Silhouettes of İstanbul


Kıvanç Tatar, 2019
premiered at Genetic Codes of Turkish Design
@İstanbul Airport International Lounge, Turkey



...in the collective exhibition with Abra Design, Ahmet Rüstem Ekici,Ali Bakova, Alper Derinboğaz, Arife Design, Arzu Kaprol, Atasay, Atlas Harran, Atıl Kutoğlu, Aykut Erol, Başak Cankeş, Burcu Yıldız, Craft in İstanbul, Day Studio, Derya Geylani, Devrim Erbil, Dice Kayek , Dila Gökalp, Egemen Kemal Vuruşan, Ela Cindoruk, Elif Gönensay, Emin Barın, Faruk Malhan, Mehmet Girgiç, Fırat Neziroğlu, Geray Gencer, Rollic Games, Güvenç Özel, Hakan Sorar, Hamm Design, Hakan Akkaya, Hasan Kocam İrem Buğdaym İznik Çini Vakfı, Koleksiyon Kunter, Şekercioğlu, Melike Altınışık, Nazan Pak, Nohlab, Omar Baban, Özlem Tuna, Pınar Akkurt, Refik Anadol, Reo.tek, Toz Design, Under1Minute, Zehra Çobanlı, Zen Seramik...

Come, dream with me. How would Kandinsky paint Istanbul? How would Dali break the form of unimaginable chaos in Istanbul? What would Picasso's lines draw between bosphorus and the silhouette of Istanbul?

The painters of the past join a metaphysical party to paint The silhouettes of Istanbul. The party is an inclusive one, from Mondrian to Cezanne, painters of the last 200 years, including Turkish ones, get together for a visceral feast.
The machine, so called artificial intelligence, applied a style imitation algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Networks. The machine copied the image styles of famous paintings of painters such as Kandinsky, Picasso, Cezanne, Dali, Gleizes, Klimt, Hokusai, Mondrian, Osman Hamdi Bey, Picabia,... on the silhouettes of Istanbul.

We is machine, machine is us. We made the machine, we came up with the AI models, we created and curated the learning material of the machine, we chose which machine outputs are worthy to be presented.

Autonomous or not, there exist a person behind every software.


Premier @Istanbul Airport 


International Lounge, 2020



No.2


I trained an AI architecture, a Deep Learning network of my design on the dataset of Silhouettes of Istanbul No.1. I produced the frames in this video artwork by exploring the latent space of Silhouettes of Istanbul. Each frame in the video is a capture from a city that I dream of; a city that has never existed; a set of faded memories that reemerges as a form of longing.

The following video is a 3min excerpt of a 30min long, fixed-media video artwork.



No. 1


I created following images using 92 Deep Learning models that are trained on famous paintings of historical artists.This was a result of 6 months of artistic research, and I still continue designing my own Deep Learning architectures to try to discover new aesthetics.

The original resolutions of these images are in-view at the international lounge of İstanbul airport.