Orkan Telhan's Emancipati Reader at the Istanbul Design Biennial
ISTANBUL--Orkan Telhan, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts; Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design, will participate in the first edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial, taking place October 13-December 12, 2012 in Turkey.
Telhan joins curator Joseph Grima's Adhocracy, one of two exhibitions comprised for the Biennial that features the incipient role for design as "an act of shaping society by enabling self-organization, producing platforms of exchange, and empowering networks of grass-roots production."
Citing the emergence of the open-source movement; the arrival of affordable micro-manufacturing technologies; the explosion of hacker and maker culture; the democratization of technology through projects like Arduino and participatory platforms such as Kickstarter, Adhocracy underscores the ideological shift away from established conventions of consumerism and the inception of a new understanding of design's role within society, one in which end-users are no longer merely passive consumers but active agents.
Telhan, an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, that engage with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility contributed "The Emancipati Reader."
The discursive reading instrument is designed to address the needs of progressive religious practitioners who would be willing to adopt new styles of learning to diversify their source 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 also is presented with its opposing arguments that are prepared with custom filtering and content-matching software," Telhan described.
Through a comparative study, the Emancipati users rely on confronting first with the other's way of looking at the world to form 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.' Multiple Emancipati Readers can connect to form "reading ensembles" in which the screens can be tiled and shared to build larger reading surfaces.
The application can also be customized to do research by multiple individuals who can simultaneously introduce their own point of view to the research process.
In this exhibition, The Emancipati Reader features the results of a series of inquiries that mix dynamically updated and user-generated content with previously prepared material.
For more information, visit http://istanbuldesignbiennial.iksv.org/adhocracy/.
About the Istanbul Design Biennial
With the aim of underlining the importance of design for production, economy, cultural interaction and quality of life, the first Istanbul Design Biennial will be realized in 2012 by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. Istanbul Design Biennial is open to all disciplines of the creative industries in major fields such as urban design, architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, new media design and fashion design, as well as their subfields. The Design Biennial aims to create a platform to support the development of design and innovation policies as well as a design archive on national and international scale.
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