Fırat Yusuf Yılmaz is an independent curator, activist and an art writer currently living and working in Istanbul, Turkey. His curatorial practice aims to diversify the active methodologies in computational politics and propose hybrid intervention strategies by combining artificial intelligence and artistic inventions which he has been gathering information both from different activist groups and art collectives. By doing so, he intends to produce a hybrid art format by cross-glitching the notions of being a geek and curator in the forms of exhibitions, artificial intelligence based art writing workshops, participatory projects, performance lectures, artistic research, telematic presentations, performative web site tours, amateur hacking interventions, DIY electronics, guerilla radios, browser forums, multiplayer online game roleplays, and sometimes artworks. His curatorial practice revolves around writing and curating projects focusing on early Net Art, meme studies, post-irony, web sociology, alternative exhibition formats and the ways in which art initiatives are organized autonomously with the help of artificial intelligence. He has curated exhibitions in independent initiatives such as FreyaALT (Container with Hole, Kyohei Fujio) and 5533 (Sidestep / multiplied // insolently). ‘Sidestep / multiplied // insolently’ was an exhibition that played around glitch punk narrative, incorporating pirate information spreading methods on online networks, political noises, bureaucratic slips, dead pixels and punk-like below-the-belt resistance tactics. He also facilitated [Plug-In/Out] with İlayda Tunca, a workshop programme on fictional commons, pseudo-organisations and solidarist ChatGPT monologues that centered around ‘5 - 5’, a solidarity guide and a compilation of answers to organizational topics by ChatGPT. In 2023, as a part of Garp Sessions, he presented his long term research and accompanying satellite artistic research titled Data Cravings: Web Meta/bolisms and Data Digestion. In the scope of the research, shared stomachs between human-machine-other living species and internet-based mutual feeding practices that blurs the contrast between the physical nature of eating and digital consumption were examined.
Website and links: https://www.instagram.com/firatyusufyilmaz/
Project:
Data Cravings: [a satellite research about web meta/bolisms, AI and data digestion]
[Data Cravings] is an ongoing research that operates in parallel with accompanying artistic research that focuses on data digestion and web meta/bolisms in a way that blurs the contrast between the physical nature of eating and digital consumption. In the scope of the research, shared stomachs between human-machine-other living species and AI supported and internet-based mutual feeding practices are examined. The research focuses on emphasizing 'seeding' in a broader sense which represents the mutual data-sharing economy of internet culture, browser-based agricultural simulation games, symbolic web food, data appetite and the net as a collective feeding mechanism. Trying to imagine a new nutritional practice that might emerge on the digital digestive tracts and conductive pores of technological objects, the research is an attempt to develop mutual stomachs, new types of digestions, and shared metabolisms on the interspecies net.
Farming robots controlled by AI are slowly replacing older agricultural systems which means that our primal activity on this planet is becoming more and more autonomous each day. The interrelation between living species and non-living things before digestion has already started to amalgamate as our general metabolismic presence is already becoming less and less organic. In addition to the [Data Cravings] research content, real world fermentation products and cooking materials were speculatively techno-fermented and digitally archived using open-source predictive AI technologies under the name of Predictive Fermentations. Fermentation efforts took the form of visual artistic research as I was also adding another visual layer of discussion to the table by implementing the idea of ‘breeding’ raw data of the physical food. The main objective of the artistic research part of [Data Cravings] was to analyze data digestion and build tools for chewing the given data and cooking pixels to see If it’s possible to imagine how a dinner table would look like between humans, data, and other living species, utilizing AI for building a post-human era nutritional practice.