MAFA13
bête comme un prompt
bête comme un prompt
Media Art Festival Arad 2026.
The festival's 13th edition places face to face two formulas separated by five centuries: la pittura è cosa mentale (Leonardo da Vinci) and bête comme un peintre (a mischievous 19th-century expression). Both, through the Duchampian lens, arrive at the radical conclusion – if art is a mental thing, execution can be absent. The readymade replaces making with choosing; L.H.O.O.Q. reduces the masterpiece to the support of an idea.
The prompt is the current form of this gesture. A sequence of words precedes and, increasingly, substitutes for the image; the choice of terms has become the technique itself. MAFA 13 invites 13 artists to formulate 13 prompts that constitute the starting point of the edition. Their materialization is not mandatory. The precedent exists: the goatee Picabia omitted in 1920 was completed by Duchamp only in 1942 (moustache par Picabia, barbiche par Marcel Duchamp) proof that a work can defer its execution without losing its status.
The proposed works will be called d'après, and the prompt will occupy the position left free: that of the one who merely chooses – re: 7.1e.C°π.
La pittura è cosa mentale, Leonardo da Vinci claimed. Five centuries later, after Marcel Duchamp's readymade and after the emergence of artificial intelligence, this statement stops being a metaphor and becomes the very condition of contemporary artistic practice.
MAFA13 starts from the idea that the work of art no longer coincides with the object. It can exist as text, algorithm, protocol, system, network, or process. The image is no longer the origin of the work, but one of its temporary forms. In a culture where code generates images, and images generate other systems of production, art becomes a field of relations and continuous transformations.
The festival brings together projects that explore this mutation through installation, moving image, artificial intelligence, interactive systems, sound, and experimental practices. The subject of the exhibition is not technology itself, but the changing status of the work and of the author in a world where creation is distributed between human, machine, and network.
Organized by kinema ikon, MAFA13 continues a line of research begun over fifty years ago: the exploration of the medium as artistic material. If the last century redefined the object, the present redefines the medium itself. From this perspective, the exhibition is not a collection of works but an ecosystem of processes, and the festival becomes a space in which art functions as a technology of thought.
Media Art Festival Arad is a project organized by kinema ikon, with a focus on visual, sound, performative experimentation, considered from a ludic, technological, hybrid, digital, analogue, purposefully redundant perspective. MAFA searches for modalities of play, using available spaces as a pretext. A shared interest in art and technology brings together a heterogenous group of, mostly young, multimedia artists. The festival seeks to motivate local producers and to facilitate the emergence of international collaborative networks within the cultural sector.
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L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp — a cheap reproduction (postcard) of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, over which Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee in 1919.
(a specific version: in 1920, Francis Picabia wanted to reproduce the work in his magazine 391, but Duchamp didn't send him the original in time, so Picabia drew the moustache himself on a Mona Lisa — forgetting the goatee. In April 1942, Duchamp came across a copy of that reproduction, added the missing goatee himself, and added the text: "Moustache par Picabia, barbiche par Marcel Duchamp, avril 1942." The inscription "7.1e.C°π" (c'est une copie) at the bottom suggests this is a later reproduction/edition of that version, not the original copy.)
"La pittura è cosa mentale" — Leonardo da Vinci, (Trattato della pittura).
(True painting is born in the mind: from science, geometry, perspective, anatomy, observation of nature. The hand only executes what the intellect has conceived. The painter is a thinker, not a house-painter.)
"Bête comme un peintre" — a 19th-century French expression, taken up by Duchamp and used as an accusation against the painting he called "retinal art" — art that addresses only visual pleasure. The painter content to please the retina remains exactly that: "bête comme un peintre."
Duchamp's proposed alternative: art must be idea, intellectual play, concept. The result is the readymade. Choice replaces execution.
"D'après" is the established term for a work made starting from another artist's piece.
(L.H.O.O.Q. is, technically speaking, a "d'après Léonard." Duchamp keeps the form of homage and reverses its meaning.)
MAFA 13 re: 7.1e.C°π — bête comme un prompt
A cheap postcard of a masterpiece, annotated by hand. La pittura è cosa mentale; bête comme un prompt. The work is decided in the mind: choose, do not execute. Moustache par Picabia, barbiche par Duchamp, 22 years late. If the image appears, label it d’après; if not, this caption is the work – sufficient unto itself, purposefully redundant. 13 artists, 13 prompts, the works eventually. MAFA 13 re: 7.1e.C°π (reset une copie) · 25.09.2026 · kinema ikon