i LIGHT, ILLUMINATION AND ELECTRICITY Editor DENİZ ÜNSAL

This book is published on the occasion of the first project of the artist-in-residence programme entitled “Light, Illumination and Electricity” held at between December 2006–June 2008.

This project was supported by the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures.

İSTANBUL BİLGİ UNIVERSITY PRESS 212 santralistanbul 3

ISBN 978-605-399-048-2

First Edition , October 2008

© Bilgi İletişim Grubu Yayıncılık Müzik Yapım ve Haber Ajansı Ltd. Şti. Correspondence Address İnönü Cad. No: 95 Kuştepe 34387 Şişli İstanbul Phone +90 212 311 5000–311 5259 Fax +90 212 297 6314 www.bilgiyay.com E-mail [email protected] Distribution [email protected]

Translation Rüya Aydemir Balca Ergener Damla Kellecioğlu Nermin Saatçioğlu Deniz Ünsal

Proofreading John Edward Dew Nazım Dikbaş Aylin Kalem

Graphic Design Efe Mert Kaya

Publication Coordination N. Kıvılcım Yavuz

Printing and Binding Ofset Yapımevi Şair Sok. No: 4 Kağıthane 34410 İstanbul Light Illumination and Electricity Phone +90 212 295 8601 Fax +90 212 295 6455 Editor: Deniz Ünsal İstanbul Bilgi University Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the İstanbul Bilgi University Library

Light, illumination and electricity / derleyen Deniz Ünsal. 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-605-399-048-2

1. Light art. 2. Art, Modern – 21st century--Exhibitions. 3. Electricity. I. Ünsal, Deniz. N6496.3.T9 2008 v

Foreword

The launching project of the international artist-in-residence programme of santralistanbul, “Light, Illumination and Electricity”, was planned as an event in process. The project attempted to follow the journey of the resident artists and their works, progressed in İstanbul, with various presentation formats and fields of research. The inputs of these formats (talks, presentations, performances and workshops) have shaped the outcome of this journey into a two-fold display: open-studio presentations at the artists’ studios and the exhibition at the of Energy. The exhibition documented the multiplicity and diversity of ideas and practice around the extensive substances of electricity and light. At the same time, it engendered and illuminated artists’ reflections and perceptions of the city, along with sequences and narrations of memory.

Başak Şenova Contents

Introduction Asu Aksoy

PART I: Light from an Art Historical Perspective Gregor Jansen, Peter Weibel

Machine Light - Projected Light in Contemporary Art Andreas Broeckmann

The Delicate Environment of the Blue Studio Paolo Rosa

PART II: Light, Illumination and Electricity: Residency and Exhibition

Curatorial Framework Recording in the Log, Başak Şenova Partners santralistanbul, İstanbul, NOMAD, İstanbul, Turkey SCCA, , ZINC/ECM, , Townhouse Gallery, , Artists Marko A. Kovačič Borut Savski Adham Hafez Cevdet Erek Collective Position: Rémy Rivoire, Renaud Vercey, Bruno Voillot Cynthia Zaven Ceren Oykut Carlo Crovato

PART III: Project Process Timeline Workshops Talks Presentations Upgrade! İstanbul Biographies Photographs 1

Introduction

“Light, Illumination and Electricity” was the launching project of artist-in-residence programme of santralistanbul, a comprehensive, participatory and interdisciplinary international platform for culture, education and arts, led by İstanbul Bilgi University.

santralistanbul is a conservation and regeneration project, involving the transformation of İstanbul’s first urban scale electricity power plant, Silahtarağa (operational from 1914 to 1983), into an international hub for arts, culture, and education. The Silahtarağa area is situated at the tip of the , one of İstanbul’s once major industrial quarters, now positioning itself as a cultural and recreational site. The power plant with its early twentieth century turbine halls, boiler rooms, control room, workers’ lodgings and its peripheral buildings like warehouses and repair yards, as well as with its extensive gardens and waterfront area, is a well-preserved industrial heritage site, unique in this respect in this region. santralistanbul has taken over this truly awe-inspiring space and has turned it into generative force field through arts, culture and learning.santralistanbul comprises a major centre for contemporary arts, exhibition and project spaces, a Museum of Energy, a comprehensive arts and humanities public library, residence facilities for visiting artists and researchers, performance spaces, as well as İstanbul Bilgi University’s various undergraduate departments, such as Visual Communication Design, Sociology, History, and Management of Performing Arts as well as the MA Programme in Architecture, santralistanbul is a unique undertaking where artistic activities and academic programmes intermingle, feeding one another with creativity.

“Light, Illumination and Electricity”, supported by the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures and organised by santralistanbul in collaboration with Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo), ZINC/ECM La Friche La Belle de Mai (Marseille), NOMAD (İstanbul) and SCCA-Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts, was one of the first projects for international collaborative work, bringing artists together from respective cities to spend three months in İstanbul, and exchanging residencies, where one artist from İstanbul spent his residency in Cairo, at the Townhouse Gallery. The project started in December 2006 and finished June 2008. The residency took place between September and December 2007.

The title of the programme was conceived both as a tribute to the memory of the space in Silahtarağa and as an opportunity for artists to generate new ideas and work on one of the most mysterious, confusing and contradictory phenomena that has been the subject of both science and arts since ancient Greeks. Light and electricity are associated with visibility and colour, our basic references to relate to the universe. Being material and immaterial, visible and invisible, natural and artificial at the same time, the concepts of electricity and light have been sources for inspiration, ideas and inventions for centuries. The beauty of light is that it brings into play simultaneously contrary experiences; illumination comes hand in hand with shadow and darkness, security and visibility comes hand in hand with danger, liberation comes hand in hand with dependence. What light does lead to invariably, though, is transformation: transformation through exaggeration, transformation through colour, transformation through connectivity, and through simulation. Besides these explorations on light and electricity, Silahtarağa site opens up another avenue of investigation. This is to do with electrification, the second industrial revolution and the radical transformation of everyday practices (the final and total encapsulation of life worlds by the logic of 2 3

modernity). Electrification has been an inspiration for generations of artists such as the Futurists and This book documents the talk series, introduces the artists who took part in the residency and also leading on to Light Art as a medium of expression and creativity. The theme of electrification has documents the exhibited works. also been explored from the point of view of the impact of technological innovations on daily lives and on social practices. This residency project by santralistanbul was supported by the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures and also by İstanbul Bilgi University. The partners of The residence programme aimed to open up these avenues for exploration. Cynthia Zaven, the project were all very committed to the project and very supportive. Through their contribution, Collective Position (Rémy Rivoire, Renaud Vercey, Bruno Voillot), Adham Hafez, Marko A. Kovačič, the whole project got its shape and was implemented successfully. We are very grateful to Claudine Borut Savski and Ceren Oykut were the artists in residence and Cevdet Erek, from Turkey, was the Dussollier and Emmanuel Vergès from ZINC/ECM, Başak Şenova from NOMAD, Barbara Borčić and resident artist in Cairo. Dušan Dovč from SCCA-Ljubljana, and William Wells and Clare Davies from Townhouse Gallery. We would also like to thank to Mohammed Yousri from Cairo, to Renata Papsch, Asuman Kırlangıç, There were talks by prominent art historians and curators on the theme of light, illumination and Emre Baykal, and Timur Özdemir for their extensive support at various stages of the project. electricity, and there were workshops by artists working with light as a medium or as a metaphor. As part of the talk series of the project, we invited Dr. Andreas Broeckmann from TESLA, Jan Peter A special thanks should go to the participating artists and also to the speakers and workshop E. R. Sonntag, light and sound artist from , Etienne Rey, light sound artist from France, leaders. The artists had to put up with some difficulties concerning theesidency r itself. This project Paolo Rosa from Studio Azzurro, Italy, and Gregor Jansen from ZKM, Germany. Carlo Crovato who being our first residency and also coinciding with the opening ofsantralistanbul meant that there works on light and sound was also invited to the residency to carry out workshops on the theme were some unforeseen problems. Our resident artists were very patient and they were also very of electricity and light, with children and also adults. The intellectually acclaimed artist, Sarkis, was understanding throughout the project. We would especially like to thank Başak Şenova who held all invited to work with the resident artists. His contribution in terms of the progress of the artworks the exhibition work together, did very good communication work between the artists, technical staff, was very important for the resident artists. The resident artists had also opportunities, before the the partners, and the public at large. She prepared a dedicated blog for this project and mobilised exhibition, to make presentations of their works to students and local artists. artist circles in and around Turkey about the project. Our final thanks should go to the members of the team, those who sweated behind the scenes, such as Deniz Ünsal, Aycan Tüylüoğlu, Ayşenur Since one of the aims of the residency programme was to involve young adults and children in the Akman, and Funda Açıkbaş. programme, a number of workshops on the themes of electricity, light, movement and motion were organised and they were run by Carlo Crovato, Ceren Oykut and two local artists, Aylin Kalem and This project turned out to be a great opportunity for sustained and focused communication across Erhan Muratoğlu. More than one hundred children took part in these workshops and it was a very the different language and cultural trajectories of the Mediterranean. In this process of transnational good experience both for artists and for children. and transcultural dialogue, like electrical transformations, some small shifts did occur. I think all the partners of the project and the team, with the artists, and the speakers, we all had to extend our The residence programme concluded with an exhibition of the works of the resident artists. This understanding in our joint aim to arrive at a successful and well achieved art project. publication is in part a catalogue documenting the resident artists’ works which were exhibited at the santralistanbul Museum of Energy and also at the residency buildings. During the exhibition the Asu Aksoy, January 2008 artists of the residency project presented their works, and Adham Hafez made a performance at the opening night.

The exhibition was curated by Başak Şenova, founder of NOMAD from İstanbul. The exhibition followed the journey of the resident artists and charted the development of their work that took shape in İstanbul. Artists used various formats to advance their work and they used talks, presentations, performances and workshops to create a reflexive process. The outcome of their journey was presented in the form of open-studio presentations at the artists’ studios and the exhibition at the Museum of Energy. The exhibition documented the multiplicity and diversity of ideas and practice around the extensive substances of electricity and light. At the same time, it dealt with artists’ reflections and perceptions of the city, intermingled with sequences and narrations of personal experience and memory.

7

Light Art from Artificial Light*

Dr. Gregor Jansen, Head of ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art Prof. Dr. Peter Weibel, Artist, Curator, Art Critic, Chairman of ZKM

The visible world and the world of sight is the world of light. Art as the field of the visible—as painting shows—has always been bound to the universe of light. Albert Einstein solved the mystery of light’s essence in 1905 through wave-particle duality. Light is both an electromagnetic wave and a current of particles. It is a form of energy that in a vacuum would travel at a speed of 299,792,458 metres per second. When light hits a prismatic structure, it divides into different wavelengths that are visible as colours. Its brightness, measured in terms of lux and lumen, describes the stream of light, or the amount of light that is emitted from a source of light.

Painting has concentrated primarily on the depiction of natural light and the wave phenomena that are known from optics and other areas. It is only since 1889 as Heinrich Hertz discovered in , “that electric waves reproduce exactly like optical waves” (Max Planck, 1894) and have the same speed, that is to say that there is a real and symbolic relationship between light and electricity, and that a universe of artificial light has had its influence on all of us.

Very few media have revolutionised and democratised our living space in the last hundred years as much as electrical light has. The most diverse areas of everyday life, of working life, consumption and media have been transformed through artificial light—and so has art. Since the beginning of the last century, artificial light has ever increasingly illuminated more streets, shop windows, billboard signs and houses in an unprecedented abundance and form. We reside in cities and gardens of light. Observed from airplanes and satellites, during the night time Earth glows like a cluster of stars. Light-works become artificial stars that change the visible world and people’s lives as a whole. Ever since the victory over the night and the sun, we have lived in paradises of artificial light.

For nearly a hundred years, artists have confronted this immaterial medium in the form of light bulbs, luminous substances and neon tubes, glowing LEDs and powerful floodlights. Art has increasingly turned from the illusionary representation of natural light to the real application of artificial light. The artwork is transforming itself from a representative screen depicting the wave phenomena of natural light—the prismatic decomposition into rainbow colours—into a real sender of electrons and photons of artificial light. Artists create autonomous, luminous objects and rooms, and even illuminate entire landscapes.

The electrification of the world inspired artists of different genres such as , , Kinetic Colour Music and the . Through art movements such as material painting, film, Kinetics, and Op Art, immaterial artificial light created an independent medium: the light art. Light art pioneers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Thomas Wilfred, and Zdenek Pesánek illustrate the great elementary attraction this medium has for artists. At the same time, this can be seen in the 1920s avant-garde films of Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger.

Through extensive room installations, new presentations and reconstructions of historically significant light objects and environments, the exhibition “Light Art from Artificial Light” demonstrated how, in the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the 1960s, the medium of light inspired a growing interest in numerous European artists groups and how these artists dealt with light, colour, and movement. Excellent work groups such as ZERO (Germany), GRAV (France), and Gruppo T and Gruppo N (Italy) document the beginning of immersive, interactive and virtual environments. Many artists thereby implement light not just statically, but also secure it with kinetic elements. In this context, it is important to view the fascinating works of the artists 8 9

Nicolas Schöffer, Jean Tinguely, and Gerhard von Graevenitz. The ZKM | Museum for Contemporary Art’s Art and Media in Karlsruhe in November 2005. The installation conveyed a perfect sense of different spectacular exhibition offered the first presentation of the classical highlights of Light Art, and in this the most fields. For it not only unites research, teaching and presentation in the State Academy of Design, recent contemporary art revealed surprising references to earlier works. The early positions of prominent where Kuball is teaching Media Art, but also serves as both an introduction and an overture to the artists such as Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, James Turrell, Mario Merz, François Morellet, exhibition “Light Art from Artificial Light”.Public Entrance focuses on the everyday act of arriving (and Ferdinand Kriwet, and Maurizio Nannucci elucidate the use and importance of artificial light in Concept Art, Op leaving). Injected elements—the red carpet, visitor-controlled spotlights—imitated the attributes Art, and Arte Povera. of public presentation of media presence and power. In this way, the entrance installation at this exhibition stands for the concepts of perception and enlightenment as the leitmotivs for the entire Current productions substantiate the shimmering spectrum of the multifarious confrontations with artificial cosmos of light art. light. The works of Sylvie Fleury, Jenny Holzer, and Cerith Wyn Evans, along with Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger, and Olafur Eliasson reveal the aestheticisation of conceptual issues dealing with the fields of Diverse though the lines may be that led in the twentieth century to the use of artificial light as the problems and perception of immaterial light. medium of art and then to the development of Light Art as an independent genre, they are coherent. While until the end of the nineteenth century, painting merely depicted light, indeed primarily sidereal Whether aesthetic, private or public, provocative, rife with allusions, or extremely minimal, between light (the sun and the stars), as of 1900 a paradigm shift took place away from the representation of the complex fields of light references between avant-garde and pop, the fascination of the medium light to the reality of light: art started working with real light. It was not natural light that was depicted is richly and colourfully illuminated through the works of—for example Tracey Emin, Mischa Kuball, illusionistically, but artificial light that was really used. Just as the clock had introduced a shift from Tatsuo Miyajima or Mike Kelley. The latest contributions and technologies, the postmodern play sidereal time (derived from the stars) to artificial chronometry, so electricity initiated a switch from on forms and content represented by Berta Fischer, Anselm Reyle, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Björn the natural light of the sun to the artificial light of the lamp. In the age of the Industrial Revolution, the Dahlem, as well as Jason Rhoades and Zaha Hadid, fascinate with profound light spheres, ironic picture became a screen. A picture represents light; a screen receives light and radiates it. Light was references, and filigree light plays. This is a true spectrum of impressively broad and beautiful area no longer captured but exuded. The artwork became the generator or emitter of real light. of Light Art. Colour is the medium of light in painting. Colours are the way to present light in painting. “Colour, the fruit of light, is the basis of the pictorial means of painting—and its language”, wrote Delaunay in his Zur Malerei der reinen Farbe. There he also quotes Apollinaire: “Pure painting perhaps means pure Public Entrance light.”

