Artists who participated in "Soft Discipline" exhibition share their experiences
Piksel is an education, support and community-building programme designed to introduce young artists and aspiring artists from all fields of plastic arts to the genres, production methods, technologies and ways of thinking behind digital skills, and ultimately to help them understand and incorporate digital technology into their workflow. Piksel | O’art New Media Residency Programme graduates’ “Soft Discipline” group exhibition opens a space for new artists. We talked to the artists of the show: Beyza Dilem Topdal, Ceren Su Çelik, Eda Şarman, Gözde Betülay Yorulmaz, Haluk Miraç Aykın, İmelda Kuyumcu, Naz Nar, Xebat Bayram and Yekateryna Grygorenko.
Esin Hamamcı: How did your story begin with the “Soft Discipline” exhibition?
Beyza Dilem Topdal: While discussing all the works in the exhibition, we started to talk about the cycle of technology changing and transforming us and us changing and converting technology. To understand these constantly intertwining balances, it was necessary to open the closed boxes of technology and look at living beings beyond human beings. The idea of bringing these unseen, unseen or unfocused creatures back to the centre was also moving technology beyond the perception of being a sterile machine. In this collective curatorial process led by Ekmel Ertan, we started to open up all these layers. At the centre of my work are creatures that have not been looked at for a long time. I wanted to process one by one the sea creatures of Istanbul, of which we can barely count ten today and whose number reaches 300.
Ceren Su Çelik: The conceptual framework of Soft Discipline and the development of the ideas of the works were realised collectively under the direction of Ekmel Ertan. It was a process in which we progressed by sharing our thoughts and discussing the development process of the works we worked on individually with common feedback. In this sense, I had the chance to develop the work I was working on by interpreting it from many different perspectives.
Eda Şarman: The exhibition was shaped by the participation of Ekmel Ertan as our curator within the Piksel. | O’art New Media Residency Programme started with masterclasses, workshops, mentoring and talks. As the process progressed, our conversations in weekly meetings focused on the relationships we established with technology through new media. The works we exhibited by sharing our areas of interest also developed in this process.
Gözde Betülay Yorulmaz: The exhibition took shape as an output of the Piksel. | O’art New Media Residency Programme to which I applied. Since the beginning of the process, we have had a collective research and production process with our curator, Ekmel Ertan and other participating artists. In this process, while shedding light on the emerging nature of the relationship between man and machine and the transformative interactions of coexistence, I focused on how complex systems, system behaviours and evolutionary dynamics can emerge from these interactions.
Haluk Miraç Aykın: I was accepted to the Piksel guest artist programme. At the end of the programme, we started to design Soft Discipline as a team with Ekmel Ertan.
Imelda Kuyumcu: This exhibition took shape as an output of the Piksel. | O’art New Media Residency Programme. My story started with my acceptance to this programme.
Naz Nar: Piksel started with my participation in the O’art New Media Residency Programme. It was a very new experience for me as someone who studied architecture. The exhibition itself is my first, so I believe it was a perfect starting point. During the process, I had the opportunity to collaborate with many friends from different disciplines. We set out to create a collective exhibition and began “Soft Discipline” as our end product.
Xebat Bayram: Before the exhibition, I can say that this process started with the start of the residency programme of Piksel. | O’art. While the program was going on, I was thinking about issues such as identity, authority, borders and prohibitions, and the framework in which I would work and produce works on these issues became more apparent over time. Afterwards, this process resulted from the exhibition “Soft Discipline”.
Yekateryna Grygorenko: First of all, I can say that we started the year 2023 with the Pixel. | O’art programme by working at a very intense pace. While the programme turned into a complete 3-month process with different master classes, mentorships and talks every week, exhibition, museum and collector tours, the people we met, and the issues we listened to and discussed were the beginning of the soft discipline exhibition. Together with Ekmel Ertan, one of our last mentors, we started moving forward in the focus of the work and the show by asking how we could transform this pixel process. Our meetings, which lasted almost 6 hours and sometimes 8 hours every week from the beginning to nearly the end of the summer, collectively structured soft discipline. We had a miro board, and we were constantly brainstorming there. While Ekmel was suggesting books to one of us, one of us was presenting artists to the other, and it was a delightful and nourishing private working space.
Esin Hamamcı: Which work of yours is featured here?
Beyza Dilem Topdal: This exhibition includes a two-channel video installation titled Hatchery. In the videos, we watch the movement of various creatures. Based on Karekin Deveciyan’s 1915 book Fish and Fisheries in Turkey, these creatures have reproduced with artificial intelligence tools and non-organic polluting technologies such as plastic and metal. Each of their stories was accompanied by interview data collected from fieldwork and literature reviews. The machine sounds heard in the background is the manipulation of oxygen machines that offer a short-term ‘solution’ to marine pollution and actual fish states. Life amid all this impossibility juxtaposes fact and fiction, science and storytelling. The lines on the floor, whose layers I have imagined as living spaces and given specific names, point to the deep topography of the Bosphorus.
