Confluential is a publication platform exploring cross-industries intersections that drive new models of thinking about societal and environmental sustainability. The idea was to create a 'confluent space' where the voices of designers, thinkers, technologists, scientists, ecologists, and policymakers can generate conscious and inspiring ideas for considerate and community-oriented socio-environmental frameworks.

Confluential brings together researchers from diverse professional backgrounds to contribute to alternative research, knowledge, product, or service-building forms. The project documents innovation and analyzes the future of technologies, emerging social behaviors, and shared commons. ↱ Read more

Readesign is a conversational platform around the role of critical design practices in shaping how we read and experience text, information, interfaces, and exhibitions as public spaces where opinions are formed. The idea for the project came as a response to public language becoming ever more fluid, overlaid, and reproducible. In addition, facing unprecedented levels of false or misleading information, propaganda, malinformation, and social media disinformation—thinking critically, fact-checking, and interpreting information are imperative to defending social values collectively.

I interview leading design practitioners and critics, cultural theoreticians and thinkers, publishers, and writers to explore visual projects, concepts, processual habits, and methodologies around the fundamental transformations in how we produce, read, and perceive information in the 21st century. ↱ Read more

From 2012 to 2017, I designed, curated, and edited anti-utopias, a compelling thematic repository of curated artist portfolios and news from the international art scene. The platform underwent three major design revisions between February 2012 and April 2017. In the process, I curated and showcased the works of 320 well-established and upcoming artists at the time, including Atelier Van Lieshout, Awoiska van der Molen, Benoit Aquin, Claudia Hart, Herwig Turk, Kjel Bjørgeengen, Lang/Bauman, Marjolijn Dijkman, Norimichi Hirakawa, Sophie Kahn, Susan Silas, or Wesley Meuris. I also published over 900 editorial materials—from artist interviews and review essays to press information about the most relevant events in the art world. 

After over five years of hiatus, the project resumes as a platform that interviews and reviews forward-thinking artists and cultural practitioners grappling with social, political, environmental, and extinction-level matters. Working with some of the most exciting artists, critics, curators, galleries, and institutions, I redesigned the project to shift away from the traditional art world and connect established and emerging artists with diverse, engaged, and inclusive audiences and communities. ↱ Read more

I started designing Creativin to create an ecosystem of curated and thematic content newsletters. The concept merges the idea of an informative and healthy supplement with thematic content curation and redistribution to provide context-rich and diverse perspectives, filter content, and amplify discussions around topics of interest in shaping public opinion. Think aspirin, but for creativity understood in its relation to broader sociocultural, political, economic, artistic, technological, and scientific practices.

Creativin is more than a newsletter service aggregating content across the spectrum in regular formats. Instead, it provides subscribers with intriguing stories and rationales for the selected stories, helping to shape public discussions. I also aim to address ethical questions and empower readers to have informed overviews, connect the dots across media channels, and stimulate topical perspectives on subjects that range from the creative industries and technology to science, politics, literature, and mainstream news. Finally, the goal is to collaborate with international mainstream, alternative, and independent media voices to bring forth relevant stories that inspire change. ↱ Read more

Contemporary Art Archives is a scalable interface archive and modular search system providing access to some of the most exciting contemporary artists, projects, publications, curators, galleries, institutions, and collections worldwide. For this project, I was inspired by the idea that search engines and, to some extent, archives are not a map of what people think as much as a map of how they think. My intention was not to create a content repository per se but an instrument that enables connections, relations, and associative thinking patterns.

I designed this as an open-access tool for users and researchers to search and collect information more easily. I wanted to transform the idea of a categorial archive into something fluid and dynamic that reflects the inquiry process, inspires new interpretations, and can be used for educational purposes. I indexed more than 75k items so far and estimate to reach 200k items by 2024 to test the modularity and scalability of the solution. ↱ Read more

"Peripheral Histories" is a print and digital publication that explores an alternative view of experimental film, video, and television art in Romania from the 1970s to 2020. I wrote, edited, and designed the book as a personal narration of the sociocultural transformations in this period rather than an art historical account. Romanian media art history provides a fascinating opportunity for people to uncover different angles on how media shapes history for cultures in transition.

I grouped some of the most representative artworks for the first time, from the early works of kinema ikon, Ion Grigorescu, or the Sigma Group to the visionary works of Aurelia Mihai, Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Dragoș Alexandrescu, Larisa Crunțeanu, or Mihai Grecu. I analyzed the prominent motifs and designed the book as a thematic overview that is easy to read—the image above is a sample from when I started the design. I wrote the book as a personal memory exercise to avoid the common understandings of the 'periphery' prevalent in art and cultural criticism, which often reinforce ideas of (self-)marginalization and hierarchical forms of modernism. ↱ Read more

This book was initially conceived in 2015, but the original project was discontinued. I resumed the book in 2022 with a new formula that expands on the original idea of blending perspectives on art, technology, science, cultural studies, politics, and environmental concerns towards a more practical focus—the present future of how we understand humanity and subjectivity amidst current sociocultural, technological, and climate transformations.

