Onkaos and SOLO Contemporary are happy to present End of Signal, the exhibition of Cezar Mocan, winner of SOLO AI ’25 AWARD.
What does it mean, under contemporary earth-observation regimes, to see everything and still misread? What space can uncertainty retain when observation is coupled to adjudication, when vision is engineered not to dwell but to authorize? In End of Signal, Cezar Mocan takes this tension as a point of departure.
A toxic lake disappears from satellite view during a solar eclipse and reappears at dawn; an insurance claim is filed for its “temporary non-existence”; witnesses diverge, and the datasets do not quite align. The exhibition treats this small fracture as both narrative device and lens onto a broader condition: it shows how poorly both institutions and machines cope with not knowing. Rather than critiquing the surveillance apparatus from a safe distance, Mocan inhabits its interior. The narrative voice is that of a distributed satellite — seventy-two “eyes” in low Earth orbit — trying to reconstruct what happened to the lake and repeatedly falling short. Its spiralling attempts to explain the anomaly, its accumulation of incompatible testimonies, appear less like an otherness and more like a reflection of our own difficulty in living with the unknowable.
End of Signal argues that contemporary infrastructures of vision do not coexist with uncertainty — they manufacture it, spinning reality into versions, each persuasive enough to intensify unknowability, each partial enough to cancel the next. What shifts is not truth — which has long been partial, negotiated, constructed — but the texture of not knowing: less a gap produced by missing information than a surplus of plausible versions, enough to stall judgment while still demanding it. A system that cannot stop looking, and cannot reconcile what its looking is doing.
— Curatorial text by Sofía Enríquez G.
About Cezar Mocan
Cezar Mocan is a Lisbon-based artist and computer programmer. Through the use of narrative generative systems, he creates simulations that reveal technological observation as a form of worldmaking, while investigating technological lifecycles from hype through adoption, infrastructuralization and obsolescence. He is interested in the built infrastructures which enable our digital lives, as well as the ways in which their presence in the natural landscape affects our perception: the moments when utility becomes nostalgia.
His real-time simulation work, Arcadia Inc. was recognized as a 2021 winner of the Lumen Prize in Art and Technology. In 2025 he was awarded the ABS Emerging Artist of the Year award and the SOLO AI AWARD.