Futures, Derivatives & Other Options Burak Delier In my latest works I have been dealing with the conflicting relationships of the tools of conduct employed by contemporary capitalism (techniques, tools, processes) and the fields of art and politics. My aim was to cross these two fields of discourse that utilize different methods of generating knowledge to be able to question our assumptions, expectations, our mode of generating knowledge in our field and the tools of contemporary management and control. There has been a mysterious relationship between art and automatism throughout the history of art. This goes well beyond the obvious links between text and encryption, or mathematics and music as well as the stylometric text analyses that forensics have long been utilizing, like in Kafka’s famous machine in In the Penal Colony, Surrealists’ “automatic writing”, Duchamp’s interest in mechanics, science and chess, and the more direct dreams of the Constructivists for an engineer-artist… Without a doubt, the automatisms in our lives today are not related to mechanical engineering but to what we could call much more complicated mathematical processes of computer-aided data processing. Perhaps what is most inconsistent in this state of affairs is that while more and more subjectivity, “creativity” and personal participation is being demanded at work, most of the operations at work and in the market are realized through bureaucratic, automatic, “hands-off” processes controlled by what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”. For instance, if we were to look for someone accountable for the financial crisis of 2008, it would be much more likely to come up with a set of complicated financial derivatives, formulas and algorithms that runs the economical system based on numerical abstractions, rather than a bunch of people or some bureaucratic organization. My aim in this project is to make a statistical and mathematical analysis of a series of Rodchenko and Pollock works, to come up with a “Pollock Code” and a “Rodchenko Code” . And through these codes producing “derivatives” of Pollock and Rodchenko paintings, as well as, perhaps, creating a Rodchenko version of a certain Pollock painting and vice versa. In the research process, with the assistance and supervision of a computer programmer and through the use of software such as JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program) and statistical methods the “trends” of color, lightness-darkness balance, patterns and dimensions of Pollock and Rodchenko painting series would be explored and stylometric analyses of the paintings would be carried out based on repeating elements. Abstract graphical representations of these analyses would be produced and examples of possible -perhaps future- paintings of these artists would be presented through the use of algorithms. Of course, the aim of the project is not simply to produce possible authenticatable copies of Pollock and Rodchenko paintings. In any case it is clear that these possibilities could not be authenticated. My aim here is to conduct a speculative research on the use of statistical and mathematical abstraction, prevision and possible dream and nightmare scenarios that financial capitalism -what one could call the economical model of hyper-modernism- relies on, and on its methods and tools of managing the present day.
Futures, Derivatives & Other Options Burak Delier In my latest works I have been dealing with the conflicting relationships of the tools of conduct employed by contemporary capitalism (techniques, tools, processes) and the fields of art and politics. My aim was to cross these two fields of discourse that utilize different methods of generating knowledge to be able to question our assumptions, expectations, our mode of generating knowledge in our field and the tools of contemporary management and control. There has been a mysterious relationship between art and automatism throughout the history of art. This goes well beyond the obvious links between text and encryption, or mathematics and music as well as the stylometric text analyses that forensics have long been utilizing, like in Kafka’s famous machine in In the Penal Colony, Surrealists’ “automatic writing”, Duchamp’s interest in mechanics, science and chess, and the more direct dreams of the Constructivists for an engineer-artist… Without a doubt, the automatisms in our lives today are not related to mechanical engineering but to what we could call much more complicated mathematical processes of computer-aided data processing. Perhaps what is most inconsistent in this state of affairs is that while more and more subjectivity, “creativity” and personal participation is being demanded at work, most of the operations at work and in the market are realized through bureaucratic, automatic, “hands-off” processes controlled by what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”. For instance, if we were to look for someone accountable for the financial crisis of 2008, it would be much more likely to come up with a set of complicated financial derivatives, formulas and algorithms that runs the economical system based on numerical abstractions, rather than a bunch of people or some bureaucratic organization. My aim in this project is to make a statistical and mathematical analysis of a series of Rodchenko and Pollock works, to come up with a “Pollock Code” and a “Rodchenko Code” . And through these codes producing “derivatives” of Pollock and Rodchenko paintings, as well as, perhaps, creating a Rodchenko version of a certain Pollock painting and vice versa. In the research process, with the assistance and supervision of a computer programmer and through the use of software such as JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program) and statistical methods the “trends” of color, lightness-darkness balance, patterns and dimensions of Pollock and Rodchenko painting series would be explored and stylometric analyses of the paintings would be carried out based on repeating elements. Abstract graphical representations of these analyses would be produced and examples of possible -perhaps future- paintings of these artists would be presented through the use of algorithms. Of course, the aim of the project is not simply to produce possible authenticatable copies of Pollock and Rodchenko paintings. In any case it is clear that these possibilities could not be authenticated. My aim here is to conduct a speculative research on the use of statistical and mathematical abstraction, prevision and possible dream and nightmare scenarios that financial capitalism -what one could call the economical model of hyper-modernism- relies on, and on its methods and tools of managing the present day.