Digital Earth Symposium

Digital Earth is a two-day symposium focusing on the materiality and immateriality of the digital reality we live in – from data centers to software interfaces, and rare minerals to financial derivatives. Earth is dug, excavated, and ripped apart to extract the fundamental materials that keep the computational machine running – oil, coltan, sand, rubber, lithium form the material basis on which digital reality is built. At the same time, digital technologies enable new modes of circulation and extraction of information and data.

Algorithmic regimes regulate the movement of goods and people around the world in relatively smooth fluxes enabled by increasingly sophisticated surveillance systems. These algorithmic regimes generate, track and accumulate such a mass of data that is already referred to as the ‘digital twin’ of Earth. The existence of a physical planet and its ‘datafied’ counterpart generate a discrepancy between the reality on the ground and what is recorded and broadcasted - often leading to violent socio-political, economic, ecological and cultural frictions.

Responding to the themes of the Digital Earth fellowship, this symposium brings together artists, architects, and scholars to share knowledges, reflections, and practices. Looking into the ways digital technologies shape our understanding of time, reconfigure processes of materialisation, and govern our landscapes, Digital Earth Symposium, examines how they mediate and regulate our world while acknowledging the human agency among these all-pervasive processes.

The event is organised by Ashkal Alwan and Digital Earth, and supported by Hivos.

With Haig Aivazian, Hicham Awad, Benjamin H. Bratton, Diann Bauer, Heather Davis, Cheng Guo, Geocinema, Monika Halkort, Helene Kazan, Jessika Khazrik, Suhail Malik, Reza Negarestani, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Adham Selim.

Friday 19 April 2019
 

10:00 Opening notes by Digital Earth & Ashkal Alwan

10:30 Tactilities of the Posthuman: On the Arithmetics of Touch 
in Contemporary Computational Regimes| Monika Halkort

11:30 The Holy Trinity of AGI: Sensation, Memory and Thinking | Reza Negarestani (a recorded message)

12:15 Digital Earth Fellows Presentations:

The Net Wanderer: Tour of Suspended Handshakes | Cheng Guo

13:00 Lunch break

14:30 Panel discussion: 

Risk Architecture | Adham Selim, Helene Kazan, & Hicham Awad, moderated by Monika Halkort 

16:00 Coffee Break

16:30 After Scarcity | Bahar Noorizadeh 

17:00 Closing remarks
 

Saturday 20 April 2019

11:00 Time and Time Again | Diann Bauer & Suhail Malik

12:00 Digital Earth Fellows Presentations: 

Making of Earths: Notes Towards a Film | Geocinema 

Society of False Witnesses | Jessika Khazrik

13:00 Lunch break

14:30 Petromateriality: The Afterlives of Oil | Heather Davis

15:30 Hemispherical Stacks | Benjamin H. Bratton

16:30 Coffee Break

17:00 Prometheus | Haig Aivazian

18:00 Closing remarks

 Friday 19 April 2019

Tactilities of the Posthuman: On the Arithmetics of Touch in Contemporary Computational Regimes | Monika Halkort

In this talk, Halkort takes up the question of the we and asks how the cumulative interweaving of technologies, social, and natural environments (re)configures the role of touch as inaugural moment of subjectivity and being-in-common. How are we touched by and in touch with the multiplicity of overlapping experiential presents that planetary infrastructures of computation enable? And where do we situate the point of contact and connectivity established in touching, when the “who”, “what” and “how” of touching are no longer clear? To raise the question of touch in relation to digital infrastructures is not to insist on the possibility of unmediated access to the world imbued in the tactility of the human body or the skin, but to make room for interrogating the hybrid ecologies of automated landscapes as situated, ontological and aesthetico-political arrangements that (re)direct and (re)configure affective movements, experience and bodily dispositions in variously differentiated and locally specific ways.

The Holy Trinity of AGI: Sensation, Memory and Thinking | Reza Negarestani (a recorded message)

The aim of this presentation is to provide an introduction to some of the current research in the field of Artificial General Intelligence surrounding sensory processing, constructive memory and conceptual cognition. In addition, we shall also investigate some of theoretical and practical flaws of these models. In concluding remarks, an integrated way of thinking about the holy trinity of AGI—a pluralistic patchwork of models and methods—will be put forward.

The Net Wanderer: Tour of Suspended Handshakes | Cheng Guo

The Net Wanderer is a research project that explores the connection between the critical network gateways in China and the infrastructure running these gateways. Cheng uses computer network diagnostic tools that track specific geographic locations, to create a map of the proxies that form the giant wall blocking Chinese users to roam the internet freely. By mapping the giant wall and physically visiting some of those geolocations, Cheng seeks to reveal the entanglement of technology, culture and ideology behind China›s internet infrastructure.

