Ioana Tomici is a designer and researcher born in Bucharest, RO. She is currently based in Rotterdam, NL where she graduated from Willem de Kooning Academy's Product Design department (Bachelor of Arts, 2013-2017).
present-day technological discourse. Her textual and visual work strives to analyse contemporary narratives surrounding social, political and economic progress based on the increasingly seamless transmutation of the digital into quotidian life. The results of her analysis frequently amount to the construction of fictional scenarios depicting potential (near-) futures.
A proposition for a mathematical model of the Earth that uses financial derivatives as a way to speculate on the future conditions of territories.
"[...] Such a financial model of the Earth with their correlating mathematical derivatives allows for a mapping of environmental conditions through the volatility surface. The volatility surface would then encompass both the current conditions of commodities reflected in the price, and the ones to come, reflected in the implied volatility. Collecting these volatility surfaces and mapping them on their respective position on the globe generates a model with which variables could be calculated to financially enhance these environments."
Video comissioned by Sami Hammana.
• a short film exploring how this technology would function and how it would become intrusive.
By creating a parallel between different types of omniscient entities — the regulatory and the mystical one — the act of surveillance is examined under its strive for accurate prediction. For the sake of speculation, these two seemingly distinct notions, mystical divination vs digital monitoring, should be bridged in order to better understand their respective implications; hopefully with the aim of identifying an intrusive phenomenon in relation to one which is remedial. Pansophic Encounters is a critical design tool in the form of a deck of tarot cards, used to perform a contradictory experience: extracting personal information by way of highly impersonal bureaucratic criteria, and contextualizing it for future therapeutic reference. Whether one’s data is being interpreted by forms of authority or by esoteric counselors should not be an issue; the only suggestion is that one should be given the choice. And that doesn’t seem to occur in the context of surveillance-states.
City Tour is a mixed media project, compiled as a visual essay containing fragments of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The visual component of the project aims to present a simulated tour through Broadway NY, culminating with Times Square. As the semiotic makeup of the landscape progressively intensifies, the tourist is provided with commentary towards mass-media as an ideological tool for control within public space.
This is a project done in collaboration with Carmen Dusmet Carrasco.