At first everything was velvety and smooth. And that's how we want it to be. This selection presents the abrasive tool with which we smooth. Starting from images found by contingency with sudden and violent ruptures from the surrounding reality, we move on to unbalanced and exaggerated repetitions, to glitch distortions that are born from the odious plausible presentations of the news that bring such serious offenses that even the soulless machine represses them. Towards the end, after polishing, when things tend to become more uniform, we can find a little peace, where the man is missing from the landscape, he becomes replaced by the machine. The machine finds its place. The TV, the plasma, the monitor or projector lose their meaning and use. The fragmentary invasion of taken and distorted images proposed by this selection is in line with the dystopia of manipulation and lies that Cătălin-Ionuț Beldean describes in a short text as follows: "Today, the day when the actions of vulgar, ignorant people, amateurs with official diplomas signed by other amateurs stepped on my territory and entered through the garden to the antechamber of my room. They gathered there and started gossiping. To give their opinion by pretending to make science. They started interviewing me as if I were an authority. I don't mind the uninvited coming. I don't mind them coming empty handed. I'm trying to get over the annoying noise. To understand. They keep asking me if it's okay to do what they do. If I like it. If it's proper. And what else could they say or create. Something worthwhile. And I show them. And I tell them. And I keep returning the essence folded seven times. They turn it on one side and the other. Maybe, maybe I'll agree with them. I expose the truth to them, which, to be serious, is not so harsh. Blinded by nothingness, and deprived of power and will, they did not stray from the path, nor did they continue to dig. But they crowded in and made jams. Wolves dressed as sheep and sheep dressed as wolves. They entered people's homes. In foreign homes. Of the neighbors. They did not advance or downgrade. They just got inflamed. People became so inflamed that they broke the laws of Solon, the one who delimited the public space from the private one. They created publicly connected miniature units and placed them in the individual cosmos. In the intimate space. With microphones and cameras attached to them, they claim to help us. They claim there are solutions. They claim we have problems. And if they don't create problems out of nothing, then we are responsible for choosing these solutions. We ended up forcing each other. At first it wasn't like that. At first it wasn't that much. It didn't cross the upper limit. Threshold of good and pulchrum. Now that it's overbidding, they've moved. And here's the beauty. And here's the monster. " _ CĀTĀLIN BELDEAN, 2022