Panel discussion:

Risk Architecture | Adham Selim, Helene Kazan, & Hicham Awad, moderated by Monika Halkort

This panel brings together distinct but intertwining enquiries into risk and its vast frame of affect, questioned through architecture and its imaging, as well as through forms of movement, making, planning, and design. Awad, Kazan, and Selim propose to examine the conception, production, and dissemination of risk through visual and statistical categorising in real-time computing and architecture; outline experiments into the impact of digital tooling in architecture and design as technical and systemic forms that multiply through historic, aesthetic, ethical, and political platforms; and observe its technological intersection with international law and human experiences of violence, traced through its speculative imaging and the responsive materiality of the lived-built environment.

Video performance:

After Scarcity | Bahar Noorizadeh

Sluggish materialism gave way to broadband idealism—Colossal corporations pipelining all sorts of things via regulated networks of highly efficient data transfer. This Utopia is neither about stamina nor grit—High-speed capitalism melts solids and, in the bargain, time. Fiber-Optic-Future-Forward: Time has changed. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. Vindicating this other internet, the lecture presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extra-ordinary to financial arrangements and imaginations of our time.

Saturday 20 April 2019

Keynote: Time and Time Again | Diann Bauer & Suhail Malik

The term Anthropocene was popularised in the early twenty-first century to designate that human civilization has become a geological force. The impact of our species on the planet›s material organisation is irrevocable and increasing. The future of the planet over the span of millennia is completely uncertain. Yet action has to be taken now. But how to take action when it is the unknown future that must determine what takes place now, and at a planetary scale? In this talk Bauer and Malik present their research on how the demands of such a practical and theoretical reordering of time and its conventions outside human experience can be met. Elaborating on their development of notions of Xenotemporality (Bauer) and the Chronocene (Malik), as well as reflections drawn from the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan that concludes just before the Digital Earth symposium, Bauer and Malik consider how large-scale digital computation processes can transform the basis and horizons of political action in a present whose anthropometric limits are displaced by time and complexity.

Making of Earths: Notes Towards a Film | Geocinema

Making of Earths: Notes Towards a Film gives an introduction to Geocinema’s current research project. While plotting their next documentary, they have been tracing the imaging of earth along with its supporting infrastructures. Their research departs from the Digital Belt and Road, the Chinese-led Big Data program, which aims to synchronise Earth Observation data towards a modernity based on predictability. Here, data-sets constellate into various forms of interpretations which map out the nearest-future forecasts. But by being attentive to how data is identified, collected and transmitted, what comes to the fore is rather how various embodiments of these remote-infrastructures along with their predetermined ways of seeing are feeding back into geographies.

Society of False Witnesses | Jessika Khazrik

Operating online under the domain https://society.system(to be launched at the end of 2019), Society of False Witnesses traces the ways with which technology as infrastructure, cryptography and content was obversely used to delimit or deny the circulation of toxicity and malware. Rather than focusing on one research project, the online public avenue critically presents reoccurring motifs and protocols that govern the circulation and production of media within the Libanes global economy. Playing with the evidentiality of fiction, matter and mediation, https://society.systemauto-reflexively brings together a variety of computational tools – from multimodal machine learning to web scraping, GIS and satellite image analysis, in order to explore the relationship between the production of knowledge, space and the architecture of post+human subsumption.

Petromateriality: The Afterlives of Oil | Heather Davis

Plastic is the intimate manifestation of our cultural fixation with and dependency upon oil. And yet it is a material beyond oil, a material that effectively effaces its origins in oil; it is the afterlife of oil, the ineradicable residue of the era of petro-capitalism. Through infrastructures and imaginaries plastic has built the world that we inhabit, including the digital networks upon which we increasingly rely. But it also refuses to let us go, for plastic can also be understood as a medium, in the sense of a clairvoyant, communicating with long-dead organisms to make their vital presence felt amongst the living, where the haunting legacies of plastic are voiced. In this talk, Heather Davis will consider the relationship between plastic as a media and plastic as a medium, where petromateriality reorganizes our notions of time.

