User:Ciğdem.zeytin

'''amberFestival ''' The foundations of amber Art and Technology Festival were laid on February 2007 in Istanbul, when a group of artists came together to establish the Body Process Arts Association BIS. An intense work was started to launch the festival on its targeted date of November 2007, that would present a whole new perspective on art and technology in Turkey, a country at the junction point of east and west.

“amber” which is the first and only festival held in Turkey in the field of art and new technologies, was actualized in its first year as a result of personal efforts struggling against many difficulties. Aiming to introduce and develop a brand new field in Turkey by bringing to the forefront a form of art which makes use of new technologies and potentials of the human body, the festival took place as an international event in Istanbul on 9-17 November 2007.  amberFestival starting on the second week of November since 2007, continues to be held each year including many performances, interactive installations, seminars artist presentations and workshops. On the flexible grounds of amberFestival enhancing artistic exchange and collaboration, artists, art followers, art-lover Istanbulites and young artists from all over the world have had the chance to experience through participation the works produced and also to '''share their comments with artists coming from diverse cultures.

amberFestival''' set off with the objective of making Istanbul a center for sharing and collaboration between the east and the west, in its second year –amber’08- managed to take the first step in the establishment of a new technologies and art network amberNetwork placing at its center neighboring countries as well as countries of the Middle East, Caucasia and Turkic Republics.

The works presented within the scope of amberFestival, anticipate physical participation of the viewer with the artwork and thereby the reconstitution of it. In this way, each artwork becomes an experience for the observer. Through the artwork itself the viewer ends up being both the subject and the object of his/her experience. Information technologies, computers, electronic units, sensors, motion capturing devices and special softwares play an important role in the artworks and performances presented.  amberFestival generally followed by contemporary art audiences, art and design students, technology and design professionals, artists and art technicians and young generations, also aims to address technology-lovers whose field of interest is rather limited to technical aspects ranging from robots to new software and hardware products. Together with all these classifications and interesting subjects pointing at our present and future and with the artworks presented, the festival creates a distinctive vision for its audiences.

The intellectual meeting that was held as a series of seminars until recent years focusing on discussions around the main theme, has been transformed into a conference in the last festival that took place in 2009. amberConference aims at creating a platform of discussion and dissemination in Istanbul for various themes and topics in which science, art and technology converge. amberNetwork International Art and Technology Network, amberFestival and amberConference, centered in Istanbul, since 2007, aside from presenting artworks

reaching out for the cultural and geographic East and West, continue to enhance and enrich international mobility and cultural connections of artists, researchers, technicians and academicians.

The festival hosting outstanding names from the international art and technology scene, apart from introducing contemporary interactive art productions to Turkish art audience, provides international visibility for artists working within the scope of art and technology in Turkey. This year’s theme for the festival held under the subjects “Voice and Survival”, “Inter-passive persona” and “Uncyborgable?” in the years 2007, 2008, 2009 respectively is “Datacity”.

Besides amberFestival which has identified the theme for amber’10 Art and Technology Festival that will take place in November as “Datacity” considering the ever increasing importance of the production and employment of all kinds of data within the city and urban life, also amberConference of this year will share the same subject.  Datacity

For the first time in history the World’s urban population has outnumbered its rural counterpart. Cities have become the predominant habitat of humanity. The requirements of rapidly growing cities, coupled with the contemporary technological possibilities bring about new urban reality that is data. amber’10 takes up the relationship between city and data as its festival theme.

It is no coincidence that the rise of statistics as a science coincided with the rise of the modern city as a social form during the industrial revolution. When statistical methods of data production and measurement coupled with reproductive techniques such as photography and printing, the modern city entered into imaginary circulation simultaneously with its double, its image. From its beginnings, the modern city emerged both as a reality and a representation that were interrelated in such a manner that it became hard to tell one from the other.

In this historical process, contemporaneous with the Enlightenment and Industrial capitalism, the ability to understand the city became conditional on processing and thinking through the data it produced. Data has become a crucial factor in urban social relations and politics.

The capacity to produce and process all kinds of data has increased tremendously with the rise of new technologies in the last three decades. Capitalist parliamentary democracy, as it exists today, demands transparency, efficiency and absolute security as the conditions of its mechanism and has at its service the wide possibilities offered by new technologies to meet these demands. This coupling brought about the strategic importance of data in today’s World. We know and define the city through the images made up of its data. The collection, storage and processing of the vast amount of data has become an everyday practice that is both visible and invisible, threatening to some and absolutely beneficial to others in a field ranging from law to ethics, human rights to health.