Bolts of lightning everywhere, red carpets as apparent gestures of reference, potentiated In the decades that followed, painting was to advance the representation of light by colour to such a intensifications of attention, ecstatic outpourings of desire without side-effects—the world has point that the light itself and not its presentation became the goal and the medium. In place of colour, become a paradise for the individual. “They can be heroes, just for one day”, as David Bowie stated or real light became the creative element in the image and, as a consequence, of space, too. Painting “Everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes”, as Andy Warhol proclaimed. Visionary scenarios like was driven by colour, by its development (in particular since the Impressionists) from a local to an these have come true in the ebb and flow of the increasingly popularised culture and art scene in all absolute colour, from colour confined to figuration to free, non-figurative colour, from polychrome areas of life. Tuned to their virtual character, the appropriation of true love in the mirror of the other to monochrome; by the end of the 20th century, real light had itself taken the place of the colour is usually limited and restricted. Only in the tender appeal of a hint of reality does desire develop as a erstwhile used on its own to depict light. While colour was the creative element of the image, it is kind of compensatory activity and key stimulus. At the same time, we recognise in the presence of now light that fulfils this function. Colour no longer represents light, as light itself takes the direct the media a loss of depth, permanence and meaning. Presence and awareness in the media is an place of colour. Painters focus increasingly on light. The equation of colour and light in painting aspect of the salvation of modernism and its derivative phrases that has been realised through light means that the moment when colour is liberated from thraldom to figurative representation, it can as the bearer of information, and many artists have devoted themselves to it since the outset of the be identified with light. Pure colour forms the precondition for pure light. The autonomy of colour era of electrification. also spells the first step toward the independence of light. Light becomes an independent means, a medium, and a material. One spokesperson of this current who has created outstanding, attention-grabbing seeking works, often with critical intent, is the German media artist Mischa Kuball. Efforts to woo the consumer This transformation of the representation of light into the reality of light was anticipated and have become more aggressive, more massively visible and palpable than we would only have supported by the shift from the representation of movement in Futurism and to the reality dreamt of in the age of progressive modernism and the decade of consumer-oriented hedonism of movement in Constructivism and . This turn away from strategies of representation to in the 1980s. Public Entrance is the title of a work by Kuball that was first presented in 2004 at Art reality programmes was of course accelerated and reinforced by the introduction of real utilitarian Cologne within a scope of a commercial event and then again in Lichthof 3 at the ZKM | Center for objects such as Duchamp’s ready-mades into the system of art. 10 11

were discovering and using new materials, such as tickets, wood, glass, aluminium and fabric. During This is the decisive change, from representation (of movement, of an object, of light) to reality (of this third phase, material images were replaced by a new physical presence. Substitution during this movement, of the object, of light); it laid the foundation for the art of light as an independent genre in phase went so far that all representative elements were replaced by real elements. In this radical turn art. Thanks to this paradigm shift, the painting of pure colour became the art of pure light. In painting, to substitution, materiality in the narrower sense became unnecessary and the immateriality spawned by the use of new materials such as aluminium and glass substituted for the old material-based the focus had been on the representation of light by means of colour. With the paradigm shift from image. The new images managed to exclude the basic historical elements completely, switching the representation to reality in the twentieth century, the image came to be shaped by light, and the entire material and technical side to the old panel painting so that images arose whose appearance focus thus moved to depiction through light. derived from subtly used light sources and thus, as with Yves Klein or Soto, entered the realm of the immaterial. Light, once the source of the image, could thus function as the death of the old image, light For real light to be introduced into the image or art as a creative element in place of colour, the replacing the image. classical concept of the image as the place where strategies of representation unfolded had to be redefined or abandoned. This was only possible if the image as a technical medium, as an obverse The conceptual duo of figurative and abstract should, in other words, be replaced in the reality of the image, could be operated artistically. history of the image in the twentieth century by a different pair of opposites: material and immaterial. Usually, the history of the image in the twentieth century is presented as a dichotomy of abstraction and figuration, be it naively in terms of theme or merely formalistically. The twentieth century is Owing to the paradigm shift from representation to reality and the dialectic of the deconstruction of considered a triumph of abstract painting. The contest between figurative and abstract painting the old image and the construction of the modern image in the three steps outlined above, whereas ignores, however, that in the twentieth century not only the concept of the image but also the in the nineteenth century we first saw the autonomy of colour, in the twentieth century came the concept of the visual underwent a fundamental transformation. For example, abstract painting has autonomy of movement and of light. Light was transformed from being the issue of the image to not in the least affected the technical aspect of panel painting (canvas, stretcher frame, oil paint) being an independent means for images, material and thus the medium. The painting of material and was thus conservative at the level of the backing medium, the obverse image and the concept followed in the footsteps of both figurative and abstract colour painting, and the response to it was an of the picture. Abstract painting was thus a conservative revolution, not a functional revolution or a immaterial form of painting (without an object, without material, without an image). Pure light revolution in material but, at most, a revolution in forms. The twentieth century’s actual achievement signified pure non-figurative images but also pure non-painting. Images of light are thus in thinking about images was its radical change and expansion of the technical medium on which an non-images that negate the historical elements and materials of painting. image could be based, namely in developing panel painting into a screen. Visual culture today has a horizon that reaches from the manual panel paintings to the apparatus-based images of the media. This change in the image can be subdivided into several steps: Artificial Light as the Medium of Art 1. Formal Analysis and Dissection: In the first phase, the modern image dissected and analyzed The trend towards immaterialisation through light began, as we have seen, in earlier centuries. In the elementary components of the old panel painting. Ever since Paul Cézanne, painters have investigated what formal elements—lines, circles, squares, cones, spheres and the like—go into total, the impression is that the spirit of Modernism is characterised by immaterial brightness. The making up a picture, not to mention the material elements such as colour and paint. In the course sign of Modernism is thus light. The image of light, like photography originally cited as the first of these investigations, painting was reduced to these elements, as from Impressionism through to radical technical questioning of the historical foil of the image, is in other words the expression of the the emphasis on colour or line was exaggerated. modern image. As Wright of Derby emphasised, the focus then was on artificial light, on a lamp that substituted for the natural light of the sun. The technical image of light is natura artifex, artificial light. 2. Accentuation and Absolutisation: Once the image had been broken down into its elements, it became This artificiality brings to an end in the domain of light what had been triggered in Renaissance panel possible to accentuate certain aspects and set new emphases or shift emphases. During this phase, paintings by the construction of perspective, which in contrast to the natural perspective of space some of these elementary parts—for example, colour—were declared autonomous and independent was termed perspectiva artificialis. Lux artificialis or artificial light continues the work ofperspectiva and given an absolute status at the cost of other elements. The colour red reigns absolute in artificialis. In this way, the image and art finally quit the domain of mimetic nature and became an monochrome abstract images. Figurative representation was neglected, and only specific geometric artificial construct, elements of the artificial world. Paul Cézanne iseputed r to have said that the sun shapes were permitted. The key result was abstract painting. Yet the obverse of this was that the panel cannot be depicted but can only be represented by colour. The sun or the light of the sun was first painting was on this side of the horizon of classical painting. replaced by colours, and finally colours were replaced by real light. The natural sun was in the end 3. Exclusion and Substitution: In the third phase, elementary parts of painting were not only ignored replaced by artificial light. We can thus list the following as sources of light art or art using artificial but also completely abandoned or replaced by new ones; for example, brown paint was replaced by light. wood, canvas by aluminium, curved lines by bent Plexiglas. As early as the 1920s, as part of an agenda of reconciling art and technology, painters had started employing the new technical opportunities and 12 13

Colour as the Medium of Light machines. Goepfert wrote that “the new creative medium, and it can be used directly as material, namely light, not only impacted on the formal appearance of the pictorial work, but also opened it A development in the representation of light by colour in painting through to the design of images out to a category of art that had hitherto not been practiced in such a way”. with light is described in the catalogue Peter Weibel edited 1981 in Vienna: Bildlicht. Malerei zwischen Material und Immaterialität, the material culture of Constructivist and Concrete Art and its The way toward dematerialisation in the direction of white light was paved by the “white manifestos” immaterial thrust, which led as early as the 1920s to light relieves, light boxes and light from Malevich to Fontana, the large number of white pictures from Rauschenberg to Manzoni and performances, the synaesthetic and/or intermedia trends in painting and music around 1900, which others. These white images were to float in the flow of light before the wall, to dissolve and become sought to find correspondences between sounds and colours, giving rise in the 1920s and 1930s to immaterial. Pictorial field and environment tended to blend into an opticalGanzfeld or “overall field” in the diverse forms taken by colour-light music, and above all, although constantly overlooked, the which the art of time and space of a James Turrell (as of 1967) and others was to avant-garde film of the 1920s and the use of real movement and real light in the mechanical art of establish itself. In the 1980s, Turrell called his light-filled experiential spaces “Ganzfeld Pieces”. Kinetics and Op Art. Dan Flavin painted his first “icons” in 1961, pictures on the edges of which he fastened electric lights. In the light experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, the transformation of material boxes into light Here, we can discern the intention to transform the finite pictorial field into an infinite environment, to boxes, of material relieves into light relieves (from Moholy-Nagy to Zdenek Pesánek) forms the include the wall and the room by means of the light. In 1963, Flavin began working with fluorescent main basis for the change in the use of light in art. Real artificial light emerges as a medium of light (but not neon). While the light boxes had held light captive, in the reflecting-material works or painting and the image through this focus on new materials, new technologies such as the those of immaterial painters, light and transparency had still been located at the level of materials; telephone and new media such as photography and film, art forms of light. The development went here light was free and was able to disseminate in space. All four walls, the floor and the ceiling from the transparent image relieves in which materials reflected lights or light rays (and in part became the surface of the picture. Real light itself became the art. made use of real artificial light sources such as lamps, fluorescent and neon tubes) onward to the light boxes and large light-screens of the 1960s. The box-shaped image developed for the material Thereafter, the freedom of light Flavin had achieved receded slightly and became more differentiated. collages and assemblages was retained for designing images as a light medium, except that here In part, light was again referred to transparent materials, for example, in Robert Irwin’s work, in the boxes were not filled with heavy materials but with lamps, filters, lenses, and mirrors. part captured again and thus related back to the idea of an image, for example in Turrell’s light projections. At that time, people stopped describing or emphasising light by means of colour and actually utilised it with reflective materials such as sheet metal, Plexiglas, aluminium and mirrors. By incorporating real light bodies (light bulbs, neon tubes), light as such became part of the artwork. The Artificial Light of the Technical Media as the Medium of Art Slowly light emerged with an absolute status instead of being a side effect of the material, becoming an independent image in which the material parts were merely auxiliaries for the What painters have always sought, namely absolute colour, colour not trammelled to material, generation of light spectacles, and finally with light’s becoming the sole material for creative art. has been achieved by means of light projections, light boxes, light walls, light environments and After the phases of colour and light, of material and light, it was pure light itself (like pure colour or ambiences by the artists and artist collectives of the neo-avant-garde from Fontana via Graevenitz to pure material) that became the artistic medium. György Kepes and artist groups such as Gruppo T. Coloured light replaced oil paint. Light Art arose. In a text published in 1936 in the Hungarian journal Telehor, Moholy-Nagy outlined almost the entire The objects that used light effects in the 1920s and 1930s became light objects and light boxes in spectrum of the future Light Art: the 1950s and 1960s. In the mid-1940s, the Arte Madi movement was founded in , with Gyula Kosice publishing his Madi Manifesto in 1946 and the Arte Madi Universal magazine coming 1. the play of light outdoors space: a. light adverts, they still usually make use of linear surface effects out in 1947. The group exhibited mobile kinetic sculptures, made use of unusual materials such as [...]. b. then there are spotlight cannons (U.S.A.—companies and persil have done similar things), and c. neon and fluorescent lamps, lasers, holographs and remote-controlled objects, challenging viewers as a future form the projection onto clouds, gaseous projection surfaces which you can walk through, to participate in the transformable works. Kosice was probably the first, who created a neon image for example d. as a future form the urban light theatre that one will experience from dirigibles, airplanes (Madí Néon Nº3, 1946) in Argentina. His colleague Lucio Fontana, also an Argentinean, brought this in the immense expanse of the light network, the shifts and changes of light surfaces, and which can definitely lead to a new, enhanced form of community festivals. idea to Europe. 2. the play of light indoors: a. film with its new potential for projecting coloured, plastic and The immaterial itself finally became the material of painting. As of 1960, the ZERO movement simultaneous effects: i.e., projected either with an enlarged number of apparatuses on a single point (Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and other artists) made light the central theme and central or onto all walls of the room, b. reflectory play of light, achieved with coloured projectors stencils or medium of their art with their reflecting relieves, with their metal elements in images and their light the like, such as lazlo’s colour organ, either as standalone achievements or using tv and broadcast 14 15

from a radio centre, c. this also includes the colour piano, an instrument with a keyboard, a series of me to do so—and in a manner that allows you not only visually but also physically to lamp units, and used to illuminate and highlight shadow screens (that will be the future instrument of experience the substance of the light that fills a room. [...] By absorbing a room in your “drawing instructor” for many demonstrations), d. the light fresco, used to use artificial light to create perception, you can watch yourself seeing. That act of seeing, that conscious perception, fulfils large architectural units, buildings, wings, walls according to a fixed lighting plan. (it is highly probable the room with awareness. that in future apartments will have a specific place reserved to receive these light frescos, like a radio). We can thus state that today Light Art as a category or genre in its own right covers the entire The precondition for the future trends in Light Art as an independent genre and medium of art was spectrum of artificial light. that experiments with light and sound were put on a technological footing. The synaesthetic efforts that related to painting could not be moved forward. Only film and music enabled the synaesthetic As a conclusion: the concepts of perception and enlightenment are constants in the history of ideas to be advanced—on an electronic synthetic basis. They were exemplified by acoustic human efforts to comprehend the phenomenon of light. We see ourselves quite naturally as ‘figures synthesisers and video-synthesisers. The history of electrical or electronic sound and of electrical of light’ and have always developed our knowledge from the revelations of natural sunlight and, or electronic images is among other things the continuation of synaesthetic, synchronistic and for many years now, of artificial electric light. Although visible light covers only a tiny segment of synchromistic dreams, with the difference that they are now termed intermedia and multimedia. the wavelength spectrum, we are more than fascinated by the fact that light, as wave or particle, is The fusion of colour light music, stage show, film and video projections, spotlights, colour effects, also a key functional component—in cameras or computer screens, for instance—or serves as the dance and music at pop concerts is only the entertainment form used by intermedia techniques, basis and the medium for issues of concern to artists. Often equally important are the concepts of comparable with music videos. It is the optophone of today, the mobile, which is the actual technical the Gesamtkunstwerk and synaesthetic utopias that have reflected and interpreted the essence of highpoint of the dreamed analogies of sound and image (if bereft of any artistic concept and without the world in light (of God). It was with good reason that Plato feared the glaring rays of the sun, for it any artistic correspondence, albeit on the joint basis of electromagnetic waves). This device enables revealed truth. the production, distribution and reviewing of images and sounds. It gives us a (tele)voice, a (tele) vision and remote listening—in one and same medium. This is the technical fulfilment of the dream of colour music, the unity of sound and vision. The development of Light Art can be studied against “Light Art from Artificial Light”, ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe, curated by Peter the horizon of this technological form given light and sound. Weibel and Gregor Jansen, 19 November 2005-6 August 2006.

After light had been utilised as a medium in the abstract vein or in approximating the idea of panel * The origin of this article is the authors’ texts in Light as a Medium in Twentieth and Twenty-First painting, in the 1980s a new generation started contrasting non-object-based Light Art to a figurative Century, ed. Peter version. Today, the art of light covers a broad spectrum: forms of transparency as layers of Weibel and Gregor Jansen (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006). transparent material, light boxes, pure light projections, light images, light rays, laser beams, object-based light objects, lamps mounted on panel pictures and light objects, light installations, light panels, light walls, fields of light inserted into walls, abstract light photographs, video, light rooms, and computer simulations of light.

Following the use of artificial light in Concrete Art, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Arte Povera and Concept Art, today essentially two trends predominate. One group of Light artists draws on the picture tradition, and we could call them Neo-Formalists. The other group draws on the world of everyday objects, and we could term them Neo-Functionalists. The artistic aesthetic of digital light (Angela Bulloch and Cerith Wyn Evans), of the electric light of spots (Michel Verjux), electronic LED screens (Jenny Holzer) or computer-controlled ensembles of lamps (Olafur Eliasson) needs to be clearly distinguished from the natural aesthetic of James Turrell’s Sky-Spaces, although Turrell also uses artificial light in his light installations and spaces. Turrell wrote in 1987:

When I work with light, it is important to me that I create an experience of wordless thought, shaping the quality and sensation of light as something real, something tangible. The quality of the substance of light cannot be touched, but it can be rendered physically visible. [...] My work deals with light to the extent that light is present in it: My work is a not a treatise on light or even a kind of documentation. It is light itself. [...] I form light to the extent that this material allows 17

Machine Lights—Projected Light in Contemporary Art

Dr. Andreas Broeckmann, Director, Transmediale

The following text combines an introductory historical sketch about the significance of light in the European art tradition, with a presentation of some contemporary artistic positions for which projected light plays an important role, and which articulate the significance of light in conjunction with the role of technology in art. The suggestion implied in this juxtaposition is that when we look at contemporary artworks that deal with light, we are also touching upon a more ingrained symbolism of light, which often has deep, culturally rooted connotations.

Light has historically been understood as a transcendental source of power, truth, life, and salvation; in many religions, light is seen as an abstract sign of the presence of God. This attitude has been, for instance, expressed in the architecture of a building like the in İstanbul, which, at different times, has served both the Christian as well as the Muslim faiths. The placement and size of the windows, the use of gold, mosaics and artificial light sources, turn the interior of the building into a space imbued with a spirituality that is expressed in the dramaturgy of light.

Such a dramaturgy is also frequently deployed in the paintings of the late Renaissance, particularly in the Italian and Dutch schools. As a theme, the birth of Christ is often epresentedr with the newborn child as the main source of light in a world that is otherwise dark, conveying the Christian idea that Jesus brings the light of salvation into the world. Whereas in medieval images, light would have been represented by gold plating, the Renaissance brings a conscious staging of light by the use of colour; it introduces a clear sense of theatricality into the symbolism of light which, in the seventeenth century, will lead to a secularisation of light, for example in the famous sunset paintings of the French artist Claude Lorrain.

In the eighteenth century, we can see the emergence of the machine and of industry in general, as sources of light, and of enlightenment. The English painter Joseph Wright of Derby created compositions, which resembled Renaissance and Baroque images, but the religious narrative was replaced by a narrative of labour, industry, and progress. Instead of the child Jesus or an angel glowing in the dark night, we see a blacksmith in his workshop, beating the metal, the scene lit up by the hearth and by the flying sparks. As in the older Christian paintings, there are observers in the image who are witnessing the scene. Yet what they are witnessing here is not some holy wonder, but the rational “magic” of forging iron and the wonders of industrial civilisation.

The Romantic period in painting in the first half of the nineteenth century is full of ambivalence towards the dichotomy between nature and culture, and the role of humankind therein. However, the Realism of the later nineteenth century will whole-heartedly embrace industry—like German painter Adolf Menzel’s painting of the Iron Forge (1872-1875) in which hard manual labour and the heat of the welding process are portrayed to celebrate the beginning of the machine age. As an aside, let me remark that this painting is also interesting in the context of the site of the new santralistanbul art centre, because, historically, the painting and its motif are placed just a few decades before the time when plans for the original electricity plant on the same site in İstanbul were made, and orders were sent to Germany, England and France to purchase some of the impressive machines which remain in the santralistanbul Museum of Energy. 18 19

Beyond this heroic, though socially conscious, optimism we enter into the twentieth century in which a medium of the light that is projected at our overtaxed body, just as the ear is not the endpoint, but so much doubt and hesitation has been sown, a doubt that must also be brought to bear on our a medium in the transmission of sound from the electronic source to our internal aural and sensory reflections of Light Art. In the form of small vignettes, I would like to offer two images that may experience. frame the examples that will then be presented in greater detail. Let us move from the purely perceptual to the machines that create such new perceptions. The The first is an image of the “nuclear shadows” that were cast by the flash of light of the Atomic bomb Austrian artist Herwig Weiser engages his audience in the technical mechanisms of his machine explosion over Hiroshima in August 1945. The shapes of objects as well as those of people’s bodies installations. He is interested in the division between the visible and the invisible aspects of were imprinted on walls and on the ground as they blocked the intense rays emanating from the technology and creates works that display the mechanisms yet obscure the technical processes that explosion, leaving ghost-like shadows. Theodor W. Adorno, one of the major German philosophers drive the machines. The installation Death Before Disko (2005/2006) consists of a thick, transparent of the twentieth century, asked the provocative question, whether it was still possible to write poems Plexiglas tube hanging in a space, an online computer and additional loudspeakers mounted on after Auschwitz. He wanted us to consider whether the experience of the moral catastrophe of the the wall. The tube is equipped at either end with two large speakers turned outwards, and small Holocaust should force us to abandon an aestheticised approach to reality. In analogy, we might stroboscopic lights turned inwards, pointing to a sphere spinning in the middle of the tube. The ask whether it is still possible to make Light Art after Hiroshima, that epoch-making flash of light, sphere is covered with a section of dark, ferro-fluidic liquid and small mirror plates, which again brighter than the sun. reflect the lights not outwards, but inwards. On the sound level, the machine processes data taken from NASA space observations and transposes them into high-pitched crackling and a strong The second image with which I want to conclude this introduction is Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather physical sub-bass vibration – which emphasises the fact that audible sound is based on waves of air Project (2003/2004), a light installation that he realised in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern museum, pressure. The mechanical system of Death Before Disko is both self-generating and self-absorbing; , another disused power station. What seems to be the overwhelming spectacle of a huge it is a machine that produces and consumes light at the same time. yellow sun hovering in the large, misty interior space is quite an easy to understand disposition of artificial lights, a tinted half-circular screen, a mirror- covered ceiling and artificial fog. The project is The project SENSOR (2006) was created by the German artist Carsten Nicolai as a commission for an epiphany of artificiality that more than two million people came to see—maybe an indication of an exhibition of the SPOTS media façade (2005-2007), a large-scale light installation that turned the how the twenty-first century will not celebrate industry but sublime spectacles. glass façade of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz into a huge low-resolution video screen, consisting of one thousand eight hundred dimmable circular neon tubes acting as screen pixels. Nicolai is a sound In the following, I would like to present you with four exemplary artistic positions that make use and visual artist who is interested in abstract structures in nature, and the articulation of technical, of light and projection in singular ways. They form interesting points of departure for a discussion mathematical, and natural patterns. His work revolves around an abstract sublimation of reality. For about the significance of light in contemporary art, and thereby about the role that media and SENSOR, Nicolai designed a system of light, sound and movement sensors which were mounted technology play in discourses of art today. on the façade and which tracked the lively square in front of the building. According to complex preset rules, the intensity of sounds, lights, and movements by people, cars, buses and other traffic The artist group Granular Synthesis is composed of the German Ulf Langheinrich and the Austrian was translated into waves of light scanning across the façade at different speeds and in diverging Kurt Hentschläger. They worked together for about a decade after the early 1990s, creating directions. It was a feedback system that produced visual effects, which were, at the same time, large-scale video and sound installations and performances, and are currently both pursuing ever changing and unpredictable, unpredictable, but in some vague form legible. The façade was solo careers. A typical Granular Synthesis work is the video performance FELD (2000), in conceived as an abstracting mirror that reflects light back into the environment as a response to which a sequence of highly abstract video images is projected onto a wide horizontal screen. the urban activity in the square—an architecture that “talks back” through the medium of a screen Simultaneously, a soundtrack of powerful, equally abstract electronic sound is played, resonating façade. in the viewer’s body and enhancing the experience of an immersion into the minimalistic colour horizon of the electronic image. In their work, Granular Synthesis use the projected images as the The final example in this short sequence, Julien Maire’sExploding Camera installation, reminds light source, creating images that can be as ethereal as the works of James Turrell, although their us of the way in which media images are constructed by effects of light, and how these effects hypnotic effect is a result of intense audio-visual pressure, rather than the ephemeral restraint of are dependent on the conditions of the electronic space in which they can also, so easily, be Turrell’s colour and light spaces. Granular Synthesis employs the digital manipulation of image and manipulated. In all of his works, the French Berlin-based artist Julien Maire deconstructs and sound in order to influence our perception and our physical response. The stroboscopic flickering re-invents the technology of audio-visual media. The Exploding Camera takes its cue from the fate and the complex fades and transformations of the visual field create very specific optical illusions in of the Afghan Commander Massoud who was killed in a bomb attack two days before 11 September our brain. The video images thus take us to a “degree zero” of perception, turning our eye into 2001. The assassins who killed him posed as journalists and hid the bomb in their video camera. For the installation, Maire has disassembled a functioning video camera and placed it on a table. The photo sensor of Maire’s Exploding Camera, even with the optical lens removed, is still operational, 20 21

The Delicate Environment of the Blue Studio

Paolo Rosa, Artist, Studio Azzurro

sending the images that it receives to a cathode ray tube monitor nearby. A transparent disk with For the past few years, we as the Blue Studio have been trying to fuse the positive signs emerging different slide images is placed above the sensor and a computer-controlled motor changes the from the confusing, dangerous, but at the same time extraordinary universe of new technologies slides at defined intervals. An array of small light spots is placed above the camera, projecting light and digital culture, with experimental expressions and the art world. Through our work with at different angles, intensities and colours onto the sensor, so that the motif of the slide images video-ambiences, delicate and interactive ambiences and multimedia shows, we learned the appear as electronic film stills on the video screen. A rumbling soundtrack enhances the impression possibilities and limits of this union, anticipated methods and created an intense texture with other of an eerie, obscure narrative unfolding in what looks like a live-action historical experimental film expressive fields. At the same time, we learned what a great observatory this small art world is, and reinterpreting the events of the war since 2001. The installation dissects the images presented by the that it is a privileged field of action directed towards deep social transitions rooted in new techniques. media, and reveals how such images are constructed by a certain technology. An analogy with the way in which the work of Granular Synthesis projects visual experiences through the medium of the human eye, we might say that Julien Maire here provides us with a metaphor for the way in which A Brief Story of the Beginning mass media images are projected into the machines and into our minds. Our work in this field began in 1982, when due to certain circumstances we challenged the language From the previous discussion we can conclude that the artistic engagement with the multiple and of technology and brought together certain video programmes with various objects presented to us layered symbolic meaning of light goes far back into history, and that there are continuities as well by Ettore Sottsass and other designers from the MEMPHIS group. Light Illusions was our first art as innovations that have occurred with the introduction of technical sources of illumination. We see installation, actually our first “video-ambience”. significant secular and technically inspired approaches to Light Art, such as the work of Carsten Nicolai, or works that are media-critical and analytical, like Julien Maire’s Exploding Camera. Yet This is what we named the work produced in our first ten years, characterised by the evident many of these contemporary artworks also reference a deep-rooted symbolism of light with dialogue among video, physical environments, and viewers. These were narrative cars based on their sublime, almost religious connotations. It therefore makes sense to bring those historical a strong scenario, video sequences showing minor repeating events and monitor compositions connotations into play when we study the artistic engagement with light and electricity today. helping to dissolve the limits of the screen. Manifesting the desire to see television not just as a box containing images and information, but as a channel revealing an “alternative” reality; just like a lens bringing into focus a complex situation produced by an immaterial phenomenon continuously Online References: leaving more traces.

Olafur Eliasson: www.olafureliasson.net The works The swimmer—Frequently goes to Heidelberg (1984) or Appearances—This individual Granular Synthesis: www.granularsynthesis.info can never stand still (1985) reveal our intentions clearly. Following these, works like Prologue (1985) Julien Maire: julienmaire.ideenshop.net and Abstract Room (1987) commissioned by Documenta 8 take this quest to the limits of theatre and Carsten Nicolai: www.carstennicolai.de performance. It confirms the solid dramatic value of the multimedia order against a role defined by SPOTS Facade: www.spots-berlin.de just being on stage. A video performance can narrate many things, through not only the presented Herwig Weiser: www.zgodlocator.org images and sounds, but at the same time by moving on stage and by oscillating between directly recorded and previously recorded material, between real and virtual presence.

After ten years of activity and more than thirty performances, new needs emerge, such as touching the images with our hands and sharing these experiences with the audience. The installation created with infrared cameras titled “The garden of objects” (1990) disclosed this need. To touch, to see. Images that only appear when they are caressed and desired. Heat emitted by hands shape the objects, and when they are abandoned, they cool down and disappear into a purifying darkness. Even though it is still not interactive, this work brings us to a turning point leading to a period of reflection lasting more than a year. Throughout this year as technology develops tools of expression become more sensitive.

Using small video projectors instead of monitors not only indicates the modernisation of the expression repository, but also at the same time it is regarded as a liberation from the formal and composite limits of that box-shaped object. Now the image can transgress the limits of the screen, 22 23

can stand on new and different supports, can free itself from the symbolic void of its armour and can aesthetic observations into social considerations, technological continuities to ethical assumptions. A reproduce the invasive dimension represented by the effects of the media system. Refusing to yield thought that the art system and the certain rhetoric enforced by its conventional methods want to to the requirements defined by the monitor, it allows a confrontation with emptiness and pertinent annihilate. A thought that fearlessly challenges critical notions such as the nature of the artwork, the aesthetic views The computer situated in the centre of our dispositions, brings us to a new phase position of the artist, the role of the viewer, and the operations of the market. where attention is concentrated on the interactive phenomenon very naturally and with a clear rapture. This is a brief and unordered picture of our preference. Using interactivity, placing it at the centre of our style of expression and moving along this path is an inevitable consequence. Within this transformation, the responsibility we feel for also taking the lead socially; capturing what changes Natural Interactivity through this delayed perception the material demands, this new project-product relationship and doing all this in a positive manner open to discussion is the summary of intricate circumstances. Thanks to the characteristics of our previous work, attention and the participation of the audience, These are some of the thoughts that lead us to confront this action territory with courage. Not to be naturally we were orientated towards interactivity. The environment created by interactive thought of as a fruit of uncritical participation in the speed of technology, just a project with strong technologies shaped a socially strategic view as well as presenting a panorama with disturbing humane origins. content. For these reasons, we were agitated and we also wanted to intervene directly with these mechanisms to familiarise ourselves with their potential. Approaching this new territory raised I would like to stress the most emblematic of all the arguments I have described in the historical three points that were clear design-wise since the beginning. The first was the idea of eliminating process: in the path you have illustrated how can one be convinced that a work is meaningful? television’s presence also to remove other technologies from the viewer’s eyesight. The second was making sure that the audience was affected by the procedures in the minimum way. The keyboard, the mouse, and the joystick were going to disappear. The mechanism was going to operate through For an Aesthetics of Relationships the free gestures of the individuals. What we define as “natural interface” was going to be realised. We thought it was only through this way that we could reach each person’s expressive resources, Often I have discovered that the best way to evaluate my experiences are not traditional analysis and receive instinctive reactions in the most meaningful and clear way possible. The third was to find and introduction methods, but transforming my role as the creator and the producer into the viewer. an activity that would contest the individualist and even solitary tendencies induced by technology. Abandoning a creative self, satisfied and proud with his own work and for a more modest and Not solitary positions, but social spaces where you can share your experiences with others. We humble self as the viewer. called these spaces “sensitive ambiences”. Spaces that react to the desires of their users, but at the same time activate a particular sensitivity through the sensual perception of material components After all, these interactive experiences delineating my artistic pursuit, this apparent conflict manifests and virtual elements. A real emotional oscillation between different natures. itself more clearly. Such that the condition of the stable, immobile observer is contrasted with the actions of other people who touch the images, operate the mechanisms, make sounds and in this The first “sensitive ambience” reconciling all these intentions wasTableaux (1994). This work with way transform the presented story as they like. the subtitle “why are these hands touching me” reveals the element of continuity with previous experience. The sense of touch is included as an animating element. To advance in the story and to Being thus a classical, contemplative viewer is based on a self-remote from narcissism, on the create small actions you have to touch the figures in the six different tableaux. Our first experience pleasure of observation, on the beauty of action and reactions and capturing the significance of was meaningful: observing the reactions of the audience, the suggestions we received in this natural expression. first exhibition encouraged various considerations and led us to set out on this new journey with determination. There is a difference between the reaction I imagine a work will initiate when creating a project and what emerges as the result of a viewer’s realistic response. This difference attains the most precious Many other new creations, and the circulation of the installations in various places in the world imagination resources of others. Often this difference encourages the evaluation of the aesthetic complimented and encouraged our attempts to understand the effects of new techniques on quality of the work by transforming the attentive observer creator into a surprised and ecstatic actions, thoughts and people’s imaginations. They helped us to determine certain ways to use these viewer. positively. When developing the project for a work characterised by ambient interactivity (for example, our Without being a professional anthropologist, scientist or sociologist we tried to shape a thought “sensitive ambiences”), when imagining a work repeating certain artistic codes, you also anticipate emerging out of direct experiences with the material, an inexperienced approach to the tools and a possible spectator response, I mean you are conscious that you are somehow designing a immediate criticism of actions. We wanted a direct experience continuously leading us to transfer behavioural attitude. This consciousness cannot prevent you from asking certain ethical questions 24 25

to yourself. Why, how and to what extent can you initiate the reactions of people you want to Aesthetics of relationships signifies dialogue between multiplicities, oscillation of differences, participate? You question yourself about the possibility of really producing an idea or a project. getting used to the beauty of a confrontation devoid of an ideological rigidity. It is impossible to These are questions and preoccupations also experienced in other experimental areas. They reflect believe that this is not a necessity. Art should regret accepting this duel and giving up many of its the difficult conditions of traditional ethical thought and its frailty faced with the level of technology elements to communication tools with definite aims born out of an idea of consumption. When I say (and economy) and the possibilities they offer. Being a behavioural designer reveals the intriguing consumption, I am referring more to showing off and publicity. Instead of following these dizzying conflicts of the subject, underlines the similarities with disquieting social dynamics, but at the same and suicidal intoxications, it must have the courage to step up and identify or invent a new territory time reveals the role of the artistic quest as representative of an inverse viewpoint on this problem. revealing its gravity. A new territory for ethics and aesthetics. This is not a behavioural determination aimed at gaining power; on the contrary, it is the reclamation of residual expressions, unanticipated things and surprises, and their recycling in these dynamics. All these can happen only if basically there is joy, excitement and profound respect for the viewer who evolves in the brain when these works are imagined and produced. The complete opposite of utilitarian and speculative thought, it is exactly this, the tension-inducing one to reverse his role and assume others.