I edited and started designing the book, adding new conversations to initial discussions. Discussion subjects range from hacktivism and networked cultures or the intersections between art, technology, and architecture to surveillance politics, the intersections between art and law or art and science, anthropology and the tactical use of post-digital technologies, and many others. Some of the artists I selected to include in the book are David Altmejd, Allison Kudla, Diana Thater, Joyce Kozloff, Mike Pelletier, Dominik Lejman, Leila Alaoui, Yael Kanarek, Zeitguised, Brigitte Kowanz, Herman Kolgen and Dominique Skoltz, Victoria Vesna, Brandon Ballengée, David Maisel, Ahmed Mater, Anne de Boer, Keita Miyazaki, Yann Mingard, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ivonne Thein, Susan Silas, Gregory Bennett, Macoto Murayama, Maija Tammi, Katie Torn, Sophie Kahn, and many others. ↱ Read more

Diffractive Archives is a two-fold experimental project. The first part is an extensive research publication on archival practices in networked environments inspired by my Ph.D. in Philosophy on archives and contemporary discourse. I explore the implications of notions such as Foucault's archaeology of knowledge, material and discursive formations, spectrality and tele-technologies, submedial spaces and chronopolitics, or the decolonization of knowledge and archives. However, in the current research, I focus on forensic archives, as inspired by the writings and practice of Forensic Architecture, and diffractive archives, as inspired by the writings of Karen Barad and philosophers of new materialism.

I wanted to explore the research's conceptual potential as a modular media installation where data generate comprehensive contexts and multi-layered interpretations, reconstitute alternative histories, and enable associative and diffractive thinking patterns. I designed the installation as a standalone informational device that can be used for specific investigative purposes and exhibited in modular settings. ↱ Read more

I have worked as a freelance writer and editor since 2009. My writings have been published in various art books, magazines, exhibition catalogs, academic publications, and creative content writing projects in Romania, Germany, South Korea, the UK, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the US. I usually write about art, design, architecture, photography, or new media, and I am interested in the intersections between art, design, cultural critique, science, and technology.

I worked as an associate editor for several art, design, and architecture magazines and published over 200 articles, from short-form project presentations to over 80 long-form interviews, critical analyses, and essays on architectural theory. I supervised several print issues of Arhitext magazine and wrote the "Possible Architectures" column for Igloo magazine between 2011 and 2013. In addition, I attended events such as the Venice Biennale as a magazine attachée and presented papers at various events in Romania, Germany, and Denmark.

I translated books such as David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR and John Whitmore's Coaching for Performance from English to Romanian, and Françoise Dastur's La Mort. Essai Sur la finitude from French to Romanian. Between 2009 and 2013, I translated more than 140 theoretical articles and project presentations in art, design, and architecture, some of which have been printed in international publications in Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands.

As a curator, I organized the video art group exhibition “Accumulations” (Sherin Najjar Gallery, Berlin, February—April 2013), the video art screening program “Sight-Building: Experimental films from Central and Eastern Europe” (ARTA cinema, Arad, June 27, 2019), and I helped to organize exhibitions in London, Zurich, and Brussels.

I was invited as a member of the curatorial board of the "Fluencies" international architecture festival (Bucharest, 2011), guest curator at the Moving Image video art fair (Istanbul, 2014), and member of the jury in a digital arts competition (Ravello, 2015-2016). In 2013, I was invited as a curator in the Advisory Curatorial Board of the Moving Image video art fair in London—one of the four works I selected for the show, "Solitude" by Swedish-Swiss artist Jessica Faiss, has received the Moving Image Award and was included in the permanent collection of the 53 Art Museum in Guangzhou.

As a content curator and editor, I ran the anti-utopias contemporary art platform between February 2012 and April 2017, where I showcased the works of 320 artists and published more than 900 editorial materials—from artist interviews and review essays to curated press information about the most relevant events in the art world. I am currently focusing on curating content in parallel with creating original content for my projects Confluential, Readesign, Creativin, and the Contemporary Art Archives search system.

the Unconventional Bureau is an experimental model for organization design that I have been working on since late 2019. The idea for this project stems from my experience as a recruiter and the many discussions and interactions I had over the years with designers, architects, artists, marketing specialists, and creative technologists who envision new organization models more adaptable to current working and social conditions. We need a profound change in how we interact with the world and each other and envision our society. Therefore, imagining alternative contribution models where different practitioners collaborate on broader social, cultural, economic, and political aims is necessary.

This model aims to assemble specialists from various disciplines with different perspectives and professional skills who can collaborate on specific projects, construct new work processes, and become equal design shapers and decision-makers. It is based on the idea that we need to move away from the economics of individual affirmation, offsetting externalities and responsibilities, softening management hierarchies and faux principles of care, or softening performance metrics and persuasive methodologies.

I designed this project around several functions—a theoretical model that explains its operational principles, a set of materials that test the theory in situated contexts and environments (including blueprints, case studies, and discussions with visionary organization designers), and an open-source prototype where everyone is encouraged to playfully imagine and experiment with different organization assemblies for real or imaginary situations, products, or services. ↱ Read more