The Crowd In Us / Beliz Demircioğlu Cihandide
“Memory is more than a looking back into a time that is no longer it is a looking out into another kind of time all together where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still.” Frederick Buechner
Istanbul is a city constructed by historic cultural diversity. Its range of dynamics is a product of many different civilizations that have been born and developed in this geography. From architecture to textile, culinary to music, multiculturalism is the essence that composes the roots of the city and feeds every living, surviving and developing aspect.
Usually we recognize and think of time as a continuous flow but in Istanbul with imagination and inspiration, time and space open into various dimensions. Istanbul’s historical architectural ruins and cultural layers existing on top of each other create a feeling as if; a person exists now and here but also in the “here” which was very different years and years ago. In the perception, this rupture can lead the way for the person to ease the boundaries of reality and let the imagination create new historical layers of the body itself.
When one walks in the places like Grand Bazaar where the merchants of the Silk Road used to walk, the magnificent power of the city on people divides the history of the body and the history of time into layers, creating a synthesized body perception. The material reality of the body dissolves into different moments that continue in their own way and the space reflects its current actuality as well as its historical authenticity.
Notice
Inspired by this concept, The Crowd In Us aims to create an architecture that brings forth this multilayered feeling of time that exists in this city. It creates 3 matrices of time; present, 5 seconds ago and a pre-recorded time, mixes these matrices together and creates one visual matrix where all the different times exist in one space. When the viewer steps in front of the projection wall what they see is their own live video footage and 5 seconds ago and a recording of a place in Istanbul. The audience has the opportunity to interact with the past since the past becomes the future in this continuous flow of different times. And they have the possibility to arrange their movements according to the way they would like to foresee the future interacting with the past. By blending a completely different time of a space they have not been before, the installation gives the audience the option to create a piece that blends virtual reality with the reality of now and here.
Credits
Concept and design. Beliz Demircioğlu Cihandide
Exhibitions:
Interactive Telecommunications Show, New York
Tedance Festival, Lisbon
Lucy Exhibition, Istanbul
Confrontation, Istanbul
