Improvised Alchemy

Improvised Alchemy is an international production collective of artists, technologists and performers applying their considerable talents to long-term collaborative productions on a global scale. From site-specific transmedia performance installations to international documentaries and interactive media archives - Improvised Alchemy engages diverse artistic and performance practices - combining the skills of many to bring visionary productions to life.

Members: Renee T. Coulombe, Peter Terner, Ilknur Demirkoparan, Walter Gershon, Vuslat D. Katsanis, Suse Ribeiro, Codrut Stancu.

Website:http://www.improvisedalchemy.com/

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FAR Bazaar Project

ARE WE THERE YET?

Description: "Are We There Yet," conceived by transmedia artist Ilknur Demirkoparan, and produced in collaboration with members of the artists collective, Improvised Alchemy, is a monumental holographic head of the Grand Turk. Projected in real-time as a performance piece, The Grand Turk interacts with live audiences by dispensing deep truths and random facts. The project derives its concept from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1770 “The Mechanical Turk,” an unbeatable chess-playing Turkish “automaton,” widely exhibited as the world’s first artificial intelligence machine. The Grand Turk, on the other hand, plays no games. She instead contemplates the meaning of technological progress, which might serve as a gateway for renewed modes of gendered and racial exploitation. So she asks: “Are We There Yet?”

Location: FA40B

Participating Artists: Ilknur Demirkoparan, Vuslat Demirkoparan, Codrut Stancu, Renée T. Coulombe

Ilknur Demirkoparan is a multi-media artist from Southern California. Her work explores notions of culture, identity, political power, control and historical erasure. She mixes traditional and new media, installation and drawing, netart and performance to explore the many layers of existence within this discourse. Ilknur has performed and exhibited her work in local and international events in Turkey, England, Canada, and the USA.

Codrut Stancu was born in Romania where he received his BS in Computer Science in 2009 from University of Craiova. In 2015, he received his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine. He works as a researcher at Oracle Labs in the area of Programming Languages Design and Implementation. When he is not tackling program analysis problems he enjoys photography and explores the intersection of technology and art through the application of visual programming.

Vuslat Demirkoparan is a visual artist, writer, and academic, and is currently a professor at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, CA. Her work primarily focuses on contemporary Turkish visual culture and related issues of gender and secular multiculturalism through a post/anti-colonial lens on cultural productions. She has performed and exhibited at the California Institute of the Arts, Highways Performance Space, Sