Commons Tense / Müşterekler Zamanı – New Media Arts from Turkey
Electriciteitsfabriek, Den Haag 15 – 30 September 2012

The Electriciteitsfabriek will host the exhibition ‘Commons Tense’, showcasing work from new media artists from Turkey. ‘Commons Tense’ is part of the Amber Arts and Technology Festival and Conference, to be held in November 2012 in Istanbul, themed ‘Paratactic Commons’. As its departure point, ‘Commons Tense’ uses the urgent need to reclaim the public ownership of the commons. Realized in collaboration with TodaysArt, the works presented at the exhibition will offer various interpretations of this theme. The co-events, which consist of two workshops, artist presentations, and a seminar, will be held parallel to the exhibition. The exhibition will take place within the framework of NLTR400, celebrating 400 years of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands.

The exhibition – curated by Ekmel Ertan (Artistic Director, Co-curator) and Fatih Aydoğdu (co-curator) – will consist of twelve newly commissioned works by fifteen artists: Candaş Şişman, Bager Akbay, Fatih Aydoğdu, Osman Koç , Onur Sönmez + Jaak Kaevats, Özgün Kılıç + Sedef Aydoğan, Ali Miharbi, Özlem Alkış, Ahmet Sertaç Öztürk, Ebru Kurbak, Selin Özçelik + Nagehan Kuralı, Mehmet Erkök.

TodaysArt Festival 2012 http://todaysart.org/2012/artist/?aname=commons-tense

05/23/2012 – 07/28/2012 :: TANAS, Berlin

Showing works by thirteen contemporary artists, most of whom were born in Turkey in the 1970s and now live in Istanbul, René Block and his co-curator Ece Pazarbaşı from Istanbul have made a selection of artists who direct their critical gaze at all aspects of daily life: at society, politics, history, and culture and their inherent antagonisms and interconnections.

Mehtap Baydu, Bashir Borlakov, Banu Cennetoğlu, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Cevdet Erek, Ha Za Vu Zu, Nuri Kuzucan, Ali Miharbi, Yasemin Özcan, Serkan Özkaya, Güneş Terkol, Vahit Tuna, Shiri Zinn

http://www.tanasberlin.de/index.php?nav=rueckschau

PILOT Gallery hosts the group exhibition “Consequences are no coincidence”, featuring 10 artists, between February 2nd and March 24th.

Works by Ali Miharbi, Hamra Abbas, Fikret Atay, Burak Delier, Bengü Karaduman, Şener Özmen, İrem Tok, Tufan Baltalar, Cengiz Tekin and Gökçe Erhan deal with social media, the world’s new order and economies.

http://www.pilotgaleri.com/en/exhibitions/detail/20

“Séance” is a mechanical sound installation that reflects routine human actions such as working, sleeping, eating and walking that people talk about in online conversations such as in Twitter, filtered to be limited to a specific time zone. Throughout the gallery’s floor, ceiling and walls, there are pieces of paper with these basic actions written on them. Every time the corresponding word on the paper is tweeted, the motors hit the structure they are fixed to. The frequency of a given word changes based on the time of day and also which day of the week it is, reflecting the cycle of action or inaction.

Dumbo Arts Center’s video_dumbo is an annual festival for international video art curated by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy. This year video_dumbo will be held on September 23-25th as part of the 2011 Dumbo Arts Festival.

I will be participating among eight installations under the exhibition title Quasi Cinema, featuring works that re-appropriate film technology as well as cinematic metaphors. Exhibition artists: Leslie Thornton, Aram Bartholl, Ernesto Klar, Ali Miharbi, Naho Taruishi, Andy Graydon, Cristobal Mendoza + Annica Cuppetelli and Ken Jacobs.

http://www.videodumbo.org/11-video-installations.html

Séance 9/9/2011 – 10/8/2011

Solo exhibition at Interstate Projects; Séance is also the name of my recent mechanical sound installation that reflects basic human actions such as working, sleeping, eating and walking through live Twitter feeds.

http://www.interstateprojects.com/?p=182

I will be participating with an updated version of Movie Mirrors.

July 19 to August 21, 2011 :: FIESP Cultural Center – Ruth Cardoso, Avenida Paulista 1313, São Paulo, Brazil.

Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio; Ali Miharbi; Andreas muk Haider; Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza; Ben Jack; Christoph Haag, Martin Rumori, Franziska Windisch & Ludwig Zeller; Coletivo COLETORES: Toni William, Flávio Camargo, Daniela Cordeiro & Karina Marques; Daniela Arrais & Luiza Voll; Eduardo Omine; Elie Zananiri, Hugues Bruyère & Mathieu Léger; Eric Siu (Support: Yoshihiro Watanabe, Hiroaki Ohno, Hideki Takeoka & Benjamin Xiao); Esther Hunziker; Hye Yeon Nam; Joachim Smetschka; Joon Y. Moon; Julian Jaramillo Arango; Julian Palacz; Juliana Mori; Karina Smigla-Bobinski; Kimchi & Chips; Lars Lundehave Hansen; Lauren McCarthy; Lawrence Malstaf; Matt Roberts; NaJa & deOstos (Project Team: Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jimenez, Thomas Sicouri); PirarucuDuo: Fernando Visockis & Thiago Parizi; Rafaël Rozendaal; Rejane Cantoni & Leonardo Crescenti; Ricardo Barreto, Maria Hsu & AMUDI; Ricardo Iglesias García; Ryoichi Kurokawa; Soraya Braz & Fábio FON; Tamás Waliczky; Tim Coe; Yoshi Akai; Yujiro Kabutoya & Kazushi Mukaiyama

Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica / Electronic Language international Festival
http://filefestival.org

With some delay, here’s a quick documentation of the first working prototype for a mechanical sound installation that I have been working on. It reflects the use of basic human actions such as work, sleep, eat, walk, etc. that people talk about on Twitter, filtered to be limited to a specific time zone. In this version 10 words are linked to a solenoid each of which is tied to the wall (to be extended to ceiling, floor or anything suitable in the space that can create a noise) and hit it every time it is mentioned. Frequency of a given word changes based on the time of the day and the day of the week since the average human behavior in the city is expected to have certain patterns, such as “work” being mentioned less in a Saturday afternoon compared to a Monday morning; or “sleep” being mentioned more certain times of the day.

In Common Ground in a Liquid City, anarchist architect Matt Hern argued that the most successful cities have been the ones that managed to balance planned and organic development. Manuel De Landa wrote in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History that the rise of Europe highly relied on a mixture of Central Place hierarchies such as Paris, Prague, Milan and networked Gateway cities like Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London. Philip Galanter started his paper What is Complexism? Generative Art and the Cultures of  Science and the Humanities by first naming usual polarities such as absolute-relative, progress-circulation, fixed-random, hierarchy-collapse, authority-contention, author-text in order to contrast modern and postmodern culture and then proposed a synthesis of the two: “Complexism” that is associated with terms such as distributed, emergent, chaotic and connectionist.

This list for me is just a way of thinking aloud, by counting examples that aren’t necessarily binary oppositions nor dichotomies, but rather approaches, processes that can run simultaneously in opposite directions within an abstract machine, with the potential of creating a complex system with feedback.

A transformer designed to utilize slight, wasted energies such as:
the excess of pressure on an electric switch
the exhalation of tobacco smoke
the growth of a head of hair, of other body hair and of the nails
the fall of urine and excrement
movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, anger
laughter
dropping of tears
demonstrative gestures of hands, feet, nervous tics
forbidding glances
falling over with surprise
stretching, yawning, sneezing
ordinary spitting and of blood
vomiting
ejaculation
unruly hair, cowlicks
the sound of nose-blowing, snoring
fainting
whistling, singing
sighs, etc. [...]

Although not nearly as poetic, here’s an image from Human Generated Power for Mobile Electronics by Thad Starner & Joseph A. Paradiso:

Possible power recovery from body-centered sources. (Total power in parentheses)

A poetic writing from mid-20th century on the everyday and the infra-slim evoking current research on energy harvesting seems to be another case where a once-marginal artistic idea turns (not entirely, but still) into a necessity, similar to Oulipo and Twitter.