Today we’d like to introduce you to Aurora Mititelu
Hi Aurora, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am Aurora Mititelu (b. 1995), a Romanian artist based in Los Angeles. I work with computer-generated images (CGI), 3D simulations, AI, and physical installations to investigate how digital media constructs contemporary reality and structures society. I am a recent graduate of UCLA’s Design | Media Arts MFA program and a Fulbright grantee, with a BA from the National University of Arts Bucharest. Before relocating to Los Angeles, I lived and worked as a 3D artist and art director in Berlin, Germany.
I grew up in a working-class family in Buzau, a post-industrial town in Romania, during the late 90s and early 2000s. I lived through the rise of computers and the internet, though I still remember life without them. This was a time when Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, embraced global capitalism, marked by an influx of American ideology and pop culture. I grew up virtually driving around Santa Monica beach in GTA, watching Hannah Montana in her pink American bedroom, and listening to American pop songs preach about Los Angeles, while I experienced poverty, spent time with friends between Soviet block buildings, and felt deeply disillusioned with local culture and its traditional values.
I attended art school from an early age where, despite my keen interest in digital media, I received education in Russian academic realism, Communist modernism and Byzantine-style Orthodox church icon painting. My rejection of these styles and affinity for digital media led me to explore what I then called “computer drawing” in whatever form was available in Romania, which was no easy feat. This eventually led me to pursue a BA in Graphic Design from the National University of Arts Bucharest, while working at a computer animation and VFX studio on the side.
Romania was nonetheless far removed from the global conversation about what I later understood to be called “media art”. This prompted me to move to Berlin, Germany, where I spent six years immersed in the new media art scene, working as an art director and 3D artist, navigating the fine line between artistic expression and commercial work. In Berlin, I began to understand the social and political contexts behind how computer images are made, recognizing the often hidden realities of gender and class inequality. I understood the vulnerable position I was in as both a woman and someone from a lower social class, coming from a country on the global margins. The questions of who shapes reality, for whom, and whose interests are served through the use of aesthetics and technology have become really important to me.
Having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue an MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA, I was able to formalize a practice that not only engages with digital media as material but also articulates the hybridized vision of the world I have come to embody. The move to Los Angeles was not coincidental; I chose it because it is the epicenter of the Western world’s “reality-manufacturing” machine though its global media industry. I wanted to understand and perhaps even embody the prophecy of the progressively digital, proudly artificial, pink-bedroom American girl I could never afford to be. I craved to experience the divide between aspirational images and reality.
Today, I explore the nuanced configuration of these social realities in my artistic practice.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It was definitely not a smooth road, but all in all, I am really grateful to be where I am today!
Perhaps one of my first and continuing challenges is navigating an art career coming from a lower social class. As I mentioned previously, I grew up in a family where we struggled financially, so I had to start working early on and became financially independent quite fast. It has been particularly difficult to balance achieving some sort of security while also maintaining artistic autonomy and exploring the things I find worth pursuing. It has been especially hard to continuously choose the path most aligned with my values and vision, even when opportunities arose that could have provided more comfort.
What I’ve also come to realize is that an artistic practice benefits greatly from the ability to experiment, fail, take time to figure things out, try outrageous ideas, and deviate from the mainstream — all things I didn’t feel I could afford to do, as I constantly had to strategize how to remain financially stable. It’s hard not to compare yourself with others’ success, even when you know it took you much longer to reach a place from where others perhaps already started. Yet, I remain humble and thankful, acknowledging the privilege of even being able to be where I am.
Of course, financial struggles for artists are nothing new, but there are varying degrees of this struggle for different people, and this ties back to my interest in the sociopolitical implications of image-making — who gets to make art, and what does that mean for the ideas of the world we build and distribute? This is also true for digital media, which is still a male-dominated field, especially in its more tech-intensive areas. Thankfully, this has been actively addressed in recent years, and I feel it is rapidly changing. However, throughout my career, I have often been the only woman in male-only creative studios, and I understand how that affects the way projects come to life and the creative decision-making process.
Another challenge was not having access to education or a community of artists in my specific field growing up. I had a strong intuition that digital media would have a massive impact on visual art and creative expression early on, but I didn’t know how to articulate it or where to find resources to pursue this intuition. The internet helped, but it was only recently that I truly found a community of artists and thinkers with whom I aligned, and that made all the difference. On a broader level, media art has only recently gained a lot of public attention, especially with the waves of abrupt digitalization during the pandemic, the NFT boom, and the rapid developments in AI. Before that, it was somewhat niche, not particularly well-funded, and available only in a few locations worldwide. Being close to one of these global hubs, such as Berlin, New York, or Los Angeles, is crucial to developing an art practice, which yet again complicates the financial aspects of such a career.
I’m sure many like me have faced these challenges, and I want to acknowledge all those who have taken active steps to change these structures. From foundations and scholarships like Fulbright, which allowed me to pursue a degree in the US, to female-led creative studios like Dada Projects in London, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working, to communities like Digi-Gxl in Berlin, as well as countless collaborators, friends, creatives, and institutions which I head the pleasure of collaborating with that are shaping the future of this field.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I work with computer-generated images (CGI), 3D simulations, AI, and physical installations to investigate how digital media constructs contemporary reality and structures society. My most recent work explores computer-generated images as a new form of representation of reality and their relationship to social inequality and the global periphery. In my work and research, I examine the sociopolitical implications of aspirational image-making across different regimes, and how computational tools such as CGI and generative AI are replacing photography in constructing human subjectivity and identity. I engage with and critically analyze discourses on computation, AI, and the ‘Metaverse’ to understand their influence on global narratives.
I explore America’s — and particularly California’s — continued dominance over the global imaginary, whose implications might not always be fully considered by locals, especially at a time when social reality is in crisis due to abrupt advancements in computation, including photorealistic AI imagery. I examine how iconography functions across different regimes and belief systems, drawing parallels between the use of imagery in Orthodox Christianity and contemporary digital media, and analyzing the impact of constructed images on gender and economic inequality.
My most recent art projects — Abel & I (2024), Gen/esis(2024), and Meta-Mahala(2023) — are centered around Abel, a virtual Eastern European male version of myself, whom I use to poetically speculate on and interrogate gender roles in a traditional, heteronormative society that persist within today’s technology. The world-building project that comes to life through these works uniquely combines sculptural elements with digital media, employing hybrid methods I have developed over the years. These include textile prints, sculptures, physical installations, game engine simulations, 3D avatars, custom scripts, photography, and generative AI — both through image-making algorithms and real-time customized language models. Part sculptural, part interactive, this collection of works allows for engagement on multiple levels, both formally and conceptually.
Through this body of work, I am happy to be able to create an embodied version of the hybrid experience I have of the world — part material, part virtual, transnational, humorous and playful, yet serious — addressing difficult subjects I believe are profoundly important in today’s world. In this form, I finally find my practice to be most potent, and I have a million other ideas I want to explore in this direction as I establish my studio practice in Los Angeles and internationally.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://auroramititelu.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/auroramititelu
Image Credits
Paloma Dooley, Paloma Dooley, Aurora Mititelu, Amalia Mititelu
