distribute political content. The exhibition includes an interactive/participatory component through which visitors are invited to assume these two counterfactual identities, both directly through Facebook profiles accessible on two laptops displayed in the gallery, and symbolically through a selfie cut-out point installed outside the exhibition space. The visitor is simultaneously positioned as spectator, user, and potential agent in the circulation of images.
A central element of the project is the continuous, real-time production of 3D-printed busts based on the images of two prominent figures. The process functions as a material metaphor for the automated reproduction of public figures in the online environment and for the ways in which political identity is fabricated, multiplied, and stabilized through the continuous distribution of images.