Ipek Kuran Yıldırım is an architect and artist, former co-founder of Mekan.Space and founder of Studio Duende Multimedia Arts & Design + Arch. Their productions are shaped around a holistic and anti-disciplinary understanding based on art, technology, nature and rituals. They uses extended reality systems as a tool for their current works. Their works of art have been exhibited on various platforms at home and abroad. Some of them are ADAF - Athens, Sonar +D - Istanbul, Prague Designblok etc. They teaches part-time in the departments of Digital Game Design, Visual Communication Design and Architecture at İstanbul Bilgi University. They continues their doctorate studies at the University of the Aegean - Culture, Technology and Communication and Yıldız Technical University - Art and Design programs.
Website:
https://www.atelierduende.org/ (Under Construction)
Proposal:
In today's social structure, the forms of establishing relationships are realized only through the mind. Ignoring bodily perceptions and the holistic experience of the body takes man, who is actually a part of nature biologically, out of the ecosystem and drags him into an illusion. This illusion is that he sees himself as an all-controlling force above nature. Today, the earth shows how unrealistic this point of view is, especially through very real disasters such as global warming and climate change. Therefore, I think it is important to get rid of this purely mind-oriented perspective and to explore the experience of the body to reveal the body-mind integrity.
The project I will present for this artist program is an extension of the art work I am planning as a part of my doctoral process. Therefore, as a final product, I plan to publish a publication in which I will share the results of the research I will conduct as a part of this project, as well as a work to be exhibited.
The interaction between body and space has been the main focus of the art works I have produced and the research I have done so far. As an architect, I researched the impact of this on space production practices. However, for this project, I aim to focus entirely on the transformation of the body and the relationship the body establishes with its environment and other living things. To explore this, I will work on the idea of a hybrid body, a cyborg body.
I believe that the relationship that the body establishes with the surrounding animate or inanimate things and nature is far from the authoritarian, controlling and dominant relationships established by the mind, and is actually more honest. Therefore, revealing the interaction of the environment through the body may be a way to increase the awareness of the human mind about its interaction with everything that surrounds it, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic.
First of all, there are two phases that I plan to realize during the project process. The first part will focus on presenting a new form of existence by physically deconstructing the human body and mixing it with bodies belonging to different species. For this, I aim to produce an interactive sculpture, to define it in general terms. In this context, by working with bioplastics, I aim to both focus on new materials and revive the memory of decomposition and return to nature. This physical structure will reveal a structure with a superhuman perception that can communicate with its environment, thanks to its various sensors and electronic layer.
The focus of the second part of the project is to speculate on how this body with which we interact in the physical world can perceive the world. To achieve this, I will produce a digital twin of the produced body and then place it in a virtual world. And I will try to explore and design the ways of interaction that its ontological structure can reveal. Thanks to this ludic experience to be produced with 6 Dof virtual reality devices, we will try to witness the way the hybrid body, cyborg and chimera perceive the world, produced by the combination of natural materials and electronic systems that emerged in the first phase.
The main focus of this ludic experience will be shaped by our companionship as part of that body, rather than the illusion of being someone else. At this point, every new person who joins the experience will have revealed a different journey and interaction network.