The discussion unfolded subsequent to my visit to Flaviu Rogojan's studio, situated in a decommissioned factory just beyond Cluj-Napoca on a November evening.

Rogojan's artistic practice delves profoundly into the nuanced interconnection of our digital and physical realities. Seamlessly integrating 'obscure' information drawn from the realm of hacking with conceptual art techniques, his works give birth to speculative narratives that eloquently tackle contemporary political issues.

You are a millennial artist born in the 1990s and raised in a former communist country, during the studio visit you told me that it was normal for children to find shortcuts to access overpriced video games in other ways, perhaps by hacking them. It seems that this practice was naturally assimilated into your creative process, I think of the surreal conversation that took place between the hacker and the user affected by the malware in your work ‘Mirai’…

Growing up in Romania in the 90s and early 00s was surely an interesting time for kids who were drawn to computers. I think this has a lot to do with Romania’s history with computers and engineering - these privileged fields in the communist education system produced a critical mass of smart people with the technological literacy to adopt personal computers and build their own networks early in the 90s. Add to this an explosion of media freedom after the Revolution, an unquenchable thirst for (mostly Western) content, and post-communist economic collapse, and you get the seeds for DIY neighborhood local networks and a strong share economy. These networks had a slow connection to the larger world wide web but were very fast between neighbors - so sharing collections of movies and music or playing games with friends was almost as fast as today’s high-speed internet. Very few had the money to buy media or software, and with no government oversight to enforce piracy laws, the ethos of open source and bootlegged content extended to include everything in the ‘virtual world’.

We also have these crazy stories of hackers from Romania from those days. Cybercrime was something lawmakers and police couldn’t legislate, the internet seemed like such an abstract and far away place anyway. There’s even a small town in Romania nicknamed Hackerville. For me, I was too young to be one of these 1990s hackers. They were older kids, hacking reverse pay calls to connect to the internet via dial-up phone connections or stealing American credit cards to pay for porn sites. I got closer to hacking as understood by the DIY maker space culture, but I would still read stories of these cybercrime hackers and geek out over computer viruses. A lot of time the secrecy, the intricacies, and codenames made it feel like reading mystery novels.

In my work Mirai, I talk about one of these hacker stories that I was following in 2016. A hacker who calls himself Anna-Senpai created this computer worm which was more powerful than even he anticipated because it managed to spread into thousands of Internet of Things devices, creating a giant botnet as his control. While he was using it to take down Minecraft servers, it had the capacity to take down twitter for a few hours and the german Telekom website. Computer security teams were on his trail, and it all sounded to me like one of these spy novels.

A few days later Anna-Senpai hacked a well-known computer security expert’s skype and they had a chat. The hacker boasted about his skills, taunted the expert, claimed he’ll never get caught, and they talked about viruses for a while before suddenly and surreally switching subjects to Anime. Anna-Senpai confessed he’s a big fan of Mirai Nikki, a 2011 japanese anime series he likes to watch, and that he even named his computer virus Mirai. The two had a weirdly friendly chat about anime before the hacker called the security expert a “cool guy” and disconnected “to go get drunk and watch anime”. The next day he released the source code for his Mirai virus on GitHub, and now any kid with hacker aspirations can make their own version of the virus in a couple of hours, making this virus into an even bigger issue.

I put myself back in my teenage shoes, fandoming over hacker stories and anime and in my works I make a kind of fan art. I remember I used to do this as a kid, draw characters from cartoons and manga. Here I redraw Mirai Nikki Manga frames as fan art, adding some hacked smart devices in the frame, fanboying both the anime and the hacker story. The hacked skype conversation and a part of the virus source-code add another layer on top.

Lonesome Rover, 2023, Installation (Robot dog, robot dog memory sticks, acrylic paint on cardboard, acrylic paint on windows, dye transfer on paper) exhibited at Wunderkammer Naturalia / Artificialia, Stuttgart, Germany

You often place your works in a very specific decade, that between the 1990s and the early 2000s, to which you seem to look back with nostalgia, a period that we all remember as a past when things 'worked better’.

