Buket Yenidogan
About
Buket is a London-based experiential multimedia artist and researcher. She describes her practice as crafting posthuman experiences to create heartfelt, intrinsic transformation towards a new existential mode of posthumanism. Exploring a nature-culture-technology continuum through experimental inquiry, she combines transdisciplinary research methods with speculative design and world-building.
Buket works with interactive technologies, digital art making tools, artificial intelligence, 3D scanning and printing as well as traditional media including film and poetry, to access the full capacity of posthuman creativity. Her outcomes expand in various forms such as interactive installations, creative workshops, moving image, sonic performance, and most recently, guided meditations. Buket's work aims to take audiences on a multi-sensory and multimedia journey of becoming posthuman.
She has exhibited internationally at Sónar+D, Dear2050: Oceans on the Rise Exhibition in Zürich, The Crypt Gallery London in addition to having performances in venues like IKLECTIK and The Amersham Arms.
Having a Bachelor of Science degree from ITU and a Master of Arts degree from RCA, she is also a published author and panellist of the AI Music Conference 2021 (AIMC) held in Austria and the Posthuman And Worldbuilding Symposium organised by the Posthuman Art Network as the artist-in-residence in 2021-2022.
Statement
I believe forming empathy and making kin within a nature-culture-technology continuum is possible by shifting our human-centred understanding of the world into an inclusive, heterogeneous and entangled version of a posthuman assemblage.
My responsibility as an artist is to create this shift on an individual and societal level, starting from the subconscious and spiritual realms.
Embodiment, breath and self-inquiry are throughlines of my work, which is concerned with entangling human and nonhuman bodies to generate empathy between unlikely forms.
While seeking new experiences and narratives about Climate Crises and the Anthropocene, I directed my research into the longest-lasting forms of narrative: myth.
My current project weaves the wet worlds of hydro-feminism, environmental policy making and maternal loss in a speculative mythology where humans do not identify separate from the ocean, where selves are bodies of water and water is our new posthuman body.
The Ones Who Became the Ocean (Multimedia World-building)
The Ones Who Became the Ocean is a multimedia project which explores oceanic spirituality through a speculative mythology based on my research combining posthuman theories, maternal loss and ecological policy-making.
It builds an alternative past for an alternative future enacted through rituals, storytelling and experimental device-making, to teleport the audience to this dreamy but familiar ancient future where they can follow the path of “the ones who became the ocean,” collaborating with Open AI GPT-3 generative text-based artificial intelligence.
While it draws on ideas from hydro-feminism, the project also critically questions our current ideologies as the main driving force of the Anthropocene, climate crises and mass extinction.
The installation consists of a moving image work narrating future mythology through a meditative poem, a speculative technological device called the “ocean-maker” which uses biofeedback to transform breathing sound into the sounds of waves crashing to the ocean shore in real-time, and the mirror-like coins with that this alternative society use depicting their values through deities, centred around a ritual instrument with plastic umbilical cord. The latex fabric hanging from the ceiling is custom-made using sand from the UK coast. It represents human skin thickening through our immigration from ocean to land, land to ocean. The installation is multi-sensory utilising the smell of ocean in the breath related works.
"The ones who became the ocean" - Video
Medium: Moving image
Weaving Wet Worlds - Sonic Performance & Instrument Making
During my research process, I created this performance piece as a way of thinking-through-making. It uses improvised sound-making through an experimental musical instrument incorporating hydrophones to make water sounds and 360 ambisonic soundscapes combining the excerpts of real-world interviews I hold with an environmental policy-making consultant, a woman who experienced abortion and the Becoming a Body of Water essay of Astrida Neimanis. It forms a rhizomatic narrative weaving the wet worlds of ocean futures, maternal loss and hydro-feminism. The experimental musical instrument later became a part of my final installation as the ritual instrument piece.
Ritual of Rejoin - Short Film
Ritual of Rejoin is a short film that depicts the believers of an oceanic spirituality enacting a mythologic event. In a far away future, a group of women practise a ritual to rejoin the ocean. The ocean is a mother, a nurturer and a torturer for them. An unexpected attendee of the ritual starts the turn of events that changes the path of humanity towards a cetaceanic dream as the narrator reveals their identity in a meditative poem.
This short movie also follows the form of a guided meditation aiming to draw the viewer into this ritual experience where the sounds of breaths mix with the sounds of the ocean.
Screened in Boat Live Works London, IKLECTIK London UK, Kunst(ZEUG)Haus Rapperswill and KAMMGARN WEST Schaffhausen in Switzerland.
To see the full movie please click here.
Medium: Video
Size: 15 min
In Collaboration with:
- JP Guerrier
Sound Design - Jessica Mardon
Performer - Charlie Ryan
Cinematographer - Ozge Kayaaslan
Performer - Magda Durka
Costume & Make up Design
Previous Works
These works belongs to my previous research theme, forming empathy and intimacy with trees.