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In this episode of Unlocked, artist Cezar Mocan explores how digital art can dissect systems of control. Speaking with Delfina Sena, he unpacks the politics of game engines, the aesthetics of AI, and how emotional resonance and poetic slowness can interrupt dominant technological narratives.
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A photography class changed Cezar Mocan's life. Not because he became a photographer - but because it taught him to look at the world instead of through it. The Romanian-born artist who learned competitive programming as a child found, in the new topographics movement and then in new media art, a way to ask the questions that pure technical excellence couldn't.
Cezar Mocan is a Romanian-born artist who started competitive programming at age ten and moved to the United States for university. A single photography class - taught by Victoria Sambunares, who introduced him to the new topographics movement - redirected his practice from code as problem-solving to code as world-building. He discovered NetArt and new media art through graduate school and now works with Unreal Engine to create real-time simulations and environments that critique the gaming industry's defaults and imagine more equitable futures. His work "World Upstream" - a post-labor picnic scene by a hydroelectric dam featuring non-hierarchical beings sharing space - is a sustained meditation on what technology's lifecycle looks like from the outside.
The protopia concept - progress that is incremental rather than utopian, building toward something better without claiming arrival - structures how Cezar Mocan thinks about his work and the role of digital art in social change. He is not making propaganda for a better world; he is building speculative environments that make different arrangements of power and relationship feel possible. This conversation explores how his competitive programming background became an artistic foundation, what Unreal Engine allows him to do that other tools don't, and what the books he finds most essential - James Bridle's "Ways of Being" and Matteo Pasquinelli's "Eye of the Master" - reveal about his approach to AI.
Competitive programming as artistic formation
The discipline of competitive programming - precise thinking, systematic problem-solving, iterative improvement - carries directly into Cezar Mocan's artistic practice. The difference is the goal: instead of solving defined problems, he's building environments that produce new ones.
Unreal Engine and real-time world-building
Unreal Engine's capacity for real-time simulation allows Mocan to build worlds that respond dynamically rather than existing as fixed images. The gaming industry built the tool for entertainment; he uses it for critique.
"World Upstream" and post-labor imagination
The post-labor picnic scene - beings sharing space non-hierarchically beside a dam that represents technology's lifecycle - is an image of a future that doesn't yet exist but isn't impossible. Mocan's skill is making that future feel specific rather than vague.
Protopia as critical position
Against both utopian fantasy and dystopian warning, protopia offers something more useful: the idea that incremental, real improvement is possible and worth imagining. Mocan's work practices this rather than preaching it.
"Imagining these futures that are more equitable, more fair towards humans, non-humans and the planet, no matter how far-fetched they might be or no matter how impossible they might be, I think they can contribute to this project of building a protopia in the current society."
The most interesting digital art is doing something beyond demonstrating technical skill or aesthetic sensibility. Cezar Mocan's work is building imaginative infrastructure for different futures - and collecting it means participating in that project. This conversation will help you understand what's at stake in world-building art, and why the questions it asks matter beyond the frame.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
