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.

“Angling in Troubled Waters” map by cartographer Fred W. Rose shows the European geopolitical situation in 1899. If you look at the details (see the larger version) you will see some countries such as Russia, UK, and Ottoman Empire are fishing. What do they catch? Blogger Catholicgauze says:

“…their ‘catches’ are in fact colonial possessions.”

This map, found via Boran Güney, is a neat example of the micro macro visualization technique. You can read through human figures and symbols across national borders.

What about today?

Architect Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA/AMO make dadaist montages of todays sociopolitical scenes on timelines and maps and they align them with architectural and cultural products. OMA/AMO’s 2004 book Content has an excellent article, “An Autopsy“, which is an annotated spatial montage of events and figures on a timeline from 1989 to 2003. Here are some pictures from An Autopsy article (taken with my cellphone camera):

An Autopsy is authored by Theo Deutinger, Maja Borchers, Matthew Murphy, Nanne de Ru, Max Schwitalla, Sebastian Thomas.

So what can we do against networked exploitation?

I think an obvious strategy is to exploit those exploiters. Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) and Amazon Noir are good examples for finding the holes in sociable web media systems and using the holes for reverse exploitation.

I think another strategy is to stay in context for collective action while all those sociable web media giants are fighting with each other for your attention (aka attention economy). There are many ways to stay in context such as email lists, forums etc. and all that social software actions as Trebor Scholz mentioned: commenting, tagging, ranking, forwarding, linking, moderating, remixing etc. Tools and environments for such actions are mainly provided by giant corporations, and under US laws, one who aggregates information owns it. But we can make our own web services for staying in the context, just like the way we can setup and maintain an old email list technology.

So this brings in the discussion of “open service provider”. As open source software development communities demonstrate, we can collectively create value independent from the capitalist exploitation. If we are in the software-as-service era, support and use open service providers as much as you support open source software. It is very important to intensify and redirect our collective techno-cultural production to a territory that is formed more by individual’s free-will than capital’s interests. But of course making one open alternative for each commercial-social web tool/environment is not all that relevant, it sounds just like making the free version of MS Office. So open service providers can use existing techniques but I think they should invent new types of interaction and aggregation for the good of the community.

I use software-as-service strategy in my artwork. They are not commercial services nor utilitarian. I believe that building an open service is closer to making a cultural product than making a commercial one. As Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble puts it here, the relation of the creative expression to social processes is as important as the materials, processes, and products.