Within the framework of the Notes for a Time Apart programme, elii [oficina de arquitectura] and Orkan Telhan present the installation Still Remains, which, distanced from Anthropocentrism, sets forth research around the microbiome: the community of micro-organisms that inhabit a certain environment, both inside and outside the human body, and are governed by their own logics and temporal scales.

The microbiome in our guts, armpits, genitals and mouths could be considered our most private landscapes, the place where our interspecies identities reside, made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses living parallel lives, resisting and working around the clock in our daily life. They sustain the hormones and chemical substances segregated by our anxious selves, withstand the stimulants, amphetamines and cognitive enhancers we consume to fight the stress caused by unresolved tasks. They endeavour to adapt to our bodies, which are increasingly conceived to work, more and more and more efficiently, all of the time.

This installation seeks to approach this invisible community through a variety of leftover food. The first step was to invite a group of professionals to share a meal in the Museo during their break time at work. As they enjoyed a specific menu, they chatted and asked each other questions about managing time and work: “What do you normally do when you take a break?”; “How do you manage stress”; “How much coffee do you drink?”; “What do you do when you need to concentrate?”; “What is your favourite energy drink?”. Before finishing this conversation, they were asked to leave their leftover food behind. What was left was the remains of shared food between people from different contexts, professions, social classes and worldviews.

These leftovers were transferred to a network of fridges to keep them in a type of capsule frozen in time. On these refrigerated surfaces, the microbes of the eaters go on to become part of these shared and slowed food landscapes, eroding and mutating. They change to a state of suspended animation which affects their cycles of conservation. They become prolonged “conversations” between micro-organisms, food supplements and people, unfurling a plural temporality that belongs to no one. As Still Remains. At least, while the cold lasts.

25 October – 16 December 2023
at Museo Reina Sofia

For more information see the museum information page and a review by Metalocus.

Photographs: ImagenSubliminal

Telhan deepens his investigation of the Yenikapı/Langa district, one of Istanbul’s most contentious urban sites, where thousands of years of material history is hidden beneath layers of asphalt and gravel today. Comprising two alternative ‘museums’ for Langa/Yenikapı, his work points to the inherently colonial function of museums, challenging the anthropocentric bias with which stories of land are told from material remains. The Museum of Exhalation is a printed publication featuring interviews between the district’s artefacts and various specialists. The Museum of Digestion, meanwhile, takes the form of a public garden installation at Müze Gazhane, where different aspects of Langa are spatialised, re-contextualising the area’s non-human residents to be ‘digested’ within the visitors’ body – both literally and metabolically.

See the Museum of Digestion project website for more information.

“Where Do Gardens Come From?” is a collaboration with elii architecture office and is a continuation of our work for the for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial: Empathy Revisited.

This video essay particularly focuses on Langa/Yenikapi region in Istanbul and reflects on the complex history of the land shaped by manly social, political, and ecological dynamics.

The full video is 16 mins. Videography and soundtrack is designed by Austin Fisher.

Please contact if you are interested in screening opportunities.

Microbial Fruits of Istanbul is a platform that tells the complex histories of Istanbul community gardens (bostans) from the perspective of microorganisms. A garden of gardens, a hybrid between a soil microbiology lab and a fruit tree, it displays microbial cultures collected from a variety of gardens in the city of Istanbul, which date back over 1,500 years.

Developing a new ‘oral-culture’, this installation will distribute a fermentation kit to make microbial fruits – microorganisms, ingredients, and recipe – that allow the audience to experience, empathise with, and learn about the heritage of gardens in relation to the ecological and socio-political realities of our time. When the microbial fruits are ready to be tasted by visitors, a robotic speaking parrot delivers their histories in the form of fables written for future generations. By using microbes that have evolved in the micro-climates of the Istanbul gardens, the project invites visitors to consume place-specific histories shaped by climate change.

Microbial Fruits of Istanbul is a collaboration with elii for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, New Civic Rituals.

The project is a partnership with Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives (IMNA) in partnership with Istanbul University Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Kokopelli Sehirde and Nadas collectives. The microbial cultures used in the project are shared with IMNA’s partners in Istanbul, who will continue to grow and disseminate the oral-cultures after the Biennial.

For more information see:
microbialfruits.design.bio
Project page at the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial website

A series of mediations on the future of the human diet. From steaks made of human cells to extinct bananas and genetically-modified fish, this table stages a number of scenarios where our relationship with food is interrogated.