With the theme title Datacity, amber’10 proposes to define the modern city as a data cluster in addition to however else the city form may be defined today and calls on artists to interpret the life forms, production and consumption patterns and politics of the Datacity from the vantage point of arts and technology.

For more information about amber’10: www.amberplatform.org

For detailed information about previous festivals:

http://09.amberfestival.org

http://08.amberfestival.org

http://07.amberfestival.org

http://www.facebook.com/amberfestival

BIS – Body Process Arts Association

BIS Body Process Arts, is an Istanbul based initiative that aims to explore artistic forms of expression at the conjunction of the body and the digital process. It was founded in 2007 as an association by a team of researchers and artists from disciplines such as dance, performance, design, social sciences and engineering. The founders of BIS came together in order to create a local discussion and production platform on art and technology in a globalized World itself transformed by new technologies.  BIS defines its area of interest through the wording of its subtitle. The concept of body- process refers to the inevitable relation between the modern human body and technological processes and tools. Starting from the observation that new technologies increasingly manage practical and critical aspects of our lives such as communication, health and security, this concept orients itself to think about the fluid boundaries between body and technology and the consequences of their interaction. The concept of body-process arts envisages artistic forms that explore, think, embody and question this complex and multifaceted relationship.

BIS’s objective is to establish a permanent center that will focus on the research, production and education in the field of body-process arts in Istanbul. Simultaneously, BIS seeks to create an international network of artists, researchers and technicians with whom it would continue to work and cooperate in a spirit of cooperation and exchange. It thus aims to participate in universal art from a local and regional perspective. BIS prioritizes new openings in the field of body-process arts that are brought on by cultural exchange and cooperation projects that also include artists and initiatives that are not part of the Global art circuits.

http://www.amberplatform.org/root/about/  why amber?

The name “amber” common in many languages, stands for a semiprecious gem made from

fossilized tree resin, also used to describe the gem’s golden color. It refers to the yellowish translucent fossil resin found mainly in the southern shores of the Baltic which is used for ornaments and jewels. It is thus a natural substance processed by humans for artistic and ornamental purposes, also called “kehribar” in Turkish.

In 600 B.C. Greek Philosopher Thales discovered that amber rubbed on wool attracted particles like dust and feather. It was believed that this was a characteristic only specific to amber, until in 16th century it was discovered by English Scientist Williem Gilbert that other substances carried the same characteristics as well. Based on the Greek name for amber: electron, Gilbert called this effect as electrification. So that’s how amber -in Greek-, gave its name to a physical principle entirely changing our lives.

While searching for a name suitable for our formation in the field of art and technology, we had certain criteria to follow. The name which would represent this new structure, should evoke concepts attributing meaning to technology, most important of all, should be familiar

to human being, thus bear an organic nature. It should be a unifying word common to many cultures. “amber” was a suggestion meeting all our expectances both due to meaning and nature. The double implication of the substance in artistry and in the etymology of technological terms such as electricity, electronics and electron prompted us to choose amber as our artistic name since amberPlatform focuses on arts and technology. Therefore, with the first months of 2007, we concurrently started to realize our dreams and put new meanings into amber through our work.

“amber” giving its name to electricity, carrying the savings of hundreds of years to the present day, while bringing together on the intersection of technology and art, artists, art followers and young people and synthesizing organic life through technology, also by means of its appeal, mediates our interpretation of the human-being and the new technologies dominating our imagination.

about amberPlatform

BIS has gathered all its activities starting from 2007 under the headline amber Art and Technology Platform. Aside from amberFestival, amberConference and amberNetwork, amberPlatform as the fourth dimension, continues its existence in the form of a space for production and sharing.

Next to amber Art and Technology Platform activities, BIS continues to carry on with its practices in the field of art and technology with a high sense of social responsibility, by being a partner of European Union projects and as a part of various national and international events and cooperations initiated both in Turkey and internationally.

http://www.amberplatform.org/root/ --Ciğdem.zeytin (talk) 12:50, 3 September 2010 (UTC)--Ciğdem.zeytin (talk) 12:50, 3 September 2010 (UTC)