If you are near New York this Friday by any chance, please stop by our show titled “New Media:Why” at Neuberger Museum of Art. I participate with MYPOCKET, other participants are Margot Lovejoy with her cybernetic confession booth, Douglas Irving Repetto with his humongous networked sound installation, and Paul Vanouse with his fantastic DNA racing “Latent Figure Protocol”. The show is curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, associate Curator/New Media and the Digital Museum. Also see the preview on New York Times:

“‘New Media’: Brain Trees, DNA, Receipts … and Bells”, Susan Hodara, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/nyregion/westchester/08artwe.html

Above is a growing set on Flickr, starting with installation photos and will progress with the documentation of the show.

New Media: Why
March 15 – June 28, 2009
South Gallery

New Media: Why is the fifth in a series that explores aspects of technology-based art. The exhibition will investigate how artists use dynamic, interactive technologies to reveal the logic, structure, and beauty inherent in experimental, non-traditional applications. The exhibition will be presented in the South Gallery and online where audience participation is encouraged. Artists include Burak Arikan, Margot Lovejoy, Douglas Irving Repetto, and Paul Vanouse.

“MYPOCKET”, Burak Arikan
“Confess”, Margot Lovejoy
“Nearly Human”, Douglas Irving Repetto
“Latent Figure Protocol”, Paul Vanouse

New Media: Why was curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Associate Curator/New Media and the Digital Museum.

Neuberger Museum of Art
Purchase College
735 Anderson hill road
Purchase, NY 10577-1400

December 25th, 2008. I went to Istanbul for doing a 3 day workshop on networked information visualization, which was kindly supported by Istanbul Bilgi University. Worked with a diverse group of participants from various schools with backgrounds from visual arts to computer science. We covered basic network structure, network topologies, and clustering. We did hand drawn diagrams. Collected data by hand and by programmatic methods. Visualized relations using templates. As the final project, we worked on the database of the national elections in Turkey from 1960 to 2007. Turkey generally has 10 to 20 political parties per election. We looked at how the same representatives elected from different parties at each election. Above image shows the network of all the political parties between 1961 and 2007 (some parties do not exist today). The diagram is created by Mumin Aydin. Line thickness shows the amount of transfers between the parties. I didn’t know that politicians can change their ideology this much. Participants created network of political parties as well as cities connected by representatives. We concluded the workshop with a mini exhibition on the corridor, which was ironically overlapping with a conference titled Marxism 2008. Full documentation will be up sooner than later.

December 27th, 2008. Did a performance at the Gozel Geceler party, which was a technical fiasco. After the disastrous NYC Minitek Festival, this was the second time I had to go on the stage without sound / image check. Never recommended.

January 6th, 2009. New year’s first lecture at Bogazici University Complex Systems Research Lab. First, presented the principles for what I do, how I use the network structures and dynamics in my thinking and the network itself as the medium in my practice. Second, showed examples of work from 2005 to 2008. Discussed large scale networks and creative processes with Chris Stephenson, Haluk Bingol, Suzan Uskudarli, Onur Gungor and students from the Bogazici University.

January 22nd, 2009. Participated in Stuttgart Filmwinter’s Media-Space exhibition with MYPOCKET (movie from the installation) and Meta-Markets. Flickr set 1. Flickr set 2. The main question was: How do artists react to the complexity of this self-made global [financial] crisis? Other participants were Derivart, Interstella, Ge Jin, Ben Rivers, Semiconductor, SIDL Spatial Information Design Lab, Various Artists of NYTimes SE, UBERMORGEN, and Marius Watz. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied organized a Wii Tennis Tournament at the Media-Space. Also I felt bad that I missed Daniel García Andújar‘s POSTCAPITAL exhibition at Kunstverein Stuttgart.

January 28th, 2009. Basak Senova kindly invited me to do a presentation at the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting. I organized the talk around the criticism of micro labor in social network services. Started with a recipe on how to create a social network service. Followed with the measurability of the contemporary social environment, and discussed how even physical activities can easily be measured and are part of the digital cloud. Showed instances from the MYPOCKET project. Described the relations between a platform owner, an application developer, and a user in terms of the social web services. Showed instances from the Meta-Markets project.

Meta-Control at Peyote, Istanbul 2009 from arikan on Vimeo.

January 28th, 2009. After the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting did a Meta-Control performance with Klaustro‘s music at Peyote. A fascinating Istanbul night of electronic music and live computer visuals. Video above by Devrim Kadirbeyoglu.

February 05th, 2008. Did a 2 day Networked Information Visualization Workshop in Kayitdisi Events at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. Participants studied the structure of networks and did basic network visualizations based on hand picked data.

Currently working on two upcoming exhibitions:

February 18th, 2009. Ergenekon.tc exhibition at Delüks, Istanbul.

March 12th, 2009. “New Media: Why” exhibition at Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY.

Today I am giving a lecture titled “User Labor” at Neuberger Museum of Art. I will speak about the flaws I see in the Architecture of Participation –-data ownership, data valuation-– in relation to the User Labor project. We will discuss living physical/digital processes and aesthetics of extreme use in networks and their relation to contemporary art making. I will present instances from “MYPOCKET,” “Meta-Markets,” and “User Labor Markup Language (ULML).”

Also I am happy to announce that my work will be featured in the Neuberger Museum exhibition New Media: Why in March 2009.

* Image above is a shot from MYPOCKET Transaction Graph.

After The Net is a deliberately ambiguous title: implying that somehow the Net is over in terms of its utopian promises and also making a reference to the documentary film The Net by Lutz Dammbeck (2003). Like the film, the exhibition explores systems of technological control and presents works that draw attention to historical shifts of network power: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and in turn to social networking platforms.

Artists and Contributors: Caen Botto (Universomente), Wayne Clements, Geff Cox (for project.arnolfini), Lutz Dammbeck, Jeff Gompertz, Rui Guerra, Linda Hilfling, Chun Lee, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (GOTO10), José Antonio Orts, and selected artists from openKURATOR: Burak Arikan, Bestiario, Carlos Katastrofsky, Abe Linkoln, Jimpunk and Mrtamale, Joseph Nechvatal, Cyril de Vroom and Jos Wabeke.

Pictures and documentation will be available at the Kurator website by next week.

Will participate in a contemporary arts talk series at the Mimar Sinan University Department of Sociology on Thursday, April 17.

Will be presenting MYPOCKET and Meta-Markets in the context of the new generation of media and networked arts.

Keywords include immaterial labor, distributed power, open web services, networked conceptual art, complex systems.

This post acts as my Twitter, each paragraph is limited to 140 character.

Read more at Dugumkume.org (in Turkish only).