The installation is commissioned by the Designs for Different Futures exhibition and is featured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (September - March 2019) then at the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I extend my special thanks to Mark Breen-Klein from the Mutter Museum for his help in fish preservation, Cassandra Dinh, Maggie Zhang, Laura Messman for project assistance.

1. Better Salmon, 2019
2. Last Bananas, 2019
3. Human Made Vanillas, 2019
4. Simit Diet & B | reactor, 2019
(Designed with Biorealize)
5. Pancake Bot, 2019
6. Ouroboros Steak, 2019
(Designed with Dr. Andrew Pelling and Grace Knight)

For full credits and project information please see the catalog available from Yale University Press.

A review from New York Times can be found here.

“It’s not a summer without it!” says an advertisement from the 1930s. Over hundred years, popsicles have become cultural icons. They refresh us, make us smile, and help us enjoy memorable moments with each other. Today, we need them more than ever—not only to cool down but also to remember what we can individually do to endure the heat waves in urban areas.

“Fruits of Matadero” is a concept about growing popsicles in public space to develop new forms of cooling rituals with friends and families under an oasis of palm trees. “When it is hot in July, we gather under the canopy, eat our popsicles and think about the Paris Agreement,” will say one young climate advocate, enjoying their “red” popsicle.

Matadero’s fruits have special probiotic ingredients that come in three flavors that match the pledges made during COP21, the Paris Agreement: the current (2.7-3.7°), the promised (1.5-2C°), and the anticipated (>4C°), corresponding to the degrees of weather change in the coming decades. The flavors of the popsicles will change every year and adapt to new wishes. As it is hard to grow all kinds of fruit trees in Matadero, we use robotic bioreactors that make the flavors, proteins, and nutrients with microorganisms. These popsicle makers live on the palm trees, ferment the organisms, charge themselves with, the sun and come down to deliver their frozen fruits when someone pays them with their phone—like a vending machine. When their flavors are finished, the popsicle sticks reveal one actionable item that remind us what to do to adapt to climate change, leaving behind a collectible item.

The oasis of palm trees can change their design from neighborhood to neighborhood in Madrid; include local plants, seating, and sheltering elements to make it worth spending time under the sun, hopefully, for much longer…

“Fruits of Matadero” (2019) Orkan Telhan.
Kinetic bioreactor (designed by Biorealize, Inc.), artificial palm tree, modified McCaw parrot (by Hasbro, Inc.), sample probiotic popsicles, and visual documentation.

”Fruits of Matadero” is a public commission by Matadero Madrid. The concept is featured as part of the Cyborg Garden and the “Ecovisionaries: Art for a Planet in a State of Emergency” exhibitions curated by the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives.

For the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Microbial Design Studio is used to design a special diet using traditional Turkish simits. We have mixed different strains of wild yeast that are sourced from different people and places in Istanbul with standardized lab cultures that are capable of producing vitamins, flavors, and smells. The “microbial simit diet” has a novel simit for everyday; it suggest a different perception of the microbial gut flora not only for traditional weight control but to diversify the culture inside us. The 30-day diet spans over the duration of the biennial and intend to become a commentary on the desires of controlling the appearance, form, and aesthetics of the body and its image—both for ourselves and the organisms—by designing them from within.

What we choose to eat and not to eat ultimately reflects our ideology. Here, the Microbial Design Studio intends to bring more designers to the conversation on genetically sourced products. The yeasts grown with the microbial design studio are genetically modified organisms. They source special vitamins and flavors for the dough to make every simit different from each other. Whether we are in favor or against genetic manipulation, the microbial design studio and the diet shows how to do it at home, in the kitchen or at the design studio. It invites the designer to take sides in the discussion and have a more discursive understanding of Microbial Humanities not only by studying it but also by shaping it from within.

30-Day Microbial Diet and Microbial Design Studio were nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize and received an honorary mention from Prix Ars Electronica in 2017.

Photography by Engin Gercek.

Bananaworks explores the future of food and the evolution of human taste from the perspective of microbial design.

Today, what we consume is not only shaped by biological evolution but also by complex social and economic decisions imposed by humans. Since the earliest days, we grow what we like; what evolves through nature is highly implicated by our anthropocentric “taste.” Today, Cavendish, the most popular banana in the international market, for instance, is mostly a human artifact; it is an outcome of a long history of selective breeding practices that standardized its form, texture, and taste. As a living artifact, on the other hand, Cavendish is a monoculture—it cannot grow by itself and rather needs to get cloned across different plantations around the world. As it cannot sexually reproduce, it also cannot diversify its own biology and“taste.”

