Six artists tackle pauses and glances as data in Soft Signals

Soft Signals is a digital arts exhibition about the gestures and messages that transcend language: changes in tone, pregnant pauses, forlorn glances and of course, those messages left unread. The show, curated by Gabriela Moldovan and Laurence Levasseur for the Institut français in Cluj-Napoca, compiles installation, image, sound and light around a central animating idea: where do those signals actually go when they become data for the big machines.

Two familiar faces from Killscreen walk that path: Mélanie Courtinat is showing Indulto, which walks a torero down a long corridor toward a bull, then looks away when the fight begins. The work recently played on a Gamerausch bill in Hamburg.

Cezar Mocan, a Lisbon-based artist, makes real-time simulations run by AI agents as a way to interrogate those systems. In Arcadia Inc., three agents walk a rendered pastoral and upload their photographs live.

The other four artists are Andreea Cristina Mircea, Unda Obscura, Benoit Challand and Teodor Buruiană. The exhibition is part of Novembre Numérique, the French cultural network's yearly month of digital culture, which in Cluj runs under the theme From Human to AI: Between the Lines. It is the city's second show of networked art this fall, after nine artists rewired the internet at Aluvial.