Panel Statement

Panel: Short:Circuit:  Cross Border Communications in New Media Between US and Turkey

In this pre­sen­ta­tion I will dis­cuss three works: “RTUK”, a browser ex­ten­sion that en­ables users to col­lec­tively black out any text on the Web, “Dar­win’s Birth­day”, a col­lec­tion of Google’s main pages as they were lo­cal­ized in 100+ dif­fer­ent coun­tries in one spe­cific day, and “Del­e­ga­tions”, an in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tion show­ing view­ers’ re­con­structed faces using sta­tis­ti­cally ex­tracted face fea­tures of the host coun­try’s mem­bers of the par­lia­ments. These pieces ex­em­plify my in­ter­est in the ten­sions be­tween the local and the global within the larger frame­work of micro vs. macro processes that can be en­coun­tered in many fields such as econ­omy, man­age­ment, so­ci­ol­ogy, com­puter sci­ence, lin­guis­tics where top-down and bot­tom-up ap­proaches are used in con­junc­tion, e.g. in urban de­vel­op­ment or­ganic and planned ar­chi­tec­ture func­tion to­gether to form cities and in human brain an­a­lytic and syn­thetic think­ing to­gether help us make sense of the world.

• Ali Mi­harbi is an artist whose work can take many forms from pho­to­graphic, graphic or sculp­tural pieces to dy­namic sys­tems dri­ven by live or stored data. His re­cent work ex­plores our com­plex two-way re­la­tion­ship with tech­nol­ogy within larger frame­works. In 2010 he com­pleted his M.F.A. from Vir­ginia Com­mon­wealth Uni­ver­sity after ac­quir­ing a dual de­gree in Elec­tri­cal & Com­puter En­gi­neer­ing and Art The­ory & Prac­tice with a con­cen­tra­tion in Paint­ing from North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity in 2000. Not only his aca­d­e­mic back­ground, but also liv­ing back and forth be­tween USA and Turkey gave him the men­tal flex­i­bil­ity to jump back and forth be­tween dif­fer­ent modes of think­ing. His work has been ex­hib­ited in Turkey, Mex­ico, South Korea, USA and Aus­tralia. ??Clau­dia Costa Ped­er­son is in­ter­ested in ex­am­in­ing his­to­ries about the re­la­tion­ship of media with art and ac­tivism. Be­fore fo­cus­ing on art his­tory, she pro­duced radio and video works in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ac­tivists and women artists in the Nether­lands and Ger­many. She is cur­rently con­clud­ing a doc­tor­ate at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity on the work of artists using dig­i­tal games and play for so­cial cri­tique.