Actually what underlies my transformation from the creator to the viewer is the development of the art scene we feel so familiar with. There is a necessity to reinforce conventional aesthetic codes for analysing artworks, and this can happen through the renewal of our viewpoint on the relationship between the work and its viewer. Like the shift of the focus from object to action, real or mental. In other occasions, I have called this “art outside of itself”. The artistic object, installation or gesture is no longer at the centre, but they constitute the ground for the dynamics that have become the true expressive basis.

You can only attain this viewpoint if it is situated in an unedited aesthetic framework. Therefore, the criteria we use to understand if a work is successful or not, is observation practiced without seeking satisfaction. With this method, the viewer’s reaction becomes the complementary element.

In this way there is a necessity to determine an aesthetics of relationships; based on the appreciation of moments, meetings, reactions, expressions; not in need of a support, what will only be lived and later told.

In the age that we live in, we all know that relationships are very important. This interest in technologies I call “homeopathic” have exhausted the desire for communication and information. In all times and places, this necessity was identified with the need to be connected with the flow of the world. Through mobile phones, televisions, and networks our planetary or private need to be connected with world events is close to being satisfied completely. On the other hand, this connection does not correspond to better relationships. On the contrary, these communication tools forcing individual dynamics push us towards solitariness, isolation and alienation. What’s more, they lead to the abandonment of social rituals that guarantee situations like reciprocal relationships, confrontation and dialogue.

28 29

Recording in the Log

Başak Şenova

“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.”

—Nikola Tesla

Background

In 2006, the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo organised “The Open Studio” residency programme dedicated to sound. In the course of the programme, seventeen participants mostly from the Mediterranean region shared aural practices and experiences by following an intense schedule throughout fifteen days in downtown Cairo. It was a rocess-oriented programme and adeptly enriched with presentations, workshops, performances, screenings, and a panel. I was part of this process as one of the resident curators and had the opportunity to shape the entire programme collectively with the other participants.

An abandoned hotel Viennoise, Townhouse Gallery, Factory, Annex and the studios were chosen as the Open Studio performance-based event venues. Taking Cairo as the main source of their artistic production, the artists worked on various performances and site-specific installations, while the Open Studio Project continued with the Public Programme series. The programme succeeded in bringing diverse approaches and artistic practices together, as well as forming a temporary platform to share all possible assets of the participants.

Following the residency, we started to discuss the possibilities of developing an extension of this project in Turkey with Clare Davies of Townhouse Gallery. In the midst of our discussions, I received an invitation from santralistanbul asking NOMAD to work together on a residency programme in partnership.

Merging Projects

Actually, santralistanbul’s invitation was appropriately based on the objective to develop a residency programme with an explicit emphasis on the Mediterranean region. Throughout the first meetings with santralistanbul, in reference to the characteristics of the Silahtarağa Power Plant site along with the university campus and the new , the general framework of the project was given as “Light, Illumination and Electricity.” Although it seemed to be a resolute theme for the entire project, these conceptions inhabited many overlapping issues with the extension of our sound-based project. Furthermore, santralistanbul’s approach to the content of our project was positive and this enabled us to discuss the possibility of processing our content together with the themes of Light, Illumination and Electricity. Again, it would be designed as a process-based international project, containing multi-layers of artistic and curatorial collaborations in a similar way, thus, we agreed on merging the projects and started to work on the spine of the “Light, Illumination and Electricity” project by the end of 2006. 30 31

Partners The Curatorial Passage

Following a series of meetings, online correspondence among institutions and fundraising Motives and the Process efforts, the project had received support from the Anna Lindh Foundation in collaboration with the partners—santralistanbul (İstanbul), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), NOMAD (İstanbul), ZINC/ECM There was a multiplicity of motives which inspired the structure of the project, as well as the (Marseille) and SCCA-Ljubljana. According to the structure programmed, curators assigned by these methodology of working with the artists: the artists’ personal reflections on the residency as a partners started to design the project. In the attempt of putting the ideas together, Dušan Dovč process; the influences of the city on this process; exploring formats for articulating memories; developing works associated with questions concerning technology; the desire to engage the of SCCA-Ljubljana, Emre Baykal of santralistanbul, Mohammed Yousri of Townhouse Gallery, audience by means of interaction; the public display of the entire process; and finally, socialising Claudine Dussollier of ZINC/ECM, and myself representing NOMAD, exchanged ideas through online and operating together as a group, simultaneously speaking multiple languages—French, English, correspondence and with regular meetings. Turkish, and Arabic. The collaborative process has affected all subsequent forms of communication, and has left its trace in the process and result through the works produced. Therefore, the project Accordingly, santralistanbul, NOMAD and Townhouse Gallery decided to invite Ceren Oykut from took shape and became modified as time went on by undergoing the adventure of following the Turkey, Cynthia Zaven from Lebanon, Carlo Crovato, a British artist living in Leipzig, and Adham journey and works of the resident artists, along with the hardships of the residency. The artists’ Hafez from Egypt. These artists were part of the Open Studio project and the desire to continue the movements were also determined by the mobile environment and conditions of the residency, and project was still at stake. Then Cevdet Erek from Turkey was also invited to receive a residency in contemplated on the process with various experiences, thought paths, presentation formats, and Cairo whilst the residency programme in İstanbul continued. He was asked to develop a project in fields of research. sync with the process in İstanbul and to present it at santralistanbul together with the others at the end of the entire process. In addition, the project’s Slovenian partners selected Marko A. Kovačič Other inputs such as talks, presentations, performances and workshops accumulated in the course and Borut Savski, while ZINC/ECM invited the group Collective Position composed of Rémy Rivoire, of the process and shaped the outcome of this journey into a two-folded display: open-studio Renaud Vercey and Bruno Voillot to the project. presentations at the artists’ studios, and the exhibition at the Museum of Energy. The open-studio presentations at the artists’ studios, along with some extension of the artists’ works presented in However, the point to be observed is that the structural process of the project required a long time the museum, inhabited the hints and snapshots of the process, while the exhibition documented the frame, and for various reasons, the curators’ involvement and commitment had been distracted diversity of ideas and practices around the extensive substances of electricity and light. Furthermore, and unstable over such a period. Yet, the partners were still active, and of course, it had been quite both venues revealed artists’ reflections and perceptions of the city, along with sequences and feasible to combine the curators’ efforts on all levels. Eventually, the project succeeded in processing narrations of memory. the initial input of the curators. Implementing an Exhibition within an Exhibition In June 2007, I was asked to complete the process as “the curator” of the project. santralistanbul’s intention was to precede the project and for them, it was a reasonable appeal to approach a curator “When existence becomes a measurable science for control, then attached to one of the project partners who was based in İstanbul. On the other hand, it was a non-existence must become a tactic for anything wishing to avoid control.” challenge on its own to complete a collaborative project alone whilst most of the parameters were already set. It was also a very difficult decision to be made in terms of the responsibility towards —Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker the other partners and the artists. I was hesitating while anticipating the results. Yet, at the end of August, two weeks before the artists arrived in İstanbul, I accepted the role as the project’s sole One of the main challenges of the project was hidden beneath the collaborative fascination and curator. will to use the Museum of Energy as the exhibition venue. The building itself, along with all the machinery, control room, turbines, columns, relics, pipes, windows and walls was an exhibition on its own. From floor to ceiling, each and every single structure was part of a giant exhibition. The idea, and concurrently the limitation, was to preserve the identity of the Museum as it was and subtly infuse it as another system into this massive exhibition. Nevertheless, the works were still able to trespass some substantial limits of the space as well as bypassing some of the control mechanisms applied specifically for this historical site. Therefore, the exhibition’s spatial design 32 33

designated a playful navigation through which the audience would discover and recognise the works story of her work. Although her approach to link these parts came from completely opposite to activate. Hence, their relationship with light and electricity functioned as a compass for the routing directions, they all produced the same impression in terms of connectivity. Each part of her project of the audience. The works were not shouting but whispering in the Museum. was located within a perceptible distance in the Museum, thus enabling each piece to have a very effective presence. However, to complete the story, one had to be determined to follow the links attached to these parts, and visit her studio, which had been transformed into a hotel room. Electricity, Light and Technology During his residency, Marko A. Kovačič collected and recreated mundane “things” and gathered them During an interview with Geert Lovink, the Mexican/Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer once together in his studio. Each and every piece indicated a slice of “memory”, which could be deleted stated that “an alternate operation to contextualise the visual arts regards to Light might be to trace from, downloaded, and installed to the minds of the audience. With every new audience the room technological developments rather than scientific models” (Lovink, 2004: 305). In the same line of hosted, these things were being uninstalled, reloaded and reshaped. Switch off the Light (2007) also thought, technology altered the essence of this exhibition. As the history of the Museum of Energy manifested as a video extract displayed in one of the dark corridors of the Museum. In both cases, indicates, the power plant site in which the entire project took place had always been one of the the work was navigating through an ever-changing sea of references. focal points where technology was highly admired. Inevitably, the works, independent of content, produced in that very specific and loaded site were also about the medium itself, either through their Cevdet Erek’s work, Dark Light Dark (2007) was similar to Zaven’s work in the sense that the work relationship with the memory of the site, or through the usage of electricity and light. In reference during his residency consisted of linking the connections of the process that he had started in Egypt. to Heidegger, technology as an agent to control always dictates various ways of perception through In Egypt, he had collected various references from different fields such as music, architecture and its manifestations. The existence of technology forms its design: a design in which everyone who traditional rituals. Naturally, the audience would assume that any work dependent on a process participates continues to interact with each other and with other systems. would carry along links from its past. However, Erek was not necessarily bound by these links, and therefore, also transformed the structures so that he demonstrated their technical details Each work in the exhibition could be considered as mimicking “distributed networks”. Galloway and mechanisms. For example, he chose to manifest the working mechanism of the “sequencer” observes “distributed networks”—by referring to Hall’s “Protocol” definition as “Each point in a beneath the “frame drum”. This allowed the audience to link the operation with the running led. distributed network is neither a central hub nor a satellite node […]. The network contains nothing Every part of the work became connected by a multiplicity of references and data that were recalled but ‘an intelligent end-point system to communicate with any host it chooses’,” (2004). Both Carlo from the non-existing past of the process. In this case, it was consistently presented in this particular Crovato’s Little Buggers (2007) and Ceren Oykut’s Sketch Repair (2007) were autonomous and at the order. Nevertheless, the work displayed complex patterns of linear and non-linear narratives same time connected to the other units of their works spread out in the Museum. Hence, they had existing together and in a constant exchange of references. On the other hand, Collective Position the same protocol with the audience. (Rémy Rivoire, Renaud Vercey, Bruno Voillot) created a closed-circuit system by placing their work Disposition (2007) in an isolated dark room that cut itself off from the surrounding sounds and light Ceren Oykut took the Museum as the source of her work. She recorded the sounds, actions, and to present the flow of references that re-constructed ‘memory’. narrations of the site. During her residency, she spent hours drawing her sketches in the Museum, thus at the end, these sketches composed short animations presented on a small LCD screen in the Likewise, the experience Borut Savski proposed with his work The Fluidity of Space (2007) indicated hidden corners of the Museum, along with the sound they generated. She preferred to leave traces a perpetual or continuous re-patterning and re-processing through interaction. Adham Hafez’s of her sketches in her studio—those that she considered to be malfunctioning or lacking opening performance practically revised the process of creating interactivity. It was announced that mechanisms and needed to be fixed. These traces were therefore connected to her works at the the performance would take place in the Museum (as a pre-coded domain for an art performance) Museum every time the audience visited them in her studio. Likewise, Carlo Crovato’s autonomous, during the opening. Therefore, the audience consciously made a decision to watch, observe and even sound generating robots, Little Buggers (2007), detected light sources to create sounds, so they to participate in the performance from the very beginning. The audience was also pre-conditioned were not in communication with every host, but only the ones that they chose. In his studio, Crovato whether or not to be engaged emotionally and intellectually during the performance. showed the process in order to produce these “buggers”: it was a simple act of showing the inner mechanisms of a technological device/apparatus that generated energy as an autonomous piece. The process of the interaction started before the performance, when the audience prepared However, these “buggers” that were spread out on a column and the windows in the museum, themselves to watch a reciprocal or mutual action. The more information the audience was provided practically camouflaged themselves. Similar to Oykut’s works, they required an effort on behalf of about the performative action, the more the expectation for the interaction became shaped. This the audience to be noticed. phase worked in two different directions: while mounting the tension for the action, it also eliminated the unpredictable nature of the performance. Cynthia Zaven, on the other hand, followed a different path in processing her project,Missing Links (In Search of A. Manass) (2007). The contradiction emerged from dispersed parts that formed the 34

In my opinion, Hafez killed the “tension” and the impulse of “unpredictability” as the most significant and powerful qualities of any performance or performative action for the sake of creating and/or mimicking suspension. His installation Suspended... Dispersed... (2007) which re-mimicked and translated this performance to a sound piece, created a repetitive pattern that was subtly waiting to be detected by the audience.

Finally, talks given by Andreas Broeckmann and Gregor Jansen, experiences conveyed by Paolo Rosa, Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag and Sarkis, and Etienne Rey’s presentation all enriched the project during the entire process. The four workshops that were held—especially the ones for children—were invaluable in providing a hands-on experience in learning to use technology in the context of the project.

I have no doubt that, in time, what we have collaboratively accomplished here will eventually form a basis for the infrastructure of presenting and perceiving digital art projects in Turkey. In this sense, the entire project was a demanding yet decisive experience.

References:

Galloway, Alexander R., and Thacker Eugene. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol. How Control Exists After Decentralization.(Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004).

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays”: in The Turning. Trans. W. Lovitt. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

Lovink, Geert. Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004).

Tesla, Nikola. “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace”: in Electrical World and Engineer, 1905.

39 santralistanbul

İstanbul, Turkey

santralistanbul is one of the most significant progressive initiatives that İstanbul Bilgi University has undertaken with the mission of assuming a pioneering role in education, culture and arts. In addition www.santralistanbul.org to its art related and cultural activities, santralistanbul aims at becoming a comprehensive, critical and interdisciplinary international platform with the purpose of contributing to urban revival within an environment of intercultural dialogue and debate.

The Silahtarağa Power Plant, preserved and converted into santralistanbul by İstanbul Bilgi University, was the first urban-scale power plant of the . Installed at the mouth of the Kağıthane and Alibeyköy rivers, at the upper end of the Golden Horn. The plant operated between the years 1914 and 1983, and was the sole electricity provider for İstanbul until 1952.

The Silahtarağa Power Plant covers a total area of 118,000 sqm with its engine houses, boiler houses, administrative buildings, residences and coal depositing areas, making it one of the most important examples of Turkey’s industrial heritage today. Terminating production due to economical reasons in March 1983, the work for the preservation and transformation of the Silahtarağa Power Plant was undertaken by İstanbul Bilgi University in May 2004 and was carried out with the contribution of public and private institutions and non-governmental organisations. One of the most comprehensive projects realised in the field of culture and art in Turkey to date, santralistanbul was opened on 8 September 2007 with the outstanding exhibition “Modern and Beyond” covering the history of art in Turkey during the fifty-year period between 1950 and 2000, and comprising some 500 works by more than a hundred artists and artist groups.