Hemispherical Stacks | Benjamin H. Bratton

21st century geopolitics to come and the planetary computational infrastructures with which they operate are, in fact and practice, not two separate things. They are different names we use for deeply interwoven socio-technical process and for how those processes become interpretable concepts and enforced institutional norms. The geographic scope of multipolar hemispherical stacks is delimited by the procedural integrations of data —imagined as a new sovereign substance— and the drawing of territorial circumventions that are sometimes ancient and sometimes quite new. That is, the boundary drawn for data capture often tracks directly with the defensible boundaries drawn for its geopolitical domain of influence if not formal jurisdiction: the geography of one becomes functionally, if not formally, tied to the boundary of the other.

Prometheus | Haig Aivazian

In the 1992 Olympic Games, the “Dream Team” —predominantly black NBA superstars— swept all opposition to win the gold medal for the USA. The team’s dominance coincided with, and reflected, a new era of global politics, embodied in the U.S technological and environmental assault on Iraq a year prior. Prometheus departs from these two events, with fire as its main trans-historical narrative motor, a fire only momentarily contained, only partially domesticated, but repeatedly mobilised, since its theft from the heights of Mount Olympus, to its unleashing on the oil fields of Kuwait. Through associative and rhythmic montage, Prometheus considers the technicity ignited by the discovery of fire, as well as the exploitative impulses that weaponise other technologies, from black oil to black bodies. Aivazian will share his thinking around the making of the film, focusing on slower and lower resolution forms of violence, and their eclipsing by a regime of real-time and High Definition imagery.

Algorithmic Island, 2018 (13’) | Tekla Aslanishvili 
 

Algorithmic Island is an extended teaser of a forthcoming full-length documentary film, focused on the trials and errors of developing a futuristic city and logistics hub in Anaklia, a village lying on the north-western edge of the Georgian Republic. An essayistic documentary investigates the material and social conditions that are produced as a result of ambitious infrastructural investments, aimed at transforming the country of Georgia into a trade corridor for the speculative New Silk Road project. By exploring the awkward infrastructural landscapes and relating architectural frictions that have emerged over the last decade in Anaklia, the film observes how the planning strategies and operational logics of large scale infrastructural investments and even mistakes, which the fantasies of technologically managed smooth urban life inevitably contain, are being manifested in a design of peripheral large-scale geo-engineering projects.Through artistic-scientific collaborations with international researchers, film partially positions itself at a distance from the actual events and speculates about the possible scenarios of development from a future perspective. 

Core Dump - Dakar, 2018 (10’)| Francois Knoetze
 

Set in Kinshasa, Shenzhen, Karlsruhe, Chengdu, New York and Dakar, Core Dump is an ongoing video series which explores the relationship between digital technology and colonialism. Core Dump considers the extractive nature of the tech industry and its origins, looking specifically at mining in the DRC, the dumping of e-waste on Africa’s west coast, and how notions of ‘progress’ and ‘mechanisation’ are falsely represented as products of the West, disregarding the contribution -both historically and in the current supply chain- of Africa. It tries to uncover ways in which the ‘materiality and immateriality of digital reality’ has played out to devastating effect across the African continent, but also to highlight conceptual connections between the West’s notion(s) of a ‘tech utopias’ and the ‘broken paradises’ it mines to create these.

Dreamland, 2017 (13’) | Fadi Mansour 
 

In the aftermath of a prolonged trash crisis in Lebanon, solid waste is used as filling material into the creation of new territories on the sea. In the purpose of coastal regeneration, an old dumpsite hill is dismantled and its toxic matter is spread onto the sea as the bottom layer of this new land formation. This operation releases a forty-year-old history of toxicity into the surrounding environment leading to an intensified ecological mutation while the directly visible end product is a valuable stretch of real estate. By way of countering the perspective of the polished architectural product, which is essentially anthropocentric, the video portrays the ecological transformation by investigating the extent of sea pollution on invisible marine biomass. The theoretical premise considers territory as the focal point to the development of capital. Whether land, skin or sea, the territory interacts with both flows of capital and flows of toxicity. The relationship between both flows is explored through their interaction with machines.