Why does that decade seem to inhabit your works like a ghost?

It’s true, a lot of my works have a certain retro-technology aspect relating them to the end of the 20th century. I don’t think things worked better back then, at least in Romania they didn’t. I believe a lot of what we are dealing with today has its roots back then. Especially when it comes to online culture and the internet, many important changes happened then: the turn from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and the platform capitalism it spawned, the hacker manifestos and freedom of information movements, and the big change from seeing the virtual world as an anonymous space separated from the real world to the online being an ever present layer of reality.

I think an idealized perspective can come up because of generation-specific references: for any generation to talk about things from their childhood years will make them feel nostalgic. This can get further complicated by the fact that so much of today’s media production actually is nostalgia-driven. This reminds me of how Mark Fisher described the cancellation of the future and how he talks about content production reusing old ideas and aesthetics.

So when we, millennials, talk about this period we more often think of vaporwave aesthetics before thinking of the politics and history of those defunct online spaces. I really like how you called this decade a ghost. It is the unfinished business, the optimistic ideas promised by Web 2.0, and the imagined futures of an internet as a space of freedom that still haunt us all to this day. But I think it’s a mistake to celebrate that decade, this is the decade where the seeds of so many ideas we struggle with today were being planted, and now is the time to critically look back and see what has sprouted and where we ended up.

This nostalgia coexists with certain objects that you have decided to ''exhume'' from our past, I am thinking of the little dog AIBO by Sony, I wanted to ask you if you owned it as a child or if you have decided to buy the ''remains'' of this robot dog only recently. You investigated the sense of loss that these objects arouse when they stop working, a sort of ''pietas'', a feeling that induces love, compassion and respect for other living technological beings.

Last year I bought a Sony AIBO, a second generation model. He’s from 2002, so he’s quite an old puppy by now. AIBOs around his age start developing age-related ‘maladies’ - joint problems, droopy head syndrome, dying batteries. Sony discontinued the AIBO line in 2006 and stopped producing spare parts. Almost everything on the robot dog is proprietary design and over-engineered, so replacement parts are almost impossible to get a hold of. It’s more common for AIBOs to get a funeral than a repair. There are a few great videos online of robot dog funerals in Japan you can check out by the way.

I never owned one back in the day, and I doubt there were many here in Eastern Europe who bought them, as the original Sony dogs were very expensive at the time, around $1,500 at the time of launch. The reason I got it is because I’m working on a larger series of stories around robots that die and the empathy response that follows their demise. This model specifically is somewhat hackable and also has a wi-fi slot, which was quite a big deal for 2002, so I will use a hack to remotely see what it sees and make it a POV character in an upcoming video work. It’s cool to see that besides its camera and computer vision filters, you can have access to a live stream of emotion data, language interpretation, and all sorts of mood indicators. These toy dogs were cleverly designed for people to attach - they form memories of your home, they learn your voice, they develop their unique personalities based on your feedback, and the memory sticks can’t be backed up or copied. Once you lose an AIBO you lose a digital companion you helped raise.

I also see this feeling of losing your pet, or the sadness of losing a companion when reading Twitter responses and press articles after the death of Mars landers, moon rovers, and other space robots. This is what prompted my most recent work, a story about a space probe that NASA lost contact with in 2013. The probe is still out there, orbiting the sun, its computers and solar panels should be working for many years to come, but due to a faulty clock software design it practically lost all sense of time. The computers are now stuck in a reset loop and the small robot is unable to communicate with Earth. While this sounds like a story of loss, I like to tell it from the perspective of the probe. In my work I talk about how proud it was to accomplish its missions, how it was eager to explore space, and how its mind slipped into a weird repetitive insanity that ultimately frees the robot from the constraints of linear time.