Ceren Su Çelik: In the exhibition, I have a work called “Synthetic Spider”, which I consider an interactive sculpture with AI and special equipment. The work, which synthesises the image of the viewer in the exhibition space with the image of the events in Turkey’s past with artificial intelligence and reflects it on the screen on the sculpture, juxtaposes Bergson’s concepts of time and memory with artificial intelligence.
Ceren Su Çelik: I have a work called “Synthetic Spider” in the exhibition, which I consider an interactive sculpture with AI and special equipment. The result, which synthesises the viewer’s image in the exhibition space with the idea of the events in Turkey’s past with artificial intelligence and reflects it on the screen of the sculpture, juxtaposes Bergson’s concepts of time and memory with artificial intelligence.
Eda Şarman: In the workshops I attended as part of Piksel, I met many new platforms and was interested in these programmes’ potential to virtualise reality. The transition between the physical world that we perceive as reality and the virtual world that we create inspired by it is enabled by digital technologies to fluctuate within the reality-virtuality continuum. Immersion, on which the fulfilment of virtual experience is based, also means immersion in water. The process of deconstruction from the seas where we can experience immersion in the blue ceramic tiled pools evolves into being in virtual water with the disappearance of physical boundaries in digital environments. So, how does this water feel? Focusing on this transition, I produced the work “Withdrawal” for the exhibition. The exhibition space has a five-litre pool, which we can look into from the top, which is the amount of blood circulating in our body. When you put on the VR headset on the blue ceramic seat in front of it, the experience begins as you are immersed in the water in a human-sized replica of this pool.
Gözde Betülay Yorulmaz: This exhibition presents my interactive installation, “Meta(more) holistic”, a simulation of artificial life (ALife) based on a series of algorithms that are computational representations of the reproduction and behaviour of organisms. It treats the city as an organism and establishes a living city representation with artificial life algorithms that connect to urban data and audience interaction, inviting the audience to an ecosystem oscillating between chaos and order. Organisms form an artificial ecosystem with evolutionary micro and macro life theories. Symbiotic relationships between synthetic organisms support the evolution of the community while at the same time revealing consciousness. This ecosystem adheres to systematic rules and becomes a cybernetic mechanism as the viewers behave as interactive parasites with data input.
The simulation developed a reaction-diffusion algorithm (Gray-Scott) with rules such as self-regulation, adaptation and synchronicity to guide artificial life forms to adaptive behaviours, while the external influences represented by urban data (traffic density and real-time weather data) and the interference created by the interaction of the viewer constantly disrupt the usual functioning and force re-adaptation. I would describe the algorithm as an automaton based on evolution; it operates according to the rules of life and death, gradually evolving through a transformation process in which the organism undergoes evolutionary changes and adaptations to adapt to environmental conditions. The three screens in the installation area represent artificial life within their dynamics; the algorithm — each screen has different life-death rules and architectural drawings -the urban data added to the algorithm, and the transformation of the data received from Arduino form a dynamic synthetic system.
At the same time, the work deals with the theme of “artificial symbiosis” by combining complex and manufactured systems and focuses on the discovery of symbiotic relationships. Human-machine cooperation and symbiotic relationships are experienced interactively with artificial life simulation through complex procedures.
Haluk Miraç Aykın: I have a 7-minute video installation work titled My Life Mate Screen in the exhibition. It is a work I designed for Soft Discipline due to our meetings and dialogues during the program.
Imelda Kuyumcu: I am here with an ‘Untitled’ work. My production consists of 4 three-dimensional prints and an animation.
Naz Nar: I am a part of the exhibition with my work titled “Cables of The Bazaar”. While the work reveals the dual relationship between the buildings/bodies that have been in the city for centuries and the newly added technology systems in the city, it narrates such a historical urban element by centring an object such as a cable, and ultimately a set of serial representations is revealed.
On the one hand, when the Grand Bazaar is about to transition between two infrastructure systems, it records the moments when these two systems are present in the bazaar at the same time. I call this a series of “intermediate recordings” before the change.
Xebat Bayram: The exhibition includes two different works of mine, “Untitled 1” and “Untitled 2”.
Untitled 1 is a work in which I deal with political systems and class differences by changing the rules of the chess pieces and can be played with these new rules. “If one day the chess pieces decide to play the game differently, won’t all our assumptions be turned upside down?”
Untitled 2 is a video game installation in which I deal with the issue of migration. We move the character in the game from point x to point y with our steps, enabling him to overcome obstacles, representing a migrating character. “Can our steps be the steps of a migrant?”
