Marginal

Techno-natural Mutations

— Installation
Thursday, 24 Sept 19:00 — Sunday, 4 Oct

We tend to imagine technology and nature as opposing domains — one engineered, the other inherited; one built to control, the other presumed to resist. Yet the environments around us are increasingly produced through their entanglement. Infrastructure alters the ecological flows, creates new conditions of life, generates residual energy, and determines how environments are sensed and understood. Challenging this narrative that infrastructure simply sits on top of an ecosystem, Techno-natural Mutations explores this entanglement as an ambient, daily condition, in an emerging not-so-speculative reality.

In Unplugged? Symbiont No. 3, Lorena Cocora and Alexandra Costea construct a fictional technological ecosystem that bypasses the centralized grid and survives by scavenging what the city constantly leaks, from the electromagnetic haze to transit vibrations. The installation occupies an unstable position between parasite and diagnostic instrument. It poses a straightforward structural question: if a device survives on the residual noise of urban life, is it autonomous, or has it simply adapted to our systemic inefficiency? Avoiding the techno-utopian promises of clean energy, the work delves into the continuous, uncaptured runoff of our built environment, treating the city's residue as an ecological niche.

A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy by Cezar Mocan approaches the same entanglement from a different perspective, examining what happens when the infrastructures built to make Earth legible begin to generate uncertainty of their own. Its fictional satellite constellation, Argus, is tasked with reconstructing the disappearance of a toxic lake from imagery, datasets, testimonies and accumulated memories. Rather than converging on a definitive account, its AI continuously produces competing but internally coherent explanations — plausible reconstructions that cannot be reconciled with one another. The work takes the resulting uncertainty as a condition of technologically mediated knowledge: the more the system attempts to explain the anomaly, the more versions of reality it produces. Built as a real-time simulation in Unreal Engine, the work generates a new 30–45 minute reconstruction with every run, so that the account encountered by each visitor is always slightly different.

Together, the works shift attention from technology as an external force acting upon nature toward technology as part of the environment itself. One work follows the energy that infrastructures continuously emit; the other follows the uncertainty that infrastructures continuously produce. In both cases, what appears to be background noise moves to the foreground.

Without searching for a clean resolution or a moral directive, Techno-natural Mutations maps the subtle political and material friction between technological systems and the environments they exist in. What happens to our ability to understand when the systems we increasingly depend on both shape our environments and generate the knowledge through which we perceive them? And how do we act when certainty is no longer the product of the technologies we rely on?

## Techno-natural Mutations is run by MARGINAL in partnership with Projekt Atol and V2_. The project is co-funded by the City of Timișoara through the Center for Projects and The Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN), and sponsored by CTP. The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the program may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.

A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy is part of End of Signal, a research-based body of work that examines the epistemic implications of AI deployed at scale. Production team: Sofía Enríquez G. (curator), Laenz (sound design), Andreea Iliescu (3D environment design). Special thanks: Yannis Siglidis, MK Skitka, Alasdair Milne, OFFICE IMPART (Anne Schwanz and Johanna Neuschäffer), Artemis Gallery, Aisling Murray.