I also blend this speculative emotional robot story with a larger history of science research, so in my most recent iteration I told this story to an audience in a Planetarium and talked about the colonial history of timekeeping devices, the history of comets, and an unexpected connection between an amateur astronomer in the 19th century, surrealist artist Max Ernst, and our little robot friend lost in space.

In Orbit, Lecture Performance at Planetario Porto, Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Porto, Portugal

What fascinates me is your ability to create fictional universes around your works, accompanied by narratives of dystopian worlds, speculations of distant futures that seem verisimilar. I see you as a screenwriter of a video game, creating its 'lore', the set of events and stories that tell all kinds of elements of the entire game world in a non-linear way.

I unfortunately don’t play so many video games anymore, but I used to play a lot of lore-heavy games like Elder Scrolls Morrowind and I remember spending hours reading the in-game books to get fully immersed in that world. I movies and books too, I am totally hooked on the world-building parts.

The closest I get to creating such video game ‘lore’ is that I often use 3D modelling software like Blender, or edit maps and modify video games to produce the images or worlds that I envision. A project for me becomes a small world, so from that world I might show drawings, videos, and installations, like bringing back souvenirs from fictional universes. I think letting the viewers join in the discovery process and piece things together from these references I throw out there is where non-linear storytelling and creating video game worlds really shine.

In my video work, Raygun, I build a 3D collage world of drawings from books of optics, open-source archaeological scans, my own fictional archaeological sites, Flash Gordon episodes from the 1930s and a famous wikileaks video from Iraq. I rewrite and fictionalize texts from theory books, Al-Jazeera reports, an archeology presentation of the Getty Museum and explain the workings of a 1980s toy light-gun by Nintendo. This all sounds like a lot of unrelated information but there is a very poetic way all of it ties together and that’s ultimately where I’m trying to get.

Lecture 9: Rayguns designs uncovered at 2nd or 3rd Millenium Sites, 2021, HD Video, 24 min 51 sec

In Raygun, you have staged an archaeology conference in the future, the games of childhood return once again: the laser-like guns are, however, the subject of a deeper debate on theories of vision, which sees the development of these devices increasingly linked to the evolution of military technologies, such as remote-controlled drones that relegate the military to a video game by de-emphasising its actions…

These archaeologists in the far future have a very skewed understanding of these few millennia between ancient Greece and the invention of digital image making. They found a relic of this Nintendo Light gun which surprisingly works the opposite way one imagines a laser gun - instead of shooting anything out the barrel, the gun is actually a camera and takes a photo of your analog 1980s TV screen. They then present a lecture about this giant paradigm shift, as the theories of vision slowly switch from extra mission theories in ancient times - the thought that rays come out of your eyes and touch the world - to intermission theories in the 10th century and modern-day optics - where rays of light enter the eye to produce vision. They compare and mirror this to the development of weaponry from primitive projectile weapons - throwing things at each other with increasing force - to an advanced absorption civilization where digital image-making becomes the weapon.

It is loosely based on the structure of a lecture on the Bronze Age Collapse, a civilization-ending event around 1200BC, and even though this fragmented lecture creates a fictional world I think this very much talks about present-day technology. Of course, we all know the crucial role of digital image-making in the military, with drones and computer-aided vision, but digital images can also hurt in everyday life away from war zones. From facial detection surveillance, to deepfakes, to revenge porn, the digital camera and image software can very much already be weaponized.

Now I would like to ask you if you are working on something new, where are you directing your research at the moment?

I am currently working on a few video works from the series of stories of dying robots and I’m also exploring ways in which I can turn these stories into lecture-performances or guided tours through interactive worlds. I’m also looking into cybernetics, old robot designs, and earlier AI models to discover how we ended up with the current large language models and discussions of singularities.

Besides my work as an artist, I am also working as a curator and cultural producer. So I split my time researching, this year I’m curating a couple of projects on how tourism development changes the landscape on the coast of Albania and more generally on coastlines around the world, and researching a 20th-century story that traces a connection between a small town in communist Romania and the ocean waters off the coast of Western African countries to talk about geopolitics of food and current struggles.