Yekateryna Grygorenko: I participate in the soft discipline with my work Artificial_desire. Artificial_desire presents a narrative about the mechanisation of desire and the body evolving through technology. Artificial intelligence is designed through norms that align with the language and thought mechanism of the power of capitalism. For power, the mechanism of desire is a dangerous thing. For management, the individual must be controlled and have controlled desires. Thus, a human being who has no desires or whose capacity to desire has been taken away is as much a machine as artificial intelligence. When you come to my area of the gallery, you encounter an incubator, four organs and a screen. The organs in the incubator are indeed there as depictions of the organs that reveal the desired mechanism in the human body. We encounter the two-dimensional embodiment of artificial intelligence on the screen on the right side. With the organs in the incubator, the viewer experiences the awareness of desire by changing the monologue of artificial intelligence and opposing the mechanised logic of passion that the government tries to do.
Esin Hamamcı The exhibition focuses on ‘disciplining the object’. Which technique did you use in this respect?
Beyza Dilem Topdal: While thinking about the working title, I remembered the information I learnt from fishermen and dear Defne Koryürek that the Marmara Sea is described as an incubator. It is like an incubator that constantly rebirths itself, produces and regenerates life. However, it is now a crippled incubator. It is a creative crippled living community intertwined with many human interventions and tries to find new migration routes and breeding areas. Here, I see a parallel with the technology I use; the artificial intelligence you ask to make a new bluefish painting will endlessly reproduce the same bluefish with different lights and colours. However, when you isolate it from the body of the bluefish and distort it with inorganic factors that do not belong to its existence, its texture, movement and sound may also change.
Ceren Su Çelik: The work makes a fictional proposal for memory processes with artificial intelligence. Although there is communication between the work and the exhibition text, I did not focus directly on the concept of “disciplining the object”. However, such a reading can be made through artificial intelligence technology, which is increasingly involved in our daily lives.
Eda Şarman: I approached the theme of disciplining the object from an architectural perspective. Moving back and forth between physical and virtual reality adds new layers to our body experiences and perception of space. Immersion, which describes this state of being, is one of the principles on which virtual reality is based. New worlds that we enter by wearing VR glasses. While producing the work “Withdrawal”, I worked with virtual reality and Unreal Engine to combine the pool in the exhibition space with the world we enter in the virtual environment.
Gözde Betülay Yorulmaz: It deals with the representation of an interactive living city that reflects the characteristics of biological complex systems such as self-organisation, non-linear dynamics, phase transitions, collapse and explosion evolution dynamics through symbiotic relationships and the transformation of relationships into a parasite with technology, and aims to be involved in dialogues that transform the symbiosis of human-machine coexistence.
This installation combines cybernetic and complex systems and consists of two phases. While the first phase, “Order”, reveals a system based on rules and the urban model brought about by the perfect human-machine coexistence, the second phase, “Chaos”, begins to interfere with the ideal human-machine coexistence that has existed since the beginning of the system. With the interaction of the data received from Arduino, phase 2 is passed. With the inclusion of the cyborg viewers in the system, the city and relations exhibit chaotic behaviours with the parasitic transformation. The boundary between chaos and order loses its clarity and becomes messy as the functioning of life itself is chaotic.
Haluk Miraç Aykın: I used videos produced or disciplined with various techniques and placed or projected these videos about the objects I organised in the space.
Imelda Kuyumcu: My production technique is based on a three-dimensional self-portrait from my MRI recording. Three-dimensional modelling is commonly built on the surface information of objects. Using the MRI record, I can construct my face without focusing on the surface, including the internal cavities. At the same time, by depicting the future of my portrait, I try to liberate the gaze from the ‘moment’ in which the self-portrait and still life tradition imprison the eye.
Naz Nar: The representation itself and the mediums used in creating the model revealed the research of this work. When an object was taken and produced many times with different words, a series of situations to be told about the Grand Bazaar were discovered through “only the cable”. I think both the object and the research were disciplined precisely through mediums.
Xebat Bayram: I used video games as a technique in two works in the exhibition. Chess, which has a new order and rules, has become a game that can be played by touching the monitor directly.
In the other work, I dealt with the issue of migration. In this work, I used a technical design in which the video game character, which we think is far away from us and independent of us, walks with sensors under our feet.
Yekateryna Grygorenko: I followed a different path with this programme than the techniques I have used in my works. Indeed, I can say that I have created a specific discipline by bringing together different materials. While producing Artificial_arzu, I can say that I made a hybrid structure such as video, AI, particular hardware/software, fabric, fibre, paint and plexi, which are very distant from each other but, when combined, create a strong language.
ESİN HAMACIOĞLU
NFTIFY
This interview was first published in nftify.com.tr in Turkish. The interview was later translated from original to English, and minor changes were made during the translation.
Original Article: https://nftify.com.tr/piksel-oart-yeni-medyanin-yumusak-disiplin-sergisinin-sanatcilari-anlatiyor/