In addition to the Museum of Energy created by the preservation and transformation of the old engine houses, santralistanbul incorporates spaces designed for contemporary artistic and cultural activities, a public library, open air recreation areas, residences and several educational units of İstanbul Bilgi University.

Making sure that the activities held are primarily research and education oriented, santralistanbul targets to become a hub for artistic production by contributing to the cultural spirit throughout Turkey as well as in the neighbouring regions, and to act as a pioneering platform for discussions, research and problem-solving through collaboration with international non-governmental institutions and universities. 40 41

NOMAD SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts

İstanbul, Turkey Ljubljana, Slovenia

NOMAD is an İstanbul-based association that targets the production SCCA-Ljubljana is a non-governmental and non-profit organisation of and experimentation with new patterns in the digital art sphere based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. SCCA-Ljubljana is a member of ICAN through the various lenses of other disciplines. The core of the (International Contemporary Art Network), Amsterdam; EFAH http://nomad-tv.net formation consists of designers, engineers, architects, curators, (European Forum for Arts and Heritage), Brussels; IKT (International and writers. Therefore, the infrastructure is based on technical and Association of Curators of Contemporary Art), Luxemburg; Anna Lindh theoretical levels to provide collaborations with affiliations of artists Foundation, Alexandria; Asociacija (Association of Independent Artists in diverse geographies. NOMAD aims to make local knowledge and and Organisations in the Field of Culture in Slovenia), Ljubljana. production visible and attainable through an international project both in Turkey and abroad. Their objective is to produce, stimulate and mediate innovative artistic and interpretative practices and to encourage international Through NOMAD’s production network, the association aims to links between them. They provide the participants and users of build strong connections across territorial borders through digital contemporary art with knowledge, tools and skills necessary for culture oriented projects. The main goal of these projects is to an emancipated and reflected operation within the art system. By establish a productive communication channel that enables access establishing a support system and cooperating with numerous NGOs, to new resources of information. Since 2002, NOMAD has developed they situate artistic practices into the social framework. Their activities numerous local and international projects including festivals, trigger discursive and social practices, which are quite rare in our exhibitions, performances, multimedia events, experimental film public space, showing that intellectual and social effects of artistic screenings, lectures, panels, and publications. practices are a strategically essential element in the present situation. They provide vital impulses for public discussion, sociability, and, by implication, make important contributions to the construction of the public space. 42 43

SCCA-Ljubljana

Barbara Borčić, Director, SCCA-Ljubljana

The interest of the SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts in participating at the project infrastructure within South-Eastern Europe, and have they in any way influenced the conditions of “Light, Illumination and Electricity” could be described as a two-fold concern connected to the centre’s creating, understanding and distributing the artistic production and critical theory reflected upon in overall vision and its specific programmes. this milieu?

We were quite happy that in connection with this project we collaborated also with Vasıf Kortun and Artist-in-Residence Programme Erden Kosova from İstanbul: first, we commissioned for the publication their discussion on the topic of the increased interest in art from the Balkan Region and in Turkey as well as in İstanbul as a city. The santralistanbul project seemed to correspond well to the SCCA-Ljubljana’s concerns in As a continuation, as a result of Vasıf Kortun’s invitation, we presented the project What Is to Be highlighting the topic of artist-in-residence and its importance in creating social and artistic Done with “Balkan Art”? and its appurtenant publication PlatformaSCCA No.4 at the 9th International international networks that will benefit Slovene cultural policy. Namely, in spite of some attempts to İstanbul Biennial in 2005. establish it on regular basis, there is still no proper artist-in-residence programme in Slovenia. One, the Art Centre in Goričko—the most under-privileged part of Slovenia, on the border with Hungary—had to close in 2007 because of illiterate and greedy local authorities. The other, in the city İstanbul of Celje, is based in a small flat, lacking a solid and constant infrastructure. It was not only that İstanbul seemed to be a very interesting city as a multicultural milieu and a new vital art centre in the border between Europe and Asia, but that the whole context of the programme Reflection upon the Art System with its partners and artists from Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, France, and Slovenia promised an appealing experience and collaboration. However, above all, our curiosity and openness has grown On the other hand, SCCA-Ljubljana has always been interested in interpretation and reflection upon out of interest in taking part in shaping a new and possibly different and innovative form of artist- the system of contemporary art. Let me list two research projects that have dealt with that topic. in-residence programme. Our role—the role of a partner—has been defined as that of consultancy The outcomes of the projects were published in PlatformaSCCA and can be viewed also at the SCCA and curatorial assistance. As the theme of the residency was prescribed in advance, there were not homepage www.scca-ljubljana.si. a lot of possibilities of cooperation in that respect. However, the theme seemed quite consistent with regard to the location of the residency itself and its historic memory. I experienced the traces of an The first projectManifesta in Our Backyard was a critical reflection and an analysis of the issues old power plant in the most satiated way one night strolling around the entirely fenced and brightly concerning the institutionalisation of art and of the operations of the contemporary art system. lit area. Behind the newly built university complex, with its precisely made paths, and along the lawn It was conceived to avoid passive and uncritical acceptance of the representative contemporary there were some forgotten and deserted buildings. Out there, in dark nooks the whizzing sounds art event, Manifesta-European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which was organised in Ljubljana, appeared and were getting stronger and stronger. The electricity was all around yet the illumination Slovenia in 2000. In addition, the aim was to avoid an art system as has been established in the West was not near anymore. The signs and figures from the times passed became visible. The experience and on the other hand to avoid an a priori rejection of it. We were also eager to find out whether was somehow repeated in the projects of the artists whom I had invited to participate. The thrown- there was potential in Slovenia that would strive to introduce different models of functioning and away objects and things were found anew by Marko A. Kovačič while wandering around the city connecting in the world of contemporary arts. of İstanbul and the location of the residency. The archaeological search and anthropological desire of the artist have met with the working and living conditions of the incomplete residency centre. The second project What Is to Be Done with “Balkan Art”? was conceived with the initial objective Migration from one hotel to another, from one part of the city to another has somehow logically of reflecting upon and interpreting the intense interest of the international art system during last made him a flaneur of the metropolis, picking up lost and forgotten items, making recordings of the years in the (re)invention and (re)definition of the Balkans and “Balkan art”. We tackled a somewhat walks and tracking changes in light and sound early in the morning and at the end of the day. Quite yet undiscovered field concerning the correlation of art with ideology, politics and economy by different was the play with light and colours, movement and sound created by Borut Savski. In the questioning the background and implications of the numerous events and exhibitions: What do we entrance hall of the Museum of Energy encountered an illuminated spot. Sometimes. If we were mean, understand and presume when we speak about the Balkans, and especially, about so-called lucky. The suspended object might also be waiting there for a visitor, in the dark and silence. Upon Balkan art? What are the connotations and criteria used to identify certain art practice and production the encounter, when we moved, it began to turn. When we made a noise, it produced certain sounds. as specific for “Balkan art”? What response can we discern in Western Europe to an increasing The installation made us feel as if the space were spinning around. It became visible and audible. A interest in the arts and culture coming from the Balkan region? How have all these events research and narration somehow met in the experimental and experiential artistic practice of both manifested themselves in the changes in the building up and operation of the art system and artists.

44 45

ZINC/ECM (Espace Culture Multimedia) of La Friche La Belle de Mai

Marseille, France

My decision of inviting both artists—Marko A. Kovačič and Borut Savski—to participate in the The goal of ZINC/ECM is to organise a laboratory of new means and santralistanbul artist-in-residence programme was based on their interdisciplinary and polimedia forms of multimedia artistic and cultural expression and authoring artistic practice and more precisely, on the projects they have been currently working on and that are gradually developed as experiments progress throughout the which they could expect to continue developing in the next few years. In this way, I have avoided a years. ZINC/ECM is based in La Friche La Belle de Mai and works for presentation of previously seen works and shifted the emphasis to works in progress. the following aims:

* to provide public access to the internet, * to facilitate the participative use of new information and communication technologies by providing introductory www.zinclafriche.org assistance for new users and facilitating multimedia creation for the public and artists, * to open a space for multidisciplinary artistic experimentation by encouraging collaboration between artists and multimedia designers, * to assist the development of multimedia arts projects, to provide support for organisations, to exchange and share new skills and new working methods, * to organise and take part in public events, facilitate the publication of multimedia works and analyse their impact.

46 47

To Reside, To Experiment, To Search

Claudine Dussollier, Responsible of Exchanges at the Mediterranean, ZINC/ECM

ZINC/ECM is what is called in France a “space of culture and multimedia”, meaning a place where contradictions, with temporary collisions and badly identified needs about the residence; but also, to new artistic, cultural and educative experiments are being practised, using new technologies be sure, about the city itself, which is a real melting pot of condensed memory, and not that easy to established over about ten years. ZINC is a cultural public operator, based in La Friche La Belle de read without local help. İstanbul revealed itself as a chimera, a monster of situations, which fed and Mai in Marseille—a group of artists and producers who acquired an old tobacco factory in the city will feed future works of the collective. centre in 1991. ZINC/ECM has developed some “how to do” techniques such as the animation of actors’ networks, the conception of experimental devices, mediation with diverse audiences, the The experience has been fertile in more than one way, through the human and creative qualities hosting of artists in residences, partnership with projects and with productions in France and in the of Egyptian, Slovenian, Turkish and French artists. Associated partners were attentive and critical, Mediterranean. Actions are conducted locally, on a regional scale in Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur and but also encouraging towards the project team of the residence. The Position collective made a in the Mediterranean, and with partners in Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt and Italy. harvest of images and sounds, but also clarified its creation project, especially through the principle of the rebus, which became the flavour of the exhibition atsantralistanbul , the text principle of the When santralistanbul called on us for “Light, Illumination and Electricity”, a visit was indispensable; installation. It will influence the conception and the form of the final DVD and future installations. hard-hats on heads, the project team and the site deeply appealed to our interests. İstanbul Bilgi The İstanbul stage gave us the basis for the continuity of our research: how to communicate filmed University was putting forth an exciting project with this new cultural campus. This social project had material to Marseille and to Alexandria. The rebus’ polysemy of the phrase will be, from now on, an impact on us at La Friche La Belle de Mai, where a project had already materialised and was in explored through its variants around the diverse languages spoken in these countries. progression. Therefore, it was a good opportunity to establish new connections, including links with NOMAD, İstanbul, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo and SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts. Furthermore, what will santralistanbul do with this experience? In the face of the complexity of the project to be achieved and in spite of the interest of the exhibition, which resulted from it, it does not The connecting thread of the project “Light, Illumination and Electricity”, is reminiscent of the seem certain to us that the team could pursue an open lane. Nevertheless, it would be a pity to confrontation between industries and contemporary arts, research and creation, memory and renounce very quickly the great idea of animating a place where artists in residence, involved modernity, included in the project and the site itself, equally. It was easy to propose participants for students and academics/researchers would meet and look to the city with a new and open point of conferences. Paolo Rosa is an accomplished artist. The studio Azzurro runs is a major reference view. for video art and the production of perceptible universes in which the audience reinvents its place. Etienne Rey is involved in an approach that articulates scientific research and interactive worlds of “Light, Illumination and Electricity” has been favourable to the encounter of worlds. It has permitted thought and sound. the discovery of new potential in İstanbul and it has confirmed the link between creation, experimentation and formation. First tracks: to associate our new partners with the RAMI It was much more difficult than planned to find available artists for a residence abroad for three platform–Rencontres Arts et Multimédia Internationales (International Arts and Multimedia months, due to scheduled agendas, family obligations and professional engagements. Years on Meetings) http://rami.lafriche.org/. And also, to take part in the creation of the Disposition DVD and script question in several medias—text, image, sound—and mediums—web, video and now its digital illuminations of memory from İstanbul to Marseille, via Alexandria… CD-Rom. After initial creations centred on hypertextual scripts supplied by the web, the group question particular correlations between support, mediums, random access memory and virtual memory. Using İstanbul as the city of the first stage of the research calledDisposition was important and relevant for ZINC/ECM, which tries to open spaces for experimentation appropriate to the language of new technologies.

For artists, there was a possible game of connections between Marseille and İstanbul, which resounded within their research hypothesis: problems concerning border, passage and ethnic crossing. However, inside this very question of Disposition, İstanbul seemed ideal to penetrate for the heart of crossings of time, and articulation of the saturation of memory possibly existing in a city and its digital and computer translation. An ideal city? A city mixing history and modernity, a fantasised city…

In reality, the residence has been a nice provocation: being confronted by strong places such as the Museum of Energy, being the first to experiment in the organisation of living quarters, in a campus barely inaugurated with the team of santralistanbul. It has been, in some way, a conjugation of 48

Townhouse Gallery

Cairo, Egypt

Located in Cairo, Egypt, the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art is a space for independent arts, aimed at promoting contemporary arts within the region and internationally. Since its inception, the Townhouse Gallery has established itself as an independent space for www.thetownhousegallery.com the arts, providing an extensive programme of visual arts, film, theatre and music. In addition, community development initiatives as well as educational programmes figure significantly in our multiple mandates.

Townhouse Gallery has expanded over the course of the last years to accommodate demands in the realm of visual and performative arts. The opening of the annex in 2001, and the factory space in the spring of 2002, has significantly expanded their programme as well as their exhibition space.

53

Marko A. Kovačič, Ljubljana

Switch off the Light city archeologistmemory

Normally, we are fascinated with images situated in our focus, images above focus and images that are systematically stored in various collections. However, images as discarded objects continuously escape our focus; they are hidden to our eyes although they often bear many different meanings. I started observing such object-images in İstanbul, the crossroads and juncture of East and West, the city that has filled me with enthusiasm over the diversity of heritage of our remote past and still inarticulate present.

In my investigation of the city, I took over the role of a kind of “contemporary archaeologist” who is systematically researching particular parts of the city, trying to find the answer among things discarded by the local inhabitants as to why so many objects in contemporary consumerist society end up in garbage bins or are discarded on the street. I was collecting objects that attracted me on the streets of İstanbul also because I located in them a certain new content, the possibility to reshape them and in this way render new meaning.

I have exhibited these found, reshaped object-images as some kind of installation (setting) and complement them with video recordings that were simultaneously recorded during my research expeditions.

Switch off the Light, 2007, installation, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul and residency room at santralistanbul 54 55

Process Work 56 57

Exhibition 58 59

Borut Savski, Ljubljana

The Fluidity of Space light play Material,digital sound Colour

About the Hardness of Materials

A light/video image is projected onto the dynamic (motorised) reflective object (‘the reflector’) hanging from the ceiling. The reflector is supposed to change its shape according to the sound in the space. The sound and light in space also change the computer generated video projection and the sound of the computer itself. The relatively simple projected image is changed by the action of the reflecting object—scattering all around the space. This creates a kind of all-enveloping medium.

“Fluidity of Space” is a poetic title for the holistic approach in building up an interactive installation. The key is in translations between the various physical entities—sound, vision (light, colour), electronics and mechanics—and in creating a system that acts as a whole and is able to envelope the visitor (the observer) as an immanent part of the installation. The system is responsive on the level of its sensory equipment—microphone for sound, camera for vision.

A system such as this can be called a balanced complex system: the elements are interconnected and act as translation objects for the outputs from other elements. A number of such interdependent subsystems produce an extremely complex number of feedback loops that make up one system. I call it “a body”.

The observer is observed; the listener is listened to. There is a high level of autonomy applied on the level of the system itself, so that it can survive (‘live’) without the human observer. As we know, it is the human observer that brings in the reflection, but here we made a joke along the lines of the literal understanding of the word—here we have a machine that actually works with reflection.

I use the computer physical inputs as sensors: a microphone as the ear; the video camera as the eye... The computer audio output is the Mouth speaking, and the video projector output is the ... Hm? What kind of output do we have that could correspond to the light? Softer than metal, lighter than wood, lighter than sound? The material the dreams are made of? The Mind, the Soul...

About the Materiality

Light is a pointed/projected physical property. It is directive—it is coming from a precise energetic point in space, bumps into materials and changes direction by the so-called reflection on the material surface. In this sequential way, it fills up the space in a much different way than sound.

