HOLO
Oğuz Emre Bal is a Madrid-based Turkish artist, using emerging software and hardware such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3d printing to realise his works about space’s interdimensional bodily experience and cognitive realities. He investigates new materialism beyond physical boundaries by the notions of space and reality, nature and technology, and reflects these relations in his artworks. Between the years 2017 and 2022, his artworks were exhibited at many international art festivals, such as 16th Venice Biennale, Cyfest (Saint Petersburg, Russia), Adaf (Athens, Greece), Connect for Creativity Project by British Council (Belgrade, Serbia), and Sonar +D (Istanbul, Turkey). Currently, he continues his design and art projects under the scope of un10design.com which he co-founded in 2017 in Istanbul.
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” Guy Debord (1958) put famously about the psychogeographical perspectives of his method of urban discovery. In our group drop, devoted to opportunities of digital architecture between online and offline worlds, we drop too. In this collective journey, we want to withdraw the conventions of living cities as public and private property, issues of access, boundaries of touch, boundaries of gaze, and the routines of the travel restricted to the means of transportation. The group show is an attempt to bring space back into the crypto universe as an opportunity for mediation and conversation between artists and the audience. The conversational approach is crucial here, so the collective NFT city is a creative attempt of three international artists with backgrounds in architecture. All three are not only architectural visionaries but global nomads themselves. Jessica Baldivieso — painter and mixed media artist, who is currently based in Dallas, Texas, finds inspiration in the architecture of Bolivia, where she was born and grew up. Othman Kandri, who works for Zaha Hadid Architects in London, builds his professional life between the UK and Italy. Oguz Emre Bal is an internationally recognized Turkish artist and architect who now lives in Madrid. The aesthetic journey proposed in the drop knows no boundaries as well. More than that, the urban life in the drop, following Debord, deconstructs existing relations not just between the urban dwellers but the elements of constructions themselves. In Baldivieso’s work the purity of perspective is given in fullness of potentiality and openness. Kandri’s work plays with the viewers' gaze on architecture that lives in his models of alternative cities both as an extremely close reading of the city’s textile and macrostructure. Bal’s droplets are raw material of urban elements and an architectural equivalent to a cell in biology.
