Selçuk ARTUT’s A/B Exhibition
Selcuk Artut’s exhibition “A/B”
at American Hospital Art Gallery
Vehbi Koc Foundation American Hospital Art Gallery is hosting Selcuk Artut’s information age touched exhibition “A/B”. Exhibition is mainly focusing on issues of understanding and perception and it will be held open between 10th of February till 20th of March 2010. Visitors are able to visit the gallery everyday starting from 10:00 to 19:00 except Sundays.
Exhibition Information
Said something? So, what was that? Who is talking to whom? Everything that is something says something to others. To get what is meant, it is even useless to see the speaker. Engraved surfaces are no longer permanent, all information are shallow. Recording narrowed, capacity enhanced. As we talked, we observed that differences became evident and awareness increased. Interrogators, unconvinced of their messages’ transmission, are everywhere. I call for the patterns classified under the buttons that I believe to be commanding. You may say that mostly there is nothing left to write or make. No, though the combinations are used up, equation is not yet verified.
“A/B” is not a soundless exhibition. In fact, it has various problems with expression. Presenting seven various art projects impressed by the information age art, it is trying to talk.
Languageless will be visiting Geneva, Switzerland
Languageless piece will be exhibited at L’art a L’Hopital Exhibition space in Geneva, Switzerland on March 15, 2010.
Here is the link for further info about the exhibition space and you may download the event’s program here.
Swap Text for Image – Collective Creation
This film was screened at Temps d’Images Festival, Garajistanbul, Istanbul TR (9th of June, 2009)
and European Graduate School, Saas-Fee Switzerland (9th of June, 2009)
This project was based on a research idea questioning inter-relations between communication tools namely images and texts. all internet users were offered to participate and throughout the activity, there had been 520 participatory users, uploading various visual materials to the website. We have received more than 2000 pictures within 27 days, and 800 were elected to create the intended film.
The backend story is that I was offered to create a visual/image based event for the Temp’d Images festival of garajistanbul, and I had proposed “Swap Text for Image” project. In order to present this project to the public, garajistanbul helped me to find writer Murat Uyurkulak to develop a 27 sentence long, short story. Everyday one single sentence of the story was announced to the public sequentially, and the registered users were asked to upload visuals related with that sentence.
After we have received images online, some were selected to be included in the film, and we have worked with sequencing all these images together to create the fim structure. Then for the festival, writer Murat Uyurkulak has read the text aloud in front of the public, as a performance act inline with the multimedia projection of the film. There are several edited versions of the film, here below you can access some.
Click here to see the film
Some photos from the garajistanbul screening;
Here is the promo text for the activity.
Swap Text for ImageWe want to make a film, and we want for everyone who wants to act in this film to do so. This artistic production of ours should have not one owner, but a large number of shareholders, with each scene belonging to someone else. Like Martin Heidegger states in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a work of art produced today cannot be considered the product solely of the artist who has produced it. Artistic production should not be perceived of as an interpretation or reflection of reality, but as reflections of a community’s shared understanding. In this respect, this film is therefore our film—the film of a series of individual, disjointed thoughts. A film that comprises a whole, made up of a sequence, containing meaning. A common ground where your understanding and my understanding meet.
We’re going to give you a script—but you only get to see one sentence a day. We want you to imagine, stage, and photograph whatever that sentence means to you on that particular day and send it to us. Later, we will put the scenes together in a sequence and make a film out of them. Disjointed, it will lack any formal connecting thread as a visual narrative language, but who knows, maybe we’ll come up with a work of textual integrity, a series of instances bound by the ties of coincidence. And then we’ll sit and watch our film all together. But that’s not all: next, it’s up to us whether we just look at what has been done or see into it, probe its depths. So now let’s play a little swapping game. It goes like this: I give you a text, you give me an image.
newspaperbox : Online News Space: a visual model for representing the social space of a website
Exhibited at File 2009,
Sao Paulo, Brazil
substairs
Sonic Installation
Exhibited at Istanbul Biennial 2007, TR
September-November 2007
To what extent can you line up with your ideas following your talks? Instead of being the real masters of your ideas, you are speaking of a never lasting realization of a shallow existence. While not pretending to differentiate any steps you walk, can you rationalize the stairs you step out? Can you face your weaknesses on every each stairs? Or do you feel yourselves fluctuating in a motion that is undoable?
