Eyebeam

Meet Speculating on Plurality cohort member Umber Majeed, an artist working with speculative fiction, collage, and digital interfaces as tools to examine the Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. You can read the rest of her feature at (eyebeam.org/with-umber-majeed).
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For the Eyebeam residency, I am iterating on ‘Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan)’. It is an ongoing speculative ‘digital’ revitalization of my maternal uncle’s travel agency “Trans-Pakistan,” which he owned and operated in Islamabad from the 1990s until early 2000s. It closed prematurely due to the US’s War on Terror that devastated and destabilized the SWANA region and the Islamophobic travel policies that resulted.

One of the case studies I researched focused on corrupt housing communities developed by Bahria Town, Pakistan's largest private real estate developer.

In 2020, I developed ‘Fotocopy.net’ during a technology residency at Pioneer Works. I combined familial archives, the digital interface, tourism, and the context of gentrification in South Asia, encouraging viewers to loiter in this kitsch imaginary of corporate culture and critical analysis. I turned my uncle’s failed tourism company, that toured foreigners to various landscapes and treks in Pakistan, into a playful web environment inviting people to draw, listen to music, and peruse.

Another project that came out of this case study was a solo presentation of a large-scale interactive installation at PW, ‘Made in Trans-pakistan,’ 2022. Inspired by the architecture of Bahria Town's developments, aesthetics of shops in Karachi that sell bootleg media, and 13th century Urdu poetry I made two activations, playing with the idea of pirated aesthetics, language, sound, and the subversion of urban planning to hit at the diasporic double consciousness that underlies my practice.
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Stay tuned for part two!



Image caption, slide 1: Portrait of Eyebeam Speculating on Plurality Resident 2026, Umber Majeed. Image Credit: Adeliia Ishmuratova.

slide 4: Umber Majeed, Trans-Pakistan Zindabad (Long Live Trans-Pakistan), 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Images taken from the Networked Justice exhibition at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. Curated by Karina Iskandarsjah.

slide 6: Umber Majeed, ‘Fotocopy.net,’ 2020, Interactive web environment, video documentation courtesy of the artist, 6 minutes and 50 seconds, supported by Pioneer Works. Animation support from Granville Jones Jr, a creative technologist intern. Coding support and sound design by Tommy Martinez, who was the director of the residency at PW, and now teaches at NYU, and helps run the IDM studio at NYU Tandon at the BK Navy Yard, where Eyebeam’s residency takes place.

slides 8, 9, & 10: Umber Majeed, ‘Made in Trans-Pakistan,’ 2022. Interactive Multimedia Installation: Unity AR Software, Ceramics, Plaster, Wood, Video, and Vinyl. Courtesy of the artist.

More about ‘Made in Trans-Pakistan,’ 2022
Right side of the room: “inspired by the architecture of Bahria Town's real estate developments, I created a distorted ceramic replica of the monumental fountains at the centers of hyper-manicured roundabouts. My version of the Gorah ki chowk (horse roundabout) sits atop a hexagonal column, embedded with ceramic stars, all in pristine white, evoking the image of an ivory tower. I used AR to animate the fountain by scanning plastic bags I found around the development in Lahore to create the texture of water flowing from the QR-code-horse-lined fountain on screen.

This year, at NEW INC’s, DEMO 2026 Total Flow showcase, which is curated by Mindy Seu, and produced by Cody Moy, the horse sculpture component of this installation will be on display. I’ll be exhibiting work alongside 15 members of the NEW INC cohort.

🎤 Meet Speculating on Plurality cohort member Aurora Mititelu, an artist working with computer images, AI, and physical installations to examine how computational media constructs contemporary reality. In an artist feature, “From the Studio,” she shares how her early years formed her artistic practice and ongoing interrogation of reality-manufacturing media. You read the rest at eyebeam.org/with-aurora-mititelu
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Aurora: I grew up in a post-industrial town in Romania, during the early years of the personal computer and the rise of the internet. This was right after the fall of communism, when the country was in economic ruin and at the same time opened up to western ideals, bringing an influx of capitalist ideology and pop culture.

Coming from a working-class family, I experienced early on how these images shape desire and reality from a position of distance. I yearned deeply for a reality that wasn't my physical reality, which I encountered primarily through a computer. The gap between lived experience and the imaginaries produced at global centers of power continues to inform how I think about representation and the role technology plays in structuring society and lived experience.

I started to experiment with creating artworks in Microsoft Paint in the mid-2000’s, right as I got my first computer, around the age of seven. My imagination was heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the early internet age and the flood of American media. Consuming a lot of American imagery shaped how I thought I should be, feeling disconnected from the local culture and values of my hometown.

As a young adult, I moved to Berlin to immerse myself in the new media art scene and to pursue a career as a 3D artist and art director focused on immersive media… But eventually I became aware of the realities my own work was producing. I couldn't fully articulate it then, but looking back, I realize I was beginning to understand how I was contributing to a world that reinforced the same distance I had felt so acutely growing up.

This inquiry led me to enroll in UCLA's graduate program in Design | Media Arts, where I developed the understanding that images are not a truth-technology but rather socio-political agents. Images that claim reality are produced and circulated in spaces of community with the intentional purpose of shaping those realities.

It’s also where I started building the body of work, [“The Abel Series”], using a masculine agent as a central figure. Through Abel, I interrogate my identity and dive deeper into the investigation of whose interests are served through the use of aesthetics and technology.
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We will post more about Abel this Thursday.

Image Captions, Slide 3: Photograph of Aurora Mititelu drawing in Microsoft Paint in 2005. Courtesy of the artist; Slide 6: Close-up shot of Abel. Aurora Mititelu, ‘Meta-Mahala’ 2023. Sculptural installation: metal pipes, concrete, photography, Generative AI, CGI, textile print. Photography by Paloma Dooley, ; Slide 7: Aurora Mititelu, ‘Gen/esis’ 2024. Textile Print, Photography, 3D Rendering, and Generative AI. Courtesy of the Artist