‘My poor Yorick,

you were part of that technology that gave us endless entertainment, fun, and distraction, trolls, and confusion. It was said that it was all about numbers, then we forgot what was there—or maybe we never knew—then we remembered, and when we remembered, we got scared and still didn't understand.

We grew up playing with what is now gathered in you:

- the remote control that was always with Dad when he sat on the couch and we would steal it to switch to Cartoon when Jonny Quest started;

-    the square phone with buttons that they brought home one day and replaced the one with the dial, and which disappeared into a box, where the other one later disappeared too;

- the central unit of the first computer we got, which sat enthroned in the living room, white, smelling strongly of a kind of plastic, a new smell in our house, with its large monitor, mouse, and keyboard, it looked like a general waiting to be served, we buzzed around it, it didn't know how to do much;

-    the tablet with a versatile design, for the adults we had become, to which we had unlimited access and a subscription to several types of websites and games, not all of them legal or decent, but Solitaire still reminded us of the time when what we saw was closer to raw hardware.

So, we grew up playing with the processors that powered these devices, and which future generations may worship—or demonize, it's all the same. But most likely, they will soon become decoration.

Unlimited access: that was infinite entertainment. Or so we thought. Could we access anything, could we go anywhere, or was our access controlled/conditional? In fact, at one point, everything was free, but it was simply running on empty and there was little left to find relevant. The most recent of these motherboards worked on an internet like a necropolis where you could spend days on end coming across all sorts of things and practically never finding anything. There were advertisements in a world where purchasing power had declined, but that wasn't even the problem. The problem was that these ads simulated a brain, a presence, which other bot-therapist ads were treating. There were trolls that simulated conversations and interactions. There were micro-programs that simulated situations like in reality shows. There were users who preferred that too.

And among all of this, pleasure remained instinctual, only slowed down.

And now we find all of these gathered here, in this super-brain, mother of motherboards, neither completely healed nor conscious, just melancholic, somehow missing the types of manipulation, still hoping that a processor will recreate our childhood memories to feel real.’ – curatorial text by Ioana Iuna Șerban

Adrian Piorescu (b. 1997, Craiova) graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest under the guidance of Professor Aurel Vlad and holds a bachelor's and master's degree in sculpture. In his artistic practice, he explores the relationship between humanity, technology, and nature. He won the Grand Prize at the National Edition – 2024 of the "Crama Oprișor Awards for Contemporary Drawing – National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest" and in 2025 the inaugural Acquisition Award – National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), awarded at the RAD 2025 Contemporary Art Fair.

Ioana Iuna Șerban (b. 1990, Brăila) is a poet, curator at MARe/Museum of Recent Art, and holds a PhD in philology/visual studies, with a thesis defended at CESI/Center of Excellence in Image Studies, in which she analyzes the relationship between text and image in contemporary art. The exhibitions she curates investigate the possibility of worlds and the inherent projections we make about them. She has published three volumes of poetry, the most recent being "Girl Meets Institution" (2024, Vellant).