Technical Implementation:
Sound source was captured by two wireless microphones that are attached to the exhibition hall ceiling. These microphones enables to produce a cacophony of sound materials emitted from various bienniale art exhibition objects. Transmitted into a computer, these signals were lowered down in pitch on a MaxMSP patch, and then supplied to 46 different subwoofer speakers that are mounted below entrance stairs. These entrance stairs are vibrated via subfrequency content of the cacophony.
Languageless – Interactive Art Installation
This is a piece I have developed during my European Graduate School PhD Session in May 09. After having long conversations about how language shapes almost everything in life through our communication habits and tactics, I have came up with the idea of “Languageless”. I have given a well-known story Frog Prince to the participants, but the text was written in completely Turkish, and didn’t mean anything to the participants, since none were a Turkish speaker. I have asked them to read the text aloud to me, and recorded their voices. Later, after finishing reading the text, I have asked the participants as if they had understood the text and interpretate what the story says in English. Many created their own stories very quickly, it was a great pleasuse to observe people’s creativity in this experimental study. For the presentation purposes, I have created a localization interactive art piece, there if one stands at an interval in front of the camera, the presented character varies through a smooth transition, so that any one who is interacting with the piece can walk in front of the projection to manipulate the presented material. The Turkish reading was played from the left speaker, and the English interpretation was played from the right speaker, and the real text was printed on screen synchronized. This piece has not been presented in any gallery, but only in the Auditorium. Expected to be presented soon.
Turkish text
You Cant Tell the Difference
You Cant Tell the Difference
Video Installation
Exhibited at 2:13 Experimental Video Festival Athens, GR
February 2006
Shaped by variety of reasons, human intelligence had formed the way we live within our societies. No matter when the first human intelligence had been born in the history, You can’t tell the difference questions the emergence of the existing differences between humankinds which have been shaped by societies. During the history, these differences including language, race, traditions, nationality etc could only be enclosed within geographical borders by country definitions for centuries.
Since the 1990s, there had been a huge technological development of unprecedented speed for the digital media. It had become much easier to find and share tons of information on the internet. World Wide Web enabled us to live within a global connection.
Consequently, current vast information traffic meandering all around us has already created virtual spaces without physical addresses.
As Armand Mattlelart has observed:
Information were free, everyone would have access to it. If information gave power and were within the grasp of everyone, then power would be in the hands of everyone. If the planetarization of information engendered interdependence, then there would no longer be any risk that power could be used by some to dominate others. Reality reveals what the myth veils. It is through the conflicts of social actors that the use values of information emerge.
Presently, people possess usernames and a password to access the every detailed information in the World Wide Web. With this respect, an individual has lost the social identity, instead established a new identity with/without creating differences between others. Moreover, metropolitan cities endorsed the situation by opening the physical barriers for whom who could survive. Metropolitan cities are filled with people from different nationalities and origins. These people try to adapt their traditions to their environment; some even have no idea of their origins. As a result the differences between humankinds are to be diminishing via loosing their identities. You can’t tell the difference is a series of visual/sound art work trying to pinpoint this issue that is discussed briefly as above by stressing the vanishing discrimination between individuals within the societies.
my childish left handwriting
Video 2.40 min
Exhibited at Children’s Welfare,Aldwych London Train Station, UK
28-29 January 2004
My Childish Left Hand was exhibited in London for a charity event which brought together thirty artists at the unused Aldwych Underground Station to raise fund for a children’s charity supported by Transport for London.(28th and 29th of January 2004)
My Childish Left Hand is basically intended to explore a colinear relationship between sound and image. When drawn with the non-regular hand of use, the lack of capability to use it precisely accumulates sketches with childish patterns. Built with vector elements, the childish patterns are mapped into pixel matrices which enables to define a numerical bilanguage between sketches and sound elements such as duration, timbre, pitch and amplitude. Evolving from sound elements, a more structured form of a musical composition is derived, and an inverse functionality accomplishes random sound patterns.
