Exhibition: Simple Present
11.9 – 11.10.2013 :: mAsA
Simple Present / Geniş Zaman
Ömer Hayyam cad. No: 29 Mata Apt. Kat: 3 Beyoğlu
http://masaprojesi.blogspot.com
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Exhibition: Turkish Art New and Superb
23.05 – 28.07.2012 :: TANAS, Berlin
Showing works by thirteen contemporary artists, most of whom were born in Turkey in the 1970s and now live in Istanbul, René Block and his co-curator Ece Pazarbaşı from Istanbul have made a selection of artists who direct their critical gaze at all aspects of daily life: at society, politics, history, and culture and their inherent antagonisms and interconnections.
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Exhibition: Consequences are no coincidence
02.02 – 24.03.2012 :: PILOT Gallery
PILOT Gallery hosts the group exhibition “Consequences are no coincidence”, featuring 10 artists. Works by Ali Miharbi, Hamra Abbas, Fikret Atay, Burak Delier, Bengü Karaduman, Şener Özmen, İrem Tok, Tufan Baltalar, Cengiz Tekin and Gökçe Erhan deal with social media, the world’s new order and economies.
Exhibition: Quasi Cinema
Dumbo Arts Center’s video_dumbo is an annual festival for international video art curated by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy. This year video_dumbo will be held on September 23-25th as part of the 2011 Dumbo Arts Festival.
I will be participating among eight installations under the exhibition title Quasi Cinema, featuring works that re-appropriate film technology as well as cinematic metaphors. Exhibition artists: Leslie Thornton, Aram Bartholl, Ernesto Klar, Ali Miharbi, Naho Taruishi, Andy Graydon, Cristobal Mendoza + Annica Cuppetelli and Ken Jacobs.
Solo Exhibition: Séance
Sept 9 – Oct 8, 2011 :: Interstate Projects
Solo exhibition at Interstate Projects; Séance is also the name of my recent mechanical sound installation that reflects basic human actions such as working, sleeping, eating and walking through live Twitter feeds.
Exhibition: FILE São Paulo 2011
July 19 to August 21, 2011 :: FIESP Cultural Center – Ruth Cardoso, Avenida Paulista 1313, São Paulo, Brazil.
FILE São Paulo 2011 takes place from July 19 to August 21, 2011 at the FIESP Cultural Center – Ruth Cardoso. In the program, immersive and interactive installations, tablets, animations, games, machinimas, besides works of web art, video, documentaries, music clips and sound experiments.
I will be participating with an updated version of Movie Mirrors.
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Work in progress: Séance
With some delay, here’s a quick documentation of the first working prototype for a mechanical sound installation that I have been working on. It reflects the use of basic human actions such as work, sleep, eat, walk, etc. that people talk about on Twitter, filtered to be limited to a specific time zone. In this version 10 words are linked to a solenoid each of which is tied to the wall (to be extended to ceiling, floor or anything suitable in the space that can create a noise) and hit it every time it is mentioned. Frequency of a given word changes based on the time of the day and the day of the week since the average human behavior in the city is expected to have certain patterns, such as “work” being mentioned less in a Saturday afternoon compared to a Monday morning; or “sleep” being mentioned more certain times of the day.
Top-down vs. Bottom-up
In Common Ground in a Liquid City, anarchist architect Matt Hern argued that the most successful cities have been the ones that managed to balance planned and organic development. Manuel De Landa wrote in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History that the rise of Europe highly relied on a mixture of Central Place hierarchies such as Paris, Prague, Milan and networked Gateway cities like Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London. Philip Galanter started his paper What is Complexism? Generative Art and the Cultures of Science and the Humanities by first naming usual polarities such as absolute-relative, progress-circulation, fixed-random, hierarchy-collapse, authority-contention, author-text in order to contrast modern and postmodern culture and then proposed a synthesis of the two: “Complexism” that is associated with terms such as distributed, emergent, chaotic and connectionist.
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Infra-Slim Energy
“Notes on the Infra-Slim” by Marcel Duchamp (1945):
A transformer designed to utilize slight, wasted energies such as:
the excess of pressure on an electric switch
the exhalation of tobacco smoke
the growth of a head of hair, of other body hair and of the nails
the fall of urine and excrement
movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, anger
laughter
dropping of tears
demonstrative gestures of hands, feet, nervous tics
forbidding glances
falling over with surprise
stretching, yawning, sneezing
ordinary spitting and of blood
vomiting
ejaculation
unruly hair, cowlicks
the sound of nose-blowing, snoring
fainting
whistling, singing
sighs, etc. […]
Although not nearly as poetic, here’s an image from Human Generated Power for Mobile Electronics by Thad Starner & Joseph A. Paradiso:
Possible power recovery from body-centered sources. (Total power in parentheses)
A poetic writing from mid-20th century on the everyday and the infra-slim evoking current research on energy harvesting seems to be another case where a once-marginal artistic idea turns (not entirely, but still) into a necessity, similar to Oulipo and Twitter.