In October and November 2021, I hosted a solo exhibition at Galerie Wedding in the frame of the program “Existing Otherwise”. The premise of the program was to explore practices that propose alternative ways of living and learning, putting an emphasis on embodied experience as an important medium for gaining and exchanging knowledge.
One of my primary objectives was to invite the audience to experience what I call “cross-contextual confluence”: a method for learning, exploring, creating, and playing which aims to combine different disciplines together, erasing the borders between the fields and mediums, doing the science in the same way we do art, doing the art as we do science, exploring dynamics of nature in artificial intelligence, hijacking the context and infiltrating with content in order to create gaps where there are connections and make new connections where there are gaps.
The exhibition was featuring my latest works, such as the interactive AI-driven installation “The Body is Moving, the Machine is Learning”, as well as the videos made during the last years of EightOS practice sessions in Berlin. Several physical practice sessions were also hosted in the space and on the public square outside of the gallery, inviting the visitors to experience the practice both through the minds and their bodies.
During this period, Galerie Wedding was taken over by the social authorities who installed their workstations right inside the gallery to process applicants’ requests. I decided to integrate this bureaucratic setup into my exhibition, hijacking the workstations to show the screenshots and explanations of the EightOS variability framework. I also replaced the information materials with scientific research papers that provided a theoretical background for the practice. This way, we kept the original intention of social services to provide an advice, but completely replaced the content of the advice and its objectives. A state-run consultancy was temporarily transformed into a self-serve library that provided information on navigating through different states in life using the principles of thermodynamics and chaos theory.
Credits and more information: Galerie Wedding | Cross-Contextual Confluence.
Videos from the Exhibition
Photos from the Exhibition
Photos above are by Jose Suez
Photos above are by Bahar Kaygusuz