Contrary to light, sound is the property of material—it spreads in the materials. Materials are physical entities—usually hard, but they can be lighter or heavier, harder or softer—iron, wood, water, air. The materials get permeated and soaked with sound. Therefore, I talk about fluidity. Sound in a closed space reflects and makes resonating patterns—standing waves. The structure of space defines the structure of sound.

Light (and colour) is the energy that spreads as a pectrum of electromagnetic waves. It gets filtered easily, these are then colours. Light can touch the materials in many different ways. On some surfaces, it enters almost fully—warming the material. This is then black colour. On some materials 60 61

Process

it reflects almost immediately—this can then become white colour. However, light can enter some materials (air, water, transparency...) and is only slowly absorbed.

However, the light is twofold: as a representation known as photons it can move the materials—it presents us with a symbolic notion of mass. Also, the light can be moved by large masses—the planets. I would say that light is a softer material than sound.

Digital as the Representation of Light Materials

The computer is the heart of the system. I use the software machine to create dynamic algorithms for sound and light generation/transformation.

The computer data has no mass, but the computer still needs time to make the translations. It has inertia. Inertia is the impossibility of a system to make a change from one value to another in an infinitely short time. The idea of inertia is the link between the analogue and digital. The digital is the representation on the level of numbers that can easily jump from 00000000 to 11111111 in one step. Analogue is the representation that has to do all the steps between 00000000 and 11111111. A great number of steps...

The analogue is the property of the mechanical world (the world of “harder” materials). However, digital computers are used to handle discrete logic—the representations here are numbers—as in associative thinking. Therefore, they are appropriate for modelling the relationships of the “softer” materials—ideas and thoughts. Moreover, they can do analogue too: bounding the “softies” together with the sequential/analogue/material logic—to form new systems.

Fluidity as metaphor for soft material... Maybe I could swim in such a space? Or, move in slow motion, as in outer space? But it should also be responsive, soft, and warm to make us want to play with it. Play as in a child’s play? Or, play as in a musician’s way?

The Fluidity of Space, 2007, installation, Artist’s Collection of Useless Objects, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul 62 63

Exhibition Adham Hafez, Cairo

Suspended... Dispersed...

Suspensiongenerator sound

The artist was invited by santralistanbul to produce an installation to be put on display inside the Museum of Energy, which was originally not designed to present contemporary art. This ultimately led the artist to question the process of “what constitutes the process of art making, the role and definition of an ‘artistic’ space, and the function an artist plays in this process?”

Such fundamental questions that rose on a conscious and an unconscious level led the artist to redefine his role and redefine the whole concept of artistic representation.

The prescribed notions and strategies of work led the artist to use the “body” as an alternative medium of expression. This being inevitably linked with the definition of art space as performative and non-performative.

The problematics of the performance ultimately led to a redefinition of what performance is and what is expected of a performance.

An essential dichotomy existed from the very start between the definition of a Museum as a space “reserved” for the display of objects (objects deemed of value historically, politically, culturally, etc.) and the concept of performance. On one hand, the Museum of Energy in İstanbul perceived “western objects” as objects of value, which defeats the purpose of a Museum, and on the other hand, there is the artist’s definition of what a performance space is and what an artistic performance is.

The two mutually fed each other and the display of the body, rather than the display of art took place. And the performance became an impersonation rather than representation.

The themes used by the artist highlighted this altered meaning of performance and connotations of performing. Thus, overlapping with such notions as prostitution, stylised forms of art, pleasure, happiness, and constant enduring interruption.

The artist perceived suspension as ultimately an exaggerated from of entertaining. The absence of a regular process of art making raised the problematic of “agency”, i.e. the capacity to choose, manipulate and undertake a certain action, and artistic choice for a performer.

Therefore, entertainment in this light entailed an element of uprootedness/decentredness, namely, suspension.

Performance was juxtaposed with grotesqueness of dramatised gestures, gestures that are dramatised for different ends and different purposes.

The definition of “happiness”, “pleasure”, “satisfaction” was repeatedly questioned in interplay between the performer and the audience. 64 65

Process

Suspension was presented in the sense of “interventio” /”delay”/”interruption”. An interruption of the actual state of performing. The performer’s “real” state of being was “suspended” for an “esteemed”, “perceived”, “desired” state of being. The performer “indulged” in a prescribed modality of performing, forced to present himself in a particular, “preferred” state of being.

The artist is compelled to represent himself in this “stylised” form, a form where the audience has historically derived pleasure witnessing and watching.

The multitude of references used emphasised the discordant elements of performance done to the extent of the grotesque, the clown references, the court jester, the prostitute and the Geisha.

The artist repeatedly points to the example of highly stylised presentations that borderlines body mutilation creating an aggravated sense of exaggeration.

The singing of a castrati Baroque aria only serves as a good example of how the suspension of sex (castration) qualifies as an interrupted state of being creating a dramatic context where the aforementioned exaggeration becomes very clear.

In this context, suspension is naturally espoused with “climax”. The artist never really ends his performance. For as long as the context continues the “impersonation” of performance continues, the artist only becomes real when he is “unsuspended”. The artist becomes an exaggerated representation of what is deemed desirable, the erformance” becomes a critique of the space and the concept of art making relevant to the particular creation and production processes of this work.

Text by: Ismail Fayed, Art Critique and Dramaturg

Suspended... Dispersed..., 2007, live performance and installation, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul 66 67

Performance

Exhibition Opening 68 69

Exhibition 71

Cevdet Erek, İstanbul

Dark Light Dark

dark light city Translationdigital memory day light

DRUM LIGHTS CAIRO

Lyrics:

dark light dark 1 0 1 hit retreat hit again breakfast break the fast

on off on on off on

chi chi chi chi chichi chi chic chi chi chichichi

on off on on off on

... .I brought the relay sequencer* to Cairo.

.Dalia took us to a special Ramadan evening concert in the Al-Azhar park. ‘Arabic scented jazz’ was collaborating with Sufis. The saggat (hand cymbal) player, dressed traditional, had an interesting technique of playing. The red bread sound engineer advised a studio.

.I was planning to get a duff (frame drum) and saggats for recording with the sequencer. Someone told me that his friend Ahmed could provide the instruments and brought him to the studio. Surprisingly, Ahmed (Al Gazar), who appeared in the studio, was the player I was watching in the concert. I asked him happily, if he would be interested in making a jam with sequencer. He accepted.

.I ordered a ruler in a sign maker shop. Laser on plexi, for drawing timelines.

.The other day i brought the new drum and saggats to a recording studio. Attached the sequencer on several points of both and threw a few tracks of recordings. 72 73

.I got used to Ramadan.

.That or previous night, I was chatting with Karim, who mentioned that he was preparing to engage with Layla. While discussing about dress, shoes etc. for the ceremony, he told me that he needed a design for engagement rings. Both of their names would be placed on the exterior of the ‘modern’ and ‘simply’ done rings.

.I tried drafting ‘Layla’ and ‘Karim’ in Kufi, the very geometric style of Arabic calligraphy. Kufi can, mostly, be constructed by even sized squares, as in the forms of a Tetris game, or any bit-based typeface/graphic.

.We printed the graphics and Karim decided to take them to Layla to ask about her idea. She was not sure and we decided to find someone to produce the rings.

.Ahmed arrived and recorded some saggats of various sizes on top of present tracks.

.After the traditional Ramadan breakfast of the Townhouse Gallery, I mailed the two images to Burak (NY) and asked him if he could make a simple digital animation, which would show the two names slowly getting into each other. A very kitsch interpretation of two souls who decide to walk together.

.He asked me to convert the two graphics into sets of 1s and 0s, in which black squares would refer to 1 and white squares refer to 0. I applied the recipe and sent back to Burak. Karim: Layla: 000000000000111 110000010000001 001110000000101 100111010000001 001010001000100 100101010000101 111111111011100 111101111111111 100000000010000 000000000000000 100001010110000 000000000101000 74 75

.In another evening after dinner, 2-3 days after recording the sequencer, i was curious about what the machine was playing. We had programmed it back in early 2006, i never changed the programmed rhythm and however, i didn’t have it written somewhere. I decided to transcribe the machine and made some listening and writing. Each ‘tick’ of a single relay, or an ‘on’ off the red light on the sequencer would be written as 1, and going to rest position or blinking of the light would be written as 0.

.With Karim, we ordered the rings. Jeweler was advised by his mother. We were supposed to receive the rings on the day of my flight back to Istanbul. I saw the building covered by Kufi.

.‘Ah, what an image’

.I tried converting this 1s and 0s into another image of blacks and whites, just the direct opposite process of converting a Layla to a set of 1s and 0s.

.I received the ruler. From 1974 to now (of that time), in Arabic, 1cm=1 year. Rough, but beautiful. .I edited the recording, it was not there yet. 76 77

.Karim received the rings: He thought the jeweler cheated because the rings were done badly. He gave them back and took the money back.

.Back in Istanbul, we had to decide about the place of the installation at the Museum of Energy. Among some spaces which Ayşegül showed, I was impressed by a room, below one of the turbines, which had two horizontal openings in each side. The room would provide the ideal site to view the flow of time, the flowing transcription, from both sides (past and future), instead of facing it. As a plus, the hanged frame drum would be viewed from both sides; from front—the skin, from back—the sequencer.

.I contacted a jeweller from Çemberlitaş a month after the closing of the exhibition and ordered the two golden rings.

.I saw a sign with ‘flowing text’—a day before the opening of the exhibition. It was made up of 8 lines. Reached the maker,

.I saw a sign with ‘flowing text’—a day before the opening of the exhibition. It was made up of 8 lines. Reached the maker, Mustafa, and e-mailed the transcription to him. He programmed the panel with 8 lines LED flow and brought it directly to the exhibition hall.

.Exhibition opens. 78

*In early 2006, I began working on a percussion sequencer with the technical guidance of Kees Redijk and Stefan Kuderna in Amsterdam. The focus was on the possibility of distributing the sounds created by programmed actions of percussing, knocking, tapping etc. to several locations in a certain room. The very first prototype for the sequencer included 8 relays (Relays are originally used as electronic or electromechanical switching devices, typically operated by a low voltage that controls a higher-voltage circuit and turns it on or off). Each relay, after receiving a signal of 1, would gently hit on the surface which it was attached to, creating a percussive sound colored by the nature of the material.

Dark Light Dark, 2005-2007, mixed media installation, Artist’s Collection, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul 81

Collective Position: Rémy Rivoire, Renaud Vercey and Bruno Voillot, Marseille

The Memory of the Rebus in Electronic Illuminations natural light memory Electronicartificial light IlluminationBlack box

“Medieval memoria thus includes, in our terms, ‘creative thought’, but not thoughts created ‘out of nothing’. It built upon remembered structures ‘located’ in one’s mind as patterns, edifices, grids, and—most basically—association-fabricated networks of ‘bits’ in one’s memory that must be ‘gathered’ into an idea. Memory work is also process, like a journey: it must therefore have a starting-point. And this assumption leads again to the need for ‘place’, because remembering is a task of ‘finding’ and of ‘getting from one place to another’ in your thinking mind.” —Mary Carruthers*

The installation Disposition presented at the Museum of Energy, santralistanbul, consists of nine video monitors and nine DVD readers synchronised in image and sound, as well as of two signs/neon signs. The exhibition space, an old room of machines devoid of any opening, introduces the characteristics of a “black box”. The installation consists of the audio-visual re-transcription of a sentence extracted from the work of Joseph Conrad, In the Heart of Darkness: “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma.” The audio-visual montage and the layout of screens are implemented according to the principle of the rebus or “puzzle-letters” in English.

Several reasons motivated the choice of composition and presentation. First of all, this installation is in keeping with the realisation, which emerges from a DVD, of having as the subject the medium of memory and the dynamic relation of text/image/sound: we would like to make visible the generative processes linking the text, image and sound like electronic illuminations.

The rebus, through the association of letters, images and signs, is the translation into image of a sentence or a text following a particular syllabic cutout: it plays on the polysemy of phonemes. It is also used as a mnemotechnical means.

Therefore, the sentence “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma,” lends itself to numerous cut-outs, to different interpretations and associations of letter/image/sign in the way of memorising a sentence. The enigmatic character of the rebus is accentuated here by translation: an English sentence is translated into French, and then transposed into an audiovisual rebus for an İstanbulite public... Crossing from one language to another, from written to oral, from the paper medium to the screen, all these transformations of the text make the rebus not only simply enigmatic but also mysterious and poetic. If the sentence led the architecture of the work, it became completely invisible, or even inaudible for the spectator; it is therefore not a matter here of literally illustrating a text but of using it as an image medium, playing with the discordance of interpretations within the same language and all the more so from one language to another.

A French spectator will be able to try to solve the rebus and, if need be, to find the initial sentence, but it is sure that a completely different sentence will be produced by a non-French-speaking visitor.

Formally, the installation Disposition at santralistanbul as part of the residence “Light, Illumination and Electricity” resembles in this case, and by analogy, electronic stained glass windows. It puts into images a text with a view to producing memory, according to different techniques but, showing some similarities nevertheless: screens/windows, artificial light/natural light, factory/church, graven animated images/graven fixed images, earthly sound/sacred chant, and visit/procession. 82 83

Process

The exhibition space resembles a cranium, the original black box, seat of the cerebrum, of our memory, our imagination, the place of production of mental images, an electrical interface between language and sensory perception.

The Disposition DVD, and its electronic illuminations is in the process of production. Following this phase in İstanbul, the creation will be displayed in two other emblematic cities of particular relation to memory: Marseille and Alexandria.

The news of creation is visible online at the address: www.disposition.fr

*Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 23.

/Disposition/, 2007, video installation, Artists’ Collection, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul and Open studio at santralistanbul 84 85

Exhibition Cynthia Zaven, Beirut Missing Links (In Search of A. Manass)

reality blurry Memorysearch light

“3 September 2007. Just arrived. The boats outside are almost moored to this Bosphorus university residence. I still have to adjust to my new space and its silence. I’m finally in İstanbul, the city of my grandfather, whom I’ve never known.”

Missing Links (In search of A. Manass) is part of a broader work that attempts to incorporate the concept of memory with that of fantasy. Or how to tackle one’s own family history when over the years, different stories have been told.

I went looking for my ancestor’s traces in the city, from archive registers to physical locations; investigating a man who was my grandfather in a city that was not mine. All I had of him were romanticised notions: he was born in 1893, he lived in the palace, his mother was a pianist, his family were wealthy. And all I knew for sure was the fact that he was a painter who, unlike the Armenians of the diaspora, had chosen deliberately to immigrate to Beirut in the beginning of the twentieth century. My search was close to impossible. The lack of precise information left me with fragmented material consisting of old family photographs and stories that were told within the family.

Throughout my stay I kept a diary. It was to become the alternative narrative alongside a search that was getting more illusory by the day. On the back of the pictures I had of him were some numbers and street names, more likely to be the photographer’s address. The absence of material to document his history was slowly contributing to making him become a ‘material’ himself; I would walk those streets, re-inventing him, re-creating episodes of his life, re-writing his history while being inspired by my family’s tales. By slowly moving away from reality, tracking down real evidence became almost unnecessary.

My installation is an apocryphal biography made of text, retouched photographs and composed music. It’s a personal attempt to unveil a man from behind one of the many blurs in my genealogy. It was presented in two venues, the Museum of Energy and my working studio that I gradually changed into a hotel room, a duplicate of one of the eight rooms I stayed and worked in during my two-month residency in İstanbul. The hotel room generated a feeling of privacy and intimacy while remaining impersonal: it contributed therefore in creating the necessary distance I needed to recompose my grandfather’s chronicle.

Inside the Museum of Energy, in the middle of a dark corridor, stood a piano with missing keys, a small light illuminating the blurry photograph standing on the desk. A few meters away, 2 sets of headphones hung under the staircase, each one playing a looped soundtrack I had composed. Those different elements served as clues in the display for the visitor to connect with if he wished to do so. He would become himself the investigator in search of the missing links, either through sounds, or indications on a map. The story as a whole was illustrated in photos, text, sound and studio music. 86 87

Process

“...My mother was thirteen when he passed away one day... All he left behind in this world erew his paintings, some photographs, and İstanbul in which to search for his invisible traces, relics of a life that could only exist in my mind.”

Missing Links (In Search of A. Manass), 2007, installation, piano, hotel room, photos, text, composed music and extracted sounds between 5’ to 17’, Artist’s Collection, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul and residency room at santralistanbul 88 89

Exhibition 90 91

Work 93

Ceren Oykut, İstanbul

Sketch Repair city Electricitytranslation

During this project I sketched the strange machines of the Power Plant: huge cables, switches, and clocks that are inside the Museum of Energy. These features are interesting indications of the history of İstanbul.

