HAKAN YILMAZ Interview

I am a digital artist graduated from Mimar Sinan Art History Department. The idea of making art by using technology emerged in these years.

Can we get to know you first? How did you come up with the idea of creating artwork using digital technologies like software, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality)?

I am a digital artist graduated from Mimar Sinan Art History Department. The idea of making art by using technology emerged in these years. Combining technology with art is not actually my idea, but it is in fact an idea that has been going on since the renaissance period.

Revolutionary artists have always worked with favorite scientists of the time.

In the early 1500s, a painter and chemist worked together to develop the paint we call oil painting today.

The same painter developed the sfumatu technique using the same paint. Thanks to the paint and the technique, smooth transitions could be made so that incredibly realistic effects could be created for the period such as the air perspective in the pictures.

The name of this revolutionary artist is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Alchemy was the artificial intelligence of the time. It was the endpoint that humanity had come to, and Leonardo had devised a way to transform it into his art. I have always been inspired by him, I always emulated him

Every artist have sources that inspires or feeds them while creating a masterpiece. How does this process work in your art?

I was alone when I started my work.
When I was alone, I often went to camping and made a very high quality iddleness.
Then I would go back to my studio and try to do things by myself that made me feel good. For example, you know my work, Starling Birds. The way they merged and scattered in the air had deeply enchanted me. I struggled for months just to make an algorithmic form of their action.
The birds I made did not look like birds, they did not even have wings, but everyone understood that they were starling birds just from their action.
Then I got a partner, Composer Mehmet Ünal. His compositions and sound compositions impressed me a lot. I have been working with him for about 8 months to be inspired by him, and to inspire him in return.

Whether oil painting or digital technologies; a work of art is usually centeralize Human and a transfer of emotions takes place from the artist to the audience. How do you think you have achieved this transfer?

I liken the relationship between my works and the audience to fortune telling. I produce abstract visuals with some emotions and feelings; but the audience doesn’t have to feel what I was feeling while performing my art. The sensations that the image gives him can be completely different. I take this as a richness. I focus on hypnotic and meditative effects in my works. I am interested in meditating the audience; he is responsible for the feelings .

To express your designs and your work more clearly, you are actually performing an art with data and machine intelligence. What would you want like to say about sustainability when we adapt it to curent world and natural life. How do you relate sustainability to the business you are doing?

I am quite worried about this. The canvases we use as digital artists are also digital.
Unfortunately, digital displays are terribly energy consuming things. That is why, I always felt a little embarrassed.
With all the energy I will spend, I will try to point out a problem by using the data of starving children, plastics wastes and people dying from obesity in my work to be published in 2021 Contemporary Istanbul. Because in the face of a worn of world, the seeing the digital artists talking on the wind and artificial intelligence is a little bit disappointing.

Finally, what does the art of future mean to you? Technology is a phenomenon that exists in every moment of our lives. How do you think art will be defined in near future?

Artists are such a people who have always came up with arts with the possibilities they have. There were oil paints 55 and brushes in they past, and they used them, now we have computers we do art with them.
The artists who will be born tomorrow will perform their arts with the futurist tools they will be born on.
Children who born into Vr technology will make art with it.
All these technological developments are just tools to make art; such as brush, spatula …
Tools when making art cannot truly define what art is.
However, they can give ideas of its form.
My humble opinion on this matter is; I think that the stories in the arts will soon be replaced by data sets (Information sets) today.