Ultima Ratio Δ Mountain of the Sun, 2017 (13’) | Bahar Noorizadeh
 

Cinema devolved into the slow-motion industry: spectacles repeat. Ultima Ratio speeds up by slowing down the image-fix. Traversing the crime-enriched Bekaa valley, the camera uncovers the age-old industries of hashish, models for altering what we see. So too, the camera follows futures, a flash-forwarded optic that seeks to perceive what can be seen anew, cut, particled into vivid fields of matter. “In hashish there is no likeness,” only zero-sites for vision-production then, now as visual senses submitted to the rule of reason. The new reason, as this cinematic skin sees it, is not dead old technology, power and blood, not accelerated nothingness, hype and retro-fascism, but technology, each and every instance, as a talking with the dead--emotions, optics, hashish, radio transmitters, melo-dramas, fiber optic telecommunications, ideologies--and now, hashish as primitive technology, the Now as a science-fiction beyond the double binds, the bad infinities of u-/dys-topia. Instead, a tension-less state, a lack of anxiety over demarcating sapience from sentience, automation from human, intelligence farms from organic machines. They--these name voyagers of the ultimate reason--have no story, it has already happened, spirit became mainframe. Bodies metamorph into databanks. A cinema mixing 3-D objects and documentary footage views this state ahead of the state Δ the future returning as past--Mountain of the Sun.

Atmospheric Feedback Loops, 2017 (18’) | Susan Schuppli
 

In a rural landscape approximately an hour due south of Amsterdam, an open-air laboratory is tuning into the atmospheric frequencies of nature. Separating the signal of climate change from the noise of cyclical variability. Since 1970 the Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research has been measuring and monitoring the changes taking place in the feedback loops between land surface processes and the airborne dynamics of our planet. Studying the ways in which the complex behaviour of clouds, aerosols, radiation, precipitation, and turbulence interact with terrestrial events.

A Wall of Water 2018 (5’.48'') | Serkan Taykan
 

HydroLab Mesopotamia (2017) specifically focuses on analysing the architectural, ecological, and social impact of eleven 'security dams’ proposed to be built on the Turkey-Iraq border. It aims to be a platform for discussing the transformations that these dams cause, bringing into the debate universities, civil society, and actors from different areas of expertise and experience.

Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a wide range of media, he delves into the ways in which ideologies embed, affect, and move people, objects, and architecture. Often departing from known events, and weaving in lesser known narratives, he has explored apparatuses of control and sovereignty at work in sports, finance, museums, and music.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, essayist and curator based in Tbilisi and Berlin. After the completion of her Master of Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2015, her work has been investigating proliferated practices of automated production and the algorithmic management of global urban spaces. Her artistic focus lies with the possibilities of unfolding the potential of computation, in favor of progressive social and political change. As part of her cross-disciplinary working method, she creates essayistic documentary films, interventionist performances, video installations, as well as texts and lectures.

Hicham Awad (b. 1988) is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Visual Studies in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) at Harvard University. His dissertation examines the roles played by “real-time” cinematographic, architectural, and computational technologies in the representation, communication, and management of risk in the domains of design, finance, and national security. He has delivered talks and presentations at several academic and art institutions such as Ashkal Alwan, Beirut Art Center, the University of Chicago, and the Society for the Social Studies of Science. His writings have been published by ArteEast Quarterly, 98editions, and the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Benjamin H. Bratton’s work spans Philosophy, Art, Design and Computer Science. He is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture).

Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She is part of the working group Laboria Cuboniks who wrote Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation and the collaborative A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle http://a-s-t.co/#Home). Bauer has screened and exhibited internationally at Tate Britain, the ICA and The Showroom, London, The Sharjah Biennale 13, UAE, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, History Miami Museum and Art Center South Florida, Miami. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including: Cornell University, Yale University and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), Goldsmiths, The Baltic, The Tate and the ICA (UK).

Heather Davis (PhD, Concordia University) is a researcher, writer, and editor from Montréal. She is currently an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, the New School in New York. Her current book project traces the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. Davis explores and participates in expanded art practices that bring together researchers, activists, and community members to enact social and environmental change. She is the editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017).

Cheng Guo is a visual artist currently based in Shanghai. His practice explores the interrelation between individuals and mainstream/emerging technologies within a cultural and societal context. In 2012 he graduated from the Royal College of Art, London with a Master’s degree in Design Products. Cheng has worked as the Executive Director of Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, and as a visiting researcher at the Department of Environment & Health at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has taken part in exhibitions, such as Machines Are Not Alone: A Machinic Trilogy (Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, 2018), The Ecstasy of Time (HE Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2017), and GAMERZ 11 (Aix-en-Provence, France, 2015).

Geocinema consists of art historian Asia Bazdyrieva and filmmaker Solveig Suess. Bazdyrieva studied analytical chemistry at the Kyiv  National University (2009) and art history at The City University of New York as a Fulbright grantee (2017). Suess completed her undergraduate in Visual Cultures at the Glasgow School of Art, with her postgraduate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, London (2017). Bazdyrieva and Suess started their collaboration at the New Normal think-tank, Strelka Institute, Moscow (2018).

Monika Halkort’s research focuses on the intersectional dynamics of racialization, commodification and enclosure inherent in digital infrastructures focusing on the specific context of political struggle and humanitarian governance. Her most recent work examines the material agency of data in (re)configuring dynamics of  collective life-making as they stretch lived and embodied commitments and obligations across socio-technical registers and spatio-temporal domains. The main geographic focus of my work is the Arab world.

Helene Kazan's work engages an intersection of international law, architecture, and the physical experience of violence. Kazan questions the politics of dominant methods of producing evidence that can exclude or render the human body invisible and, in response, argues for the poetic testimony of violence, as a method by which the person can gain further political and legal agency. In 2019, Kazan complete a PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, London. She recently curated the exhibition Points of Contact in Lebanon, and her work has been shown at documenta(14), The Serpentine Gallery, London, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, Mosaic Rooms, London, Ibraaz, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist and a writer. In her practice, she focuses on topics ranging from ecotoxicology and machine learning, to linguistics, photography, and the history of science. She explores the influence of the global economy, the techno-politics of voice, and the organisation of knowledge. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Arab Image Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Times Museum Guangzhou, and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Theater from the Lebanese University, and a Master’s degree in Arts, Culture and Technology from MIT, where she was also awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.

Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, filmmaker and sculptor, currently based in Cape Town. He received his MFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town (2015). Knoetze’s practice explores the life cycles of discarded objects and the intersections of material and social histories. Using material waste as a medium, he creates elaborate sculptural suits that merge the human with the synthetic. His works have been presented at a wide range of national and international group exhibitions and festivals, including the Afropixel Festival & Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar (2018), LagosPhoto Festival, Nigeria (2015), and Syngenta Photo Awards Exhibition at Somerset House, London (2017).

Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies, and was 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. Recent and forthcoming publications include, as author, On the Necessity of Art’s Exit From Contemporary Art (2017) and ‘The Ontology of Finance’ in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014), and, as co-editor, Realism Materialism Art (2015), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), a Special Issue of the journal Finance and Society on ‘Art and Finance’ (2016), and The Flood of Rights (2017).

Fadi Mansour is an architect, artist and researcher based in Beirut. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London in 2017 and the Architectural Association Diploma School in 2009. His research work, visual art practice and writing lies at the intersection of techno-capitalism, colonial violence and ecology.

Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher best known for pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book Cyclonopedia. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. He is the author of Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic/Sequence Press).

Bahar Noorizadeh is a filmmaker, writer, and platform designer. She works on the reformulation of hegemonic time narratives as they collapse in the face of speculation: philosophical, financial, legal, colonial, futural. Noorizadeh's current research examines the intersections of finance, Contemporary Art and emerging technology, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialisation imaginaries. She is pursuing this work as a PhD candidate in Art Practice+Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Noorizadeh is a founding member of BLOCC (Building Leverage over Creative Capitalism).

Adham Selim is an architect and researcher whose work spans the aesthetics, politics and histories of tooling in architecture and design. His most recent research "Digital Arabs" pushes the archaeology of the digital into different time zones and extends it beyond the Western canon. He curated Objects of Change at the Sursock Museum (Beirut, 2017), and co-curated Command: Commandline at Station (Beirut, 2017). Selim is also a co-founder of The Archilogue, an online platform for crowd-translating and publishing.

Susan Schuppli is an artist and researcher based in London, whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Her current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an “extreme image” archive of material wrongs. Recent projects include Eavesdropping, Ian Potter Museum Melbourne, Nature Represents Itself & Slick Images, SculptureCenter, New York, Trace Evidence, a video trilogy commissioned by Arts Catalyst UK & Bildmuseet, Sweden and Atmospheric Feedback Loops, a Vertical Cinema commission for Sonic Acts, Amsterdam. She is Reader and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths where she is also an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture.

Serkan Taycan (1978, Gaziantep, Turkey) is an artist/researcher and academic with an engineering and photojournalism background. He lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. In his research-based artistic practice, he focuses on the dynamics of ecological and urban transformations caused by human activity. His work has been exhibited in various venues including Venice Architectural Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Helsinki Photography Biennial, Mardin Biennial, Sinop Biennial and Thessaloniki Photography Biennale as well as SALT, MAXXI, MuCEM, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, St. Petersburg Russian National Centre of Photography and Malmo Museum. Serkan Taycan completed his MFA degree in Visual Arts at Sabanci University, Istanbul and in Photography at Aalto University, Helsinki. He gave lectures, seminars, and led workshops at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (Reykjavik), Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore) and Leeds Arts University.