I like drawing stories based on the details that surround my environment. This work is a combination of drawing and animation. I drew and worked on my sketches at the studio at santralistanbul with my computer and recorded them in real time with the camera. I repaired the sketches, transforming each energy machine into monsters and into various abstract characters. I performed there for a week and created five short films from this sketching process.

I created the sound of the drawing-videos by recording my working process with the camera and by playing with the “Tape Loop Machine”, an analogue sampler designed by Carlo Crovato. The tape sound coming from the homemade machine accompanied my plain black and white drawings.

Sketch Repair, 2007, drawing-video, Artist’s Collection, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul and Open studio at santralistanbul 94 95

Process Exhibition 96 97

Work Carlo Crovato, Leipzig, London Little Buggers energy sonic Autonomoussunlight sound

Fourteen autonomous sound producing robots were arranged in the Museum of Energy at santralistanbul. K:I:S:S: is a useful acronym that serves as a guiding principle when designing installations. Keep It Simple Stupid. The title for the first artist-in-residence programme at santralistanbul was simple: “Light, Illumination and Electricity”. To create an installation that fulfilled these three phenomena, as well as satisfying my need to create a work which was independent from the electrical grid, was my aim.

A Photovore is a light-eater, consisting of a small solar panel, an integrated circuit chip, a capacitor, a resistor and a speaker, very basic, very simple. Any robot that uses light (rather than batteries) as a source of energy is called a photovore. Little Buggers feed off light. They feed and instantly turn their food energy into sound energy. There is no storage system, no battery. So no light means no sound. The sound intensity is dependent on the light intensity. The Little Buggers were arranged in two locations in the museum.

The first group, a group of five, was placed on one of the massive vertical iron girders that form the structure of the museum. They were designed to emit tones when in direct sunlight. On a sunny day bright white sunlight would fall on this area of the museum between three and four o’clock, so they would only work if both these parameters were fulfilled.

The second group, a group of nine, was placed in one of the large windows of the museum. The window was located in a position that received only indirect daylight, therefore not bright white sunlight but rather low-intensity light. The first group would only emit sound if the conditions were favourable, that is: direct contact with bright sunlight. The second group was designed to emit tones in low light conditions—tones ranging from monotonous continuous squeals to varying staccato rhythms depending on very subtle changing lighting conditions.

The installation was meant to be discovered by visitors by the incidental nature of the Bugs. They were small and almost invisible due to their specific locations, their components blending in with the dark colours of the iron work to which they were clinging. If the day was particularly dark with no lighting variations a visitor could miss the works or pay no attention due to the absence of tone or by the fact that the tones were not attractive or alluring enough therefore ignored as possibly only a broken installation. It is only when conditions were favourable, that is fluctuations in lighting intensity illuminating the bugs creating varying electrical currents, that the Bugs came alive showing their sonic personalities and demanding attention.

Little Buggers, 2007, sound installation, Artist’s Collection, Museum of Energy, santralistanbul and Open studio at santralistanbul 98 99

Process Exhibition

103

Timeline

14-15.12.2006 Partners meeting in İstanbul to discuss the project activities and the timetable, and to choose the artists.

22.01.2007 Partners meeting in İstanbul.

01.09.2007 Beginning of the residency.

04.09.2007 santralistanbul tour with the resident artists.

04.09.2007 Orientation meeting for the resident artists.

04.09.2007 Biweekly meetings with the curator.

01.10.2007 Cevdet Erek departs to Cairo for residency.

04.10.2007 Partners meeting in İstanbul to talk about the residency and about the exhibition.

05.10.2007 Talks programme opening; talks of Andreas Broeckmann, Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag with the participation of all partners.

05.10.2007 Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag’s workshop with İstanbul Bilgi University students.

16.10.2007 Presentation of Etienne Rey and talk of Paolo Rosa.

21.10.2007 Cevdet Erek returns from Cairo.

22-23.10.2007 Sarkis meeting with project artists.

25.10.2007 Upgrade! İstanbul hosts the residency artists to present and talk about their works.

27.10.2007 Workshop for children by Ceren Oykut.

28.10.2007 Workshop for children by Aylin Kalem and Beliz Demircioğlu.

30.10-02.11.2007 Workshop with local artists by Carlo Crovato.

01.11.2007 Opening of the project exhibition.

02.11.2007 Partners meeting in İstanbul.

02.11.2007 Gregor Jansen’s talk, with the participation of all partners.

03.11.2007 Workshop for children by Carlo Crovato.

04.11.2007 Workshop for children by Erhan Muratoğlu.

20.06.2008 End of the Project. 105

Workshops

The Continuous Birth of Light in Our Installations 22-23 October 2007 by Sarkis with resident artists

Sarkis uses “light” to construct the ethereal body of his work. His works therefore demonstrate extraordinary experiments with light. He often also opens up a dialogue between his work and the audience. His significant and critical approach towards the notion of “re-presentation” and “museums” played a great role in the decision to invite him to the project as one of the guiding mentors for the artists. During his stay, Sarkis held an evaluation workshop with resident artists and their work. On the first day, he presented himself to the artists and explained the aim of the meeting. Similar to his practice in France with local and international artists, he spent hours on each artist’s work in order to understand the developmental process. Following discussions with the artists, Sarkis shared his ideas and experiences with them. The workshop not only made it possible for the artists to talk about the work they produced specifically for this residency, it also offered them the possibility to discuss their work in general.

Cyclop 27 October 2007 by Ceren Oykut with children aged between six and ten years old

Light exposes the hidden particularities of objects and materials. Children between six and ten years old worked with an overhead projector and a slide machine to discover the details in the reflection of objects. They made paintings by using transparent, half transparent and non-transparent materials. They used materials such as tape, glass paint, glue, marker pens, ropes, strings, plastic bags, fabrics, some glittering objects, modelling dough, sand, and soil. They painted and made collages on A4 transparent papers and experimented with light, shadow, and colour filtering. These collages were then put under the overhead projector and blown up in size. Children also made small paintings (about 2x3 cm) with the same materials. When these paintings were blown up to 20x30 cm with the use of a slide machine, they were able to observe small details.

Light Travels Through My Body 28 October 2007 by Aylin Kalem and Beliz Demircioğlu with children aged between eight and twelve years old

This is a movement workshop realised with the use of specially written codes using Max/MSP/Jitter software. It is a design for perception suggestive of the redefinition of time and space.

Based on the relations of the physical body with its shadow and its processed images on the projection, this exercise is triggering improvisation and creativity by re-positioning the parameters of the space, and transferring virtual movement to an actual environment. 106 107

This experience provides the participant with four different time-lines in real-time by creating visuals animation they had watched so far, the kids learned some vital tips on how to capture still images that fuse the matrices of the slightly delayed present, five seconds earlier and ten seconds earlier. and combine them in an orderly fashion to end up with a “moving” and “animated” image. With the The expected time-line of the movement is reversed and a relation among the movements of these help the instructors, they had a hands-on experience with digital cameras and computers that are different time-lines is suggested. When the person is not moving the image becomes concrete and specially configured for animation production. In a short period of two hours, they made when there is movement the image becomes blurred. It is suggestive of different forms of wonderful figurines out of Play-Doh clay, shot them sequentially with digital cameras, downloaded conceiving movement and stillness. them onto computers and combined them with Quicktime software. At the end of the workshop all the children’s great pieces of stop-motion animation were watched contently and proudly. Prior to the experimental work within an interactive environment, there is a section devoted to physical games aimed at augmenting the perception of the participant in relation to the self, to the confronted other, to the one next to oneself, to the self in the group and to the occupied space. There is also a section in which the participant is presented with visual examples of possible forms of interaction. These exercises prepare the participant to a diversity of experiences in the technological environment.

Sounds Light Work 3 November 2007 by Carlo Crovato with children aged between eleven and twelve years old

The workshop aimed to provide creative fun with the simple electrical phenomenon of light and sound. Children were asked to bring some old electronics to the workshop. They were encouraged to use spare parts to make things such as speakers from wire, wood and magnets. They built a simple radio and made simple lights with LEDs. They were presented a selection of possibilities and each child could select what they wished to do.

The workshop also introduced the invisible phenomenon of electricity and how to manipulate its properties in the visible manifestations of sound and light. Using cheap common consumer electronics (cassette recorders, radios, electronic scrap) for spare parts, children made unusual sound/light objects. There were also elements of “circuit bending” and experimental audio noise.

Alternative Current: A Stop-Motion Animation Workshop 4 November 2007 by Erhan Muratoğlu with children aged between ten and twelve years old

The invention of photography and cinema indicates an important milestone in the technological journey of mankind. Capturing motion by means of light sensitive devices and reproducing it synthetically was a great achievement whilst producing motion via animation was something that was regarded as magical, in those early years. Today, we still experience similar excitement while watching various works of animation. Animation still preserves its magical and alternative stance in our visual culture.

This workshop, named “Alternative Current”, invited very young and eager people to come and play within the magical world of animation. The youngsters who attended the workshop showed wonderfully fast learning abilities. After exchanging their personal experiences of any kind of 109

Talks

Machine Lights—Projected Light in Contemporary Art 5 October 2007 by Andreas Broeckmann

The emission and the projection of light have played a significant role in the visual and performing arts for a long time. In his talk, Andreas Broeckmann highlighted a number of recent artworks which deal with projected light as a medium. While the Austrian artist group Granular Synthesis have used abstract video images as an extrovert source of light for their performances, the stroboscopes in Herwig Weiser’s installation Death Before Disko are all turned towards the inside of this spectacular machine.

Carsten Nicolai’s project for the SPOTS light and media facade, SENSOR, took readings of sound and visual events in the environment and reflected them back as waves of light scanning across the building’s skin. Finally, by means of his “Exploding Camera”, French artist Julien Maire deconstructs the notion of the recorded video image and demonstrates it as an effect of the projection of light into the camera’s sensor system.

Broeckmann framed the analysis of these works by a presentation of the Berlin-based laboratory for art and media, TESLA, which he runs together with two colleagues. TESLA is an art centre that supports the production and presentation of contemporary, media-based art practices, and that fosters a critica.

Light and Narration in Sensible Environments 16 October 2007 by Paolo Rosa

In his talk Rosa outlined Studio Azzurro’s experience in projecting “sensible environments”, through works in which light reacts when touched, where images live in relationship with the spectator or interact with his/her curiosity. Light becomes the kinetic painting that paint in fresco the space as a sixteenth century cathedral, telling today’s stories. This light gives form to an interlacing of real and virtual that now makes part of the landscape of our everyday lives. Light also gives matter to presence of things. At the end, light can disappear or extinguish itself. He discoursed about contemporary art through regular public salons and debates.

Art and Knowledge in Balance: Light Art from Artificial Light 2 November 2007 by Gregor Jansen

Discussing the importance of knowledge in the present world, such as the knowledge of “light” adjustment in the new media art “Light art from artificial light exhibition” in ZKM, combines the usage of electricity/physics/chemistry/mechanics/computers in a multi-facet representation. How can we balance the cultural function of such knowledge in the involved multiple knowledge structures, taking into account the similarities and differences of knowledge and art? 110 111

Presentations

Diverse though the lines may be that led in the twentieth century to the use of artificial light as the Borders & The Infinite—Forming Gas and Electromagnetic Waves: medium of art and then to the development of Light Art as an independent genre, they are coherent. While until the end of the nineteenth century, painting merely depicted light, indeed primarily sidereal “sonArc-ion” Project (Würtenbergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart) light (the sun and the stars), as of 1900 a paradigm shift took place away from the representation 5 October 2007 (of light) to the reality (of light): Art started working with real light. It was not natural light that was by Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag depicted illusionistically, but artificial light that was really used. Just as the clock had introduced a shift from sidereal time (derived from the stars) to artificial chronometry, so electricity initiated a Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag presented his on-going, multidisciplinary project, entitled sonArc::project switch from the natural light of the sun to the artificial light of the lamp. In the age of the industrial during the course of the residency. This project is a comprehensive research in the field of electricity revolution, the picture became a screen. A picture represents light, a screen receives light and with multiple formats as video, spatial installation and performance. Sonntag consequently defines radiates it. Light was no longer captured but exuded. The artwork became the generator or emitter the project as “cycle in alternating aesthetic formats: the project aims at searching the essence of of real light. electricity as well as the possibility of domesticating lightning since 2003: that is, in search of the electric/electronic sources and, at the same time, visions of our media age”.

Sonntag’s work may possibly be traced through aspects of and conceptual art, hence his interest in new and experimental music, and he has repeatedly cooperated with scientific laboratories. Alongside the examination of human perception, the question at the centre of his artistic work concerns visions of modernity as “an unfinished project”.

sonArc::ema – (Z) OZONE 2007 An attempt to domesticate lightning at the cupola of the Württembergischen Kunstverein in Stuttgart. Bolts of lightning were directed via the “golden dear”, situated on top of the building, straight to the exhibition space and were controlled from there. As the result of this attempt, high-voltage plasmas and electromagnetic fields were sculpturally formed. Through this work, the visitors were able to follow weather conditions on a computer that was logged into a meteorological early-warning network.

sonArc::ema – RADIAL 2006 High-voltage installation In this case, the work tried to form the architectonics of the exhibition as an electronic high-voltage installation. Sonntag refers to it as “an interactive concert”, consisting of four different electromagnetic fields, which can be performed by the audience. The visitors had the opportunity to surf “wireless” through the signals and the noise of the medium-wave ‘ether’ and to transform this into sound, light and ozone. With “sonArc::ema – RADIAL” Sonntag has created an electronic instrument which makes the air oscillate by means of electricity. He also presented a performance of this installation together with his N-solab at the museum night in 2007.

DYSTOPIA – radial 2007 The visitors experienced the work by resting on a 600 litre water membrane while using earphones. The aim was to change and control the perception of the visitor by creating a feeling of submer gence in an endlessly falling room. This effect was induced by the electromagnetic waves which were converted into acoustic and physical oscillations. Furthermore, through a field of black oil, the oscillations were translated into visual wave patterns. 112 113

sonArc::ion#1, 2005/06 Through the appreciation of our micro-interactions, Delay~ aims at eliciting on a more macro level, 1 channel HD Video and 5 channel Sound Installation (130 minute loop) the palpable grasp of what these fluxes, converted in energy-form, represent in our world: flux of This video and sound installation was based on Sonntag’s opera ‘sonArc::ion-PROLOGUE‘. This economic capitals, flux of air, butterfly effects, information flows, and the worldwide information net. opera was composed of thunderbolts, the ether and the 100-year plus history of electrical/electronic music: from pure RAW-data-extensions via data taken from “Studie2” by Karl Heinz Stockhausen What structures are entailed in these? How do we represent them and how do we imagine to the freely swinging, singing high voltage plasmas, which exchange their data by “talking” purely ourselves within them? And how do these fluxes turn out to represent now also a part of the “living”, electronically-produced sound and emission, which the English engineer and inventor, William the somewhat “constituted body” of our environment? Duddel had already conceived in 1899. Emmanuel Vergès www.wkv-stuttgart.de Doctor of Information/Communication www.sonarc-ion.de Director of ZINC/ECM France

Delay~ References: 16 October 2007 by Etienne Rey 1. Dirigeable: www.dirigeable.org 2. Mille Mondes: www.millemondes.org The work Delay~ suggests a questioning of our relations with our environment: an environment 3. Stanislas Lem in Solaris, Gallimard, 2002 which is described as an environment of energy, of flux and where phenomena induced by attractions and interactions between different aspects of this environment—lights, sounds, movements—are brought out. This work is set up as a sound piece in a space that we are led to discover: strolling between tight wires, oscillating rods of iron wires carrying diodes, sound boxes below a tight net of fine threads of wires, below and within a fragile structure in movement /oscillation.

Etienne Rey follows the line of thought that he started with Dirigeable 1 and Mille Mondes,2 in thematic coherence, by this phrase by Stanislas Lem:3 “We’re in search of nothing but the man. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” In Delay~, he places digital beings in virtual sound spaces into an installation where we are interacting agents and interpreters of a form of “natural symphony”: a position that we assume everyday in environments oversaturated by information, sound and noise. The created composition, far from being chaotic and uncertain, builds itself, and partakes within a play between space, us and the “aspects” of this environment (which are material).

The aim of this work is to make us realise our influences intertwined with the general flux and to investigate what these interactions produce. The work proposes direct experience of a micro-localised link between the public and the installation in order to make us feel this fragile but universal relation of our connections to things: the things that become more and more in our societies, digital and informational. However those digital things paradoxically take shape through waves, vibrations, oscillations: eminently natural, analogical, oscillating, fragile phenomena. The work reminds us of the fragility of our position. 114 115

“Light, Illumination and Electricity” meets UPGRADE! İstanbul

25 October 2007

Upgrade! İstanbul is a monthly gathering for new media artists, academicians, practitioners, curators and all active participants of digital culture, organised by NOMAD and hosted by santralistanbul. The Upgrade! series also operate as a forum for the presentation of new projects to foster dialogue and create opportunities for collaboration within digital culture. In this context, on 25 October 2007, Upgrade! İstanbul hosted the curator and the resident artists of the “Light, Illumination and Electricity” project. After the introductory talk by Başak Şenova, artists presented their works-in-progress for the project by addressing their backgrounds, working methodologies, artist statements and research, along with reference to their previous work.

Upgrade! is an international emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralised, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art and work on the agenda for the following year.

Current Nodes: Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgrade (Serbia), Berlin (Germany), Boston (United States), Brussels/Ghent (Belgium), Chicago (United States), Lisbon (Portugal), Johannesburg (South Africa), İstanbul (Turkey), Montreal (Canada), Munich (Germany), New York (United States), Oklahoma City (United States), (France), Salvador (Brazil), São Paulo (Brazil), Scotland (United Kingdom), Seattle (United States), (Second Life), Seoul (South Korea), Skopje (Macedonia), Sofia (), Tel Aviv-Jerusalem (Israel), Tijuana (Mexico), Vancouver (Canada), Warsaw (Poland), and Wellington (New Zealand).

Organisations: Eyebeam, Turbulence.org, New Media Scotland, Art Centre Nabi, The Western Front, The Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), InterSpace, i-camp, DCA, CCA, No-Org.net, NOMAD/ santralistanbul, program angels/lothringer13, Open-Node.com, t-u-b-e, C-M.TV, Lisboa 20, AT. joburg, University of the Witwatersrand, Ars Longa, 911 Media Arts Center, Ars Virtua / BitFactory (Second Life), Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. 116 117

Biographies

Funda Açıkbaş has a BA degree in Management of Preforming Arts from İstanbul Bilgi University. Works at santralistanbul since 2006 in, International Projects and Museum of Energy content preparation research asistant.

Ayşenur Akman is a physicist who is specialized in science and technology studies. She is also experienced in managing interactive content production projects. She worked as a researcher, writer and interactive media content design specialist based in and İstanbul. Currently, she works as the project coordinator of the Museum of Energy at santralistanbul.

Asu Aksoy is presently in charge of project development at santralistanbul. Previously, she has worked for many years in British universities on a variety of research projects, focusing on urban and cultural transformation in the context of migrations, globalisation and technological change. Asu Aksoy is also advising the Urban Board of Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency. She was born in 1958 in Istanbul, graduated from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Westminster in London.

Barbara Borčić is an art critic and curator. Since 2000, she has been the Director of SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts. From 1980 on, she worked at the Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana (1982-1986: artistic director). Between 1982-1992 she was involved in video practice in the frame of the “Ljubljana alternative scene” and she is also co-author of video projects. 1991-1992: editor of the fine arts magazine Likovne besede (Art Words). Borčić was active in the field of contemporary arts as a freelance curator, publicist and editor. Amongst others, she has conceived and edited the documentation, archiving and research projects on video art in Slovenia (Videodokument. Video Art in Slovenia 1969-1998). She has been curating the web project Internet Portfolio and video programmes under the title Videospotting and writing about performance and video. In frame of SCCA-Ljubljana Borčić is also the leader of research projects (What Is to Be Done with “Balkan Art” What Is to Be Done with the Audiovisual Archives?) and co-editor of publications (Anthology of the World of Art, PlatformaSCCA, Žepna Pocket Edition).

Andreas Broeckmann is one of three artistic directors of TESLA—Laboratory for Arts and Media in Berlin. From 2000 to 2007 he was the Artistic Director of transmediale—festival for art and digital culture Berlin. He also worked as a project manager at V2_Organisation Rotterdam, Institute for the Unstable Media. Apart from curating various exhibitions in Europe, he initiated and guided many projects and meetings on media art and digital culture in Eastern Europe. He is a member of the advisory board for Visual Arts of the Goethe Institute, and of the Council for the Arts, Berlin. He co-maintains the Spectre mailing list and is a member of the Berlin-based media association Mikro.

Collective Position(s). Since, 2006, the collective POSITION has presented an on-line work named SUPERPOSITIONS which is a singular relationship to the city on the basis of clickable audiovisual collages. The navigation can be made according to games of fate or according to narrative continuity. SUPERPOSTIONS is an invitation to a journey specifically created for the web.

--Rémy Rivoire investigates the notions of topography and construction with his plastic work. He was selected for the “Biennale of the young creators of Europe and the Mediterranean” in Athens, 118 119

exhibited in Montpellier at Square St Anne and in Nicosia (Cyprus) for the exhibition “Noisecrossing”, Cevdet Erek started realising a series of time based installations with the production of Avluda (In and also invited by Noise of Coincidence. In 2004, he took part in “Return of Athenes” in Marseille and the courtyard) in 2002. Using sounds & beats, moving images & objects, constructions and in “Buttom Line” in Ljubljana. His first solo exhibition took place in 2005 at the Art Center of Talence performance, he creates intense experiences by capturing and reformulating spaces and situations. (France). He has been a resident of the city of Marseille’s workshop for the last two years. He creates While working as a research assistant and sound engineer at ITU - MIAM, he was shown and pictures and animation for the web site “www.superpositions.net”. performed at Stedelijk Museum CS, İstanbul Biennial, ZKM, Platform Garanti Contempoarary Art Center, V2_Organisation Rotterdam, Martin Gropius Bau, IFA, MOMAS, Art Museum of Estonia, Living --Renaud Vercey was a multimedia creator for the ECM at “La Friche La Belle de Mai” from 1998 to art Museum Rejkavik and others. He received the Uriot Prize with ‘Studio’ (2005) during his 2001 and created several web sites including documents of artists and the AMI. He collaborated as residency at Rijksakademie – Amsterdam. He also collaborates with architects, directors, videaste in creations M encore ! and Non seulement of Georges Appaix, and took part in the choreographers and performs with İstanbul’s Nekropsi. French-Japanese group PACJAP, investigating interactions between music and new technologies. He creates interactive videos and DVDs. He works on “www.superpositions.net” which investigates Adham Hafez works with themes like rituals, gender and transformation in performance. His the relation of the body with the machine, created for the Net Art of Web flash festival in 2006 (Paris). interests in these themes push his work towards being inter/multi/trans-disciplinary where sounds, Currently, he is working on the project Radiovision, a collective creation of music and image on the movements, texts, installation work and live vocals usually mix in one work. His dance repertoire poetics of waves. includes several solo performances, group pieces and duets. His music compositions include several original soundtracks for dance performances, sound installations and live concerts as well --Bruno Voillot lives and works in Marseille since 1997 at first near to minors in a clandestine as CD-releases of his compositions. Founder and Programme Director of HaRaKa Dance situation in the district Belsunce, then with psychotic adults in Luberon. He has worked for six years Development and Research, the only organisation for research, development and archiving of dance in a centre of reception and care for drug addicts in the city centre where he animates a workshop in Egypt, Hafez is the winner of First Prize as a Young Choreographer in the International Dance dedicated to radio creation. He works on theoretical and practical questions related to creation and Theatre Festival Egypt/France 2004. schizophrenia. He took place in POSITION(S) in October 2001 to create a sound installation in multi-diffusion. He created the sound for the web site “www.superpositions.net” in 2006. Gregor Jansen is an expert in contemporary art, curator of exhibitions about art in the twentieth and twenty-first century in Aachen, Köln, Maastricht and Seoul. He was the curator of BEIJING CASE, Carlo Crovato creates kinetic/aural/visual installations, describing his style as “plastic electric”. a research project on international urban development of megacities. In 2002 he was the curator of He has worked with Staalplaat Sound system since 2001 and participated in the Stralsund Sound the second media art biennale »media_city seoul, in South-Corea. Again in 2002 he was the project Festival, transmediale (Berlin 2001). Crovato has exhibited at galleries in Leipzig, Berlin, Krakow, coordinator of the exhibition” Iconoclash, at ZKM 2002. In 2006 he was one of the curators of “Light Dresden, Goehlis, and at the Szombathely Museum of Modern Art, Hungary. He participated in the Art From Artificial Light” at ZKM. He has published many books, catalogues and articles. Open Studio Project in Cairo in 2006. Aylin Kalem is a writer, lecturer, researcher and curator in the fields of dance, performance, the Dušan Dovč has been working at SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts, as production body and digital culture. She works as an instructor at the BA Progamme in Management of manager since 2004. He is the member of the editorial boards of on-line media Artservis Performing Arts at İstanbul Bilgi University and at the Department of Modern Dance at Mimar Sinan (www.artservis.org) and Evrokultura (www.evrokultura.org). Fine Arts University and gives courses on Performance Studies, Theories of the Body and Digital Performance. She is the curator of the international programme and organiser of TECHNE 06 Claudine Dussollier fulfilled many responsibilities and tasks in fields related to immigrants’ International İstanbul Digital Performance Platform held in April 2006. Kalem is the co-founder of a integration, and urban, social and cultural development. Since 1998, she has directed or coordinated multidisciplinary arts initiative “boDig” that focuses on the issues of the body in contemporary arts, training projects on publishing and cultural development in France and in the Mediterranean area. performing arts and digital culture. Artistic interventions in public areas, clown arts and the recent use of digital tools and multimedia cultural field represent her choices. Since 2002, she has been in charge of the cooperation Asuman Kırlangıç is a teaching assistant at İstanbul Bilgi University. She has been publishing programmes development in the Mediterranean region of ZINC/ECM (La Friche La Belle de Mai) and papers on art and theory. she has run la collection Carnets de rue/écritures artistiques, espaces, publics in l’Entretemps publisher, since its foundation in 2005. Claudine Dussollier is coordinating with Abdo Nawar the Marko A. Kovačič is an interdisciplinary and polymedia artist: his field of interest covers different platform RAMI-International encounters on arts and multimedia. Since 2001, she has managed the media: performance, sculpture, installation, video, music, film, and theatre. He is a founding member cultural exchange programmes in the Mediterranean region of ZINC/ECM (La Friche La Belle de Mai of Ana Monro Theater (1981–1991), R IRWIN S Group (1983–1985) and Zlati Kastrioti music and de Marseille, France). 120 121

multimedia band (from 2000). He is the holder of the Golden Bird Prize (1987) and the Zupančič Başak Şenova (Assistant Professor) is a curator, writer and designer based in İstanbul. She has Award (1994). His project The Civilization of Plastos gained the title of the Artwork of the Month from been publishing papers on art, technology and mass media since 1995, and frequently gives ICAN, International Contemporary Art Network based in Amsterdam (February 2003). lectures. Şenova has initiated projects and curated exhibitions in Turkey and Europe since 1996. She is the editor of art-ist 6, Kontrol Online Magazine and one of the founding members of NOMAD as Erhan Muratoğlu is an interactive designer and digital artist. He has worked and exhibited in Turkey, well as the organiser of ctrl_alt_del and Upgrade!İstanbul. Currently, she works as a lecturer at the Europe, the UK and the US with his computer generated projects, and has received awards in many Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University. festivals for his experimental videos. He works as a lecturer in the Department of Communication Design at Kadir Has University, İstanbul and is a member of NOMAD. He also organises the Aycan Tüylüoğlu has been working at santralistanbul in International Projects and International ctrl_alt_del sound-art project. Artist-in-Residence Programme. She has been actively involved in the establishment process of the residency programme at santralistanbul and has been engaged in the coordination of such projects Ceren Oykut is an artist who produces multidisciplinary projects which blend sound and visual like ArtExperience 2007, Transfer: The International Artist and Art Exchange Programme representation modes through drawings on urban culture. Her drawings have been presented in (Turkey-NRW 2005-2007), Public Turn in Contemporary Art within the context of Culture 2000 various magazines such as L-inc, Kontrol, Roll, and Fuct-D. She also works with a music band Programme of the European Union as well as Light, Illumination and Electricity Residency called “Baba Zula” and a collective called “Anabala” by creating and rendering projected digital images Programme. in real time on stage. She has contributed to many projects in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Serbia and Montenegro, and Egypt. Oykut lives and works in İstanbul. Deniz Ünsal (Assistant Professor) has taught and coordinated projects at the BA Programme in Art Management at İstanbul Bilgi University since 2005. She has worked in museums in the Sarkis has produced many works using light, sound and colour as his primary media. While dealing Netherlands and Turkey. She works on museums, interpretation and cultural policies. with memory and space, he displays contrasts in order to make an impact on the perception and intuition. Besides his many solo exhibitions and projects, he has participated in Documenta VI and VII William Wells has been involved in the development and education of the arts for over 25 years. He in Kassel in 1997 and 1982, İstanbul Biennial in 1987, 1989 and 1995 and Venice Biennial in 1993. He worked for the Arts Council of Great Britain, and, in the early 1980s, he was one of the initial also had several solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris in 1984, the founders of Unit Seven Studios and Gallery in London. In the late 1980s he moved to Egypt. He Pompidou Center in 1993, the ENSBA – Lyon and the Lyon Contemporary Art Museum in 2003 and worked freelance and in the educational sector for several years in both Egypt and the Gulf. In 1991 the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. His latest work Leidschatz is presently exhibited at the Louvre he established the design centre Part One and in 1998 he established Townhouse Gallery, a Cairo Museum. institution committed to the development of the arts locally, and providing exhibition halls, rehearsal space and a platform for international exchange. Borut Savski joined Radio Student Ljubljana in 1984 where he started coordinating the Ministry of Experiment, an open platform for various media research in 1997. In the late 90s he co-organised Mohammed Yousri is currently Programme Consultant to the Townhouse Gallery as well as the web—and radio based Xtended Live Radio events and performed about a hundred of direct radio Coordinator of Tadamon, the Egyptian-refugee multicultural council. Yousri also sits on the board of broadcasts (as “amplification of underground activities”). Savski took part in web activities at Ars Art Moves Africa, the mobility fund for artists and cultural operators in the African continent. Electronica 1998. In 1999, he started a regular radio broadcast “Huda ura” as a host of algorithmic sound examples. In 1999, he realised a sound installation Sound Biotope with John Cynthia Zaven is a pianist, composer and installation artist based in Beirut. Her works include Grzinich (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana) and in 2000, a soundtrack for a cartoon (E-Motion Film collaborative productions with visual artists and stage directors, ranging from live performances to production). Other projects include: Holy Trinity/Round Table, 2001, Sonic Point Of View, 2002, sound engineering for live acts. Her sound and video installations have been shown in festivals and Aesthetic machines, 2003, Bazooka-Electric Jesus, 2004 and Bowlfuls of sound, 2005. exhibitions in Europe and Asia. The piano remains her mandatory tool, often de-contextualised and used as a sonic interface to communicate within an urban space. Zaven has written soundtracks for Jan Peter E. R. Sonntag is an artist and curator. In the early 90s he worked as a curator at the documentaries, experimental and feature films that have toured amongst other venues the IDFA, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik for experimental arts and music. He develops experimental audio the Tribeca Film Festival, the Kassel Documentary film and Video Festival, Videobrazil, the Bern performances and creates locative, interactive installations including light and sounds. He performed Kunstmuseum, the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. in various venues and festivals in Europe including Transmediale. He is a founding member of She is currently a part-time piano instructor at the Higher National Conservatory of Music in Beirut. “unerhört”, Bremerhaven, “oh Ton”, Oldenburg and of the Edition HORCH. He co-founded the “hARTware” project and “slap—social landart projects” and in 2002 he founded N-solab. 123

Photographs

Photographs

Cevdet Erek pp. 60, 61, 62, 63, 65.

Ceren Oykut p. 79.

Collective Position p. 69.

Başak Şenova pp. 45, 46, 47 (bottom left and bottom right), 50, 51 (top right), 54, 68 (bottom), 71 (right), 72, 81, 82.

Cynthia Zaven pp. 74, 75.

İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of Visual Communication Design pp. 43, 44, 47 (top left and top right), 51 (top left and bottom), 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 68 (top), 69 (bottom), 71 (top and bottom left), 73, 77, 78. 125