CONVOLUTION

Year: 2020-2021

Location: Contemporary Istanbul Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey

Team: Guvenc Ozel, Onur Koyun

Convolution is one of the largest site specific Augmented Reality installations to date. Through animated AI generated content distributed across the entire city of Istanbul on LED screens owned by the municipality, the project allows the inhabitants to access the work both 2D through the screens and 3D through the custom augmented reality app.

Training on vast amounts of data that document various natural and artificial morphologies of our world, generative algorithms have the capability to decipher a meta- understanding of our physical world and autonomously deduct formal biases about it. Through these new technological frameworks, it is possible for machines to imagine images and generate landscapes based on considerations yet unforeseen by the human designer.

Based on this premise, “Convolution”aims to visualize speculative scenarios of Istanbul if it evolved in ways different from its current morphology. By taking into consideration urban outputs of alternative geopolitical events, Convolution creates a data model that is an aggregate of various cities and their morphologies, ranging from more developed economies to ones that are more colonized and exploited. Through this GAN-based data model, the algorithmic system creates fictional narratives about the urban layout of Istanbul; some that are more “westernized” and planned, others more chaotic and distributed. By merging these scenarios into a continuous animated sequence, the artwork aims to visualize the speculative relationship between politics, culture, economy and urban form.