Cezar Mocan has been awarded the SOLO AI ’25 AWARD, the international prize from SOLO Contemporary and Onkaos promoting artistic and creative exploration around artificial intelligence. Mocan will receive €10,000 to develop and produce his project, which will be exhibited at SOLO CSV in early 2026.
The SOLO AI AWARD explores the intersection of contemporary creative practices and AI through new media art. This edition invites artists to address the foundational models, semantic embeddings, and multimodal architectures of generative AI, focusing on ontological shifts and the reshaping of our epistemological landscape.
A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy
Mocan’s work, A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy, begins with an unsettling question: what would happen if a satellite lied? As Earth observation infrastructures increasingly rely on AI—transforming light into data through recursive algorithmic loops between observation and reality—this body of work follows moments when measurement instruments shift from allegedly objective observers to unreliable narrators.
Work in progress of A “Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy”. Cezar Mocan (2025)
Using moving image, real-time simulation, and docu-fiction, the work stages a speculative incident where a satellite briefly erases a place from existence, paired with AI-altered photographs of operative landscapes, phantom islands, and quasi-fictional sites that appear on the map or in the territory, but never both. Drawing on histories of cartographic deception, it casts orbital infrastructure as a world-making apparatus, showing how planetary vision technologies not only record reality but actively shape its fictions.
An international selection of talent
A jury composed of curators, researchers, and journalists such as Rachel Falconer, Alex Estorick, Pita Arreola, Peter Bauman, and Elena Carbajal — led this year’s selection, also highlighting Didio (邊界_BRG), WORLD Ø-1 (Playfool), Machine Unlearning (Sarah Friend), and Biotopy (Will Freudenheim, Wendi Yan, Darren Zhu).
Work in progress of A “Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy”. Cezar Mocan (2025)
Cezar Mocan
Cezar Mocan (Lisbon, 1994) is an artist and programmer exploring the dialogue between technology and nature. His narrative generative systems —videos of indefinite duration and real-time simulations in game engines— rethink digital culture and question the power structures mediating our relationship with technology. His works have shown in Toronto, Berlin, New York, Santa Fe, and Istanbul; Arcadia Inc. won the 2021 Lumen Prize (art & tech), and in June 2025 he was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the ABS Digital Art Prize for World Upstream.