A series of Bananaworks features biochemically novel concoctions that are made of probiotics, microbe-sourced proteins, and wild banana water. They function as hybrid semi-living encapsulations that can diversify their taste on their own and create infinitely new possibilities that cannot be created by nature-born (wild) bananas or microorganisms alone.

The microbial designs inside the encapsulations were designed using the Microbial Design Studio. The platform was used to genetically transform bacteria so that they can synthesize different flavors. The organisms were automatically cultured inside the platform and then incorporated into different concoctions.

Bananaworks research grew out a residency that is enabled through the European Commission EC FP7 project SYNENERGENE (Responsible Research and Innovation in Synthetic Biology), which is executed by the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark) and Biofaction (Vienna, Austria).

Special thanks to Steen Rasmussen, Jens Hauser, and Markus Schmidt for their guidance and support.

Exhibition

February 6 - May 7, 2016 - Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation at Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA.

 

A Now for MENAM integrates various historical and contemporary practices of time keeping across the cultural geography of Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean (MENAM). Instead of unifying the different time zones and calendar systems used within this vast geography, the calendar offers a set of discursive perceptions and experiences of time embedded within different cultural artifacts and symbolisms—jokes, recipes, news, or visualizations of high-frequency trading. The application brings together the slow and the fast, the personal and the social, the past and the future and algorithmically curates a ‘now’ to be shared across MENAM.

The calendar works as a real-time mobile application that delivers images, videos, information or text from different archives and online sources. The format refers to the calendars published in Turkey since 1900s known as the “educational calendar with time” (Turkish: Saatli Maarif Takvimi). These calendars offer a daily digest of practical information—quotes, recipes, remedies, suggested names for newborns—as well information about significant events from the past. A Now for MENAM offers a contemporary take on this format and offers a critical commentary on the periodicity, synchronicity and the continuity of temporal experiences in an intellectual geography shaped by a multitude of social, cultural, and political experiences.

A Now for MENAM is installed inside the CULTURUNNERS RV and exhibited during the Armory Show 2015.

A short write-up about the piece is featured at the 10th issue of Cleaver. Now is Elsewhere

The Emancipati Chapel (2014) is a space for contemplation, critical reflection, and discussion to support faith-based communities. The room serves sermons mixed from personal recordings, online news sources, and historical audio footage overlaid onto electronic music tracks designed by sound artists. The sermons feature alternative opinions on current political and religious issues and present critical voices next to each other.

The chapel includes two electronic rose windows placed at the opposite walls of the room. The windows animate geometric figures that correspond to the different sections of the soundtrack in which light patterns interact with the sound and with each other.

"The Emancipati Chapel in Detroit" features an audio track for Detroit based on issues ranging from social injustice and marginalization in the city to communal responses against the conflicts in the Middle East. The installation is developed for the People's Biennial 2014 curated by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffman. Special thanks to Ken Lum for inviting me to the exhibition.

The soundtrack of the installation is designed in collaboration with Erika from Detroit's Interdimensional Transmissions.

Along with the Reader and the Ensemble, the Chapel is part of the Emancipati trilogy.

Exhibition
September 12 - January 4, 2015. People's Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI.

United Colors of Dissent (UCoD, 2013 - http://ucod.org) is a data-driven performance designed for live public interaction using mobile phones and public displays. Participants collectively respond to a series of questions in their preferred language using a web-based voting interface running on their mobile phones. At every question, UCoD builds real-time graphics based on the answers and features them both on the phones and the displays. The performance intends to capture the linguistic and socio-cultural profile of different communities in urban environments by creating real-time visualizations that can map the prejudices, assumptions, and biases we may have about each other. UCoD is commissioned by “Connecting Cities,” a network aiming to build up a connected infrastructure of media facades, urban screens and projection sites to circulate artistic and social content.

United Colors of Dissent is a collaborative project with Mahir M. Yavuz.

A 5 min. documentary video of the project can be watched here:
ARTE Creative.
   
Exhibitions
Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, 2013
Videospread Marseille, Marseilles, France, 2013
Amber Festival, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013

Publications
Telhan, Orkan and Mahir M. Yavuz. “United Colors of Dissent.” 2015. Accessed March 9. http://civicmediaproject.org/works/civic-media-project/unitedcolorsofdissent. Link

The Road of Cones: The Eviction of Social Memory (2013) is set up as a reminder for the so-called transformations in public memory of Turkey. The structures translate the transient and fluid nature of events through data captured from online media and turn them layer by layer into conic form. Instead of taking the form of didactic visualizations, they feature streams of data; an abundance of information that is to be experienced as a symbolic embodiment. Walking through the road of cones, the audience witnesses an homage to all histories of eviction in these ancient lands; from the roads that are furnished with statues that stand for once ‘victorious kings’ to public spaces and monuments that glorify the ethnic, nationalistic, and religious cleansing projects that handed over power from one class to another. The cones seek to be read as discursive depictions of complex realities rather than work as abstract mapping, diagramming, and interpretation schemes which promise to reveal a truth, either in the servitude of the evicted or the evictor.

The Road of Cones is a collaborative project with Mahir M. Yavuz.

Exhibitions
 13th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, 2013

"The Eventual" combines traditional screen printing with synthetic biology. It is designed as a stand-alone microbial battery that uses bacteria to grow electricity to power up an image printed with electroluminescent inks. Feasting on rich soil, Geobacter bacteria forms a biofilm on the electrodes of the battery to produce electricity. As electricity becomes available, it begins to power the printed orb image, causing it to flicker and glow.

"The Eventual" is created with Matt Neff for Gizmodo’s Home of the Future show in New York, May 17-21, 2014.

Excerpts below are from Molly Petrilla's write up at The Penn Gazette: Art for the Future

"In designing the piece, Telhan says he and Neff strove for a “noir” look and feel. “We wanted an object you could place inside the Blade Runner house or the Minority Report house,” he adds. “We played around with different images, the look and feel of the glass container, how much dirt and the different ingredients in the dirt—it’s quite a bit more complex than it looks.”

Telhan began exploring synthetic biology—a field that fuses biotechnology with design, computation and electronics—when he came to Penn in 2010. “It’s a sub-field that is founded by computer scientists and engineers and designers,” he says. “They’re not necessarily interested in making medicine or human-related research, but rather in using biology as a way of investigating what other things we can do with living systems in relation to human needs, desires and wants."

Read more about the piece from Adam Clark Estes' write-up at Gizmodo.

The Emancipati Reader (2012) is a discursive reading instrument that addresses the needs of progressive religious practitioners who are willing to adopt new styles of learning to diversify their sources of knowledge. As users research their topic of interest using the left screen of a dual-tablet interface, the Reader dynamically prepares a number of adversarial “point of views” related to the content and presents them on the right screen. The instrument not only intends to assure that the subject is studied in a hyper-linked, socially-networked, and distributed form meshed with data, images, and sound, but that the subject is also presented with opposing arguments that are prepared with custom filtering and content-matching software. Through a comparative study, the Emancipati users rely on confronting first with others’ way of looking at the world to form an opinion; exercise a Kantian form of ‘judgment,’ where the need for exchange with the opposing argument is necessary to become aware of one’s own values, both for upholding a position or taking on others.’ 

Exhibitions
 1st Istanbul Design Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, 2012

The Emancipati Ensemble (2013) is an installation that features readers that address the needs of a more discursive religious pedagogy. These readers connect with each other and form “reading ensembles” among two to four children. The screens of the tablets make a shared reading surface and let children read, watch, and learn together. The dual-tablet interface presents information with alternative points of view by using custom content analysis software. Children get exposed to perspectives from multiple points of view that span across different religions, belief systems, orthodox, secular, scientific or agnostic opinions at the same time. Thus, children not only can introduce their own preferences and styles of learning by picking from a multitude of sources but also share with each other what they individually encounter during their studies.

Exhibitions
New Museum, New York, NY, 2013
Limewarf Gallery, London, UK, 2013

'Dust Serenade' is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni's famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases.

Kundt was a strong believer in experimental methods over purely theoretical inquiry in a time when the disciplines of theoretical and experimental physics started to diverge.

'Dust Serenade' intends to remind us the materiality of sound. Tubes filled with scraps of words and letters--cut-up theory--interact with sound waves and turn into figures of dust. Here, visitors can modulate the frequency of the sound emitted by moving a rod and create different harmonic sound effects. As sound waves figure, refigure, and disfigure the text, we invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theorical knowlegde and the sensory experience.

Dust Serenade is one of a series of interactive sound projects that enable visitors to experience the physical aspects of sound, presence, and atmosphere. Works in the series have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Zagreb, Istanbul and São Paulo.

Dust Serenade is a collaboration with Markus Decker and Dietmar Offenhuber.

Exhibition
 Laboratoria: Art & Science Space, Moscow, 2012
M.I.T. Museum - Emerging Technologies Gallery, Cambridge, MA, 2010

Video
M.I.T. TechTV Interview

URL(s)
Russian-Austrian art&science project DUST
dustserenade.net 
M.I.T. Museum Page