Artist´s statement

Main strategy of my work is the manipulation of the experience of the audience through use of appropriated materials and created situations that tricks the audience's expectations. The experience proposed to the audience aims to create an awareness of the potentials of the information technologies, which is my main concern, to alter the social, economic and cultural life, not only in digital but also in physical practices.

I see a great potential to alter highly criticized capitalism and culture industry in concepts like digital multiplication , including the concepts i theorized in my graduate thesis; digital duplication, digital re-production(digitizing), and digital format conversion, digital distribution, which is lacking part in Benjamin's Artwork essay,   wireless communication and internet access that literally dematerializes information, network economies and new economy to enable marginal cost to approach zero, copyleft attitude including FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) movements and GPL, Free Art License, Creative Commons and for me the most political one; Libre Commons, gift economy , which was not possible for '68 generation because of the scarcity of the material resources but is an everyday practice now, nanotechnology to make it visible that when conditions change, even generally accepted chemical and physical behaviors of some materials can change, also can social life. Information technologies must be evaluated politically in art to address new potentials in social and economic life. Not to be used for art's sake, just as a medium to create/exhibit art.

My undergraduate economics thesis was called« New Economy and Electronic Commerce » and my art and design graduate thesis was called   « The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Multiplication and Wireless Distribution ». I wrote various papers during my graduate education from an IT point of view about dance & performance, photography, video cinema, multiples, fiction / documentation, readymades, appropriation, sampling, copyleft licenses for cultural productions, intelligent transport systems and copyright in software.

I participated some local exhibitions and realized some solo projects. In « RDL : Digital & Rational Language for Objects » i constructed an artificial language with a highly modernist approach in mind where the relation between signifier and signified is not arbitrary, but dependent on the individual properties of the objects. In « Project ? » i distributed 60 gift editions of betamax videotapes with special cases and label stickers where my name was written as the artist and « Project ? »   as the title of the video supposed to be on the tape. In « World Map Remix » i simply cut a readymade world map into three and replaced the left side, where USA is, with right part, where China is, so that it looks just like the real world map from a distance. In « cremaster@internet cafe » i located all 5 episodes of Mathew Barney's « Cremaster Cycle », to the computers in a very big internet café where visitors were able to watch only one episode in their computer's hard disk but also could search for other episodes in internet cafes LAN. In « untitled » (2006) i curated an exhibition in another one appropriating not the works but the artists having homonym names. Phil Collins, Paul McCarthney (not Paul McCarthy), Steve McQueen and Ray Charles (but not Charles Ray), were announced as the artists in the exhibition. The exhibition also had fake sponsors like Vodafone, BMW, Intel, British Airways, DHL, ACF and The Mondrian Foundation logos of which were printed on the invitations and announced in the fake press release. In !f Istanbul AFM International Film Festival Shorts Award Ceremony I did a performance as a part of the ceremony in which i shot the narrator to the video at the rehearsal. During the ceremony the video was screened form a dvd to the screen next to the narrator, with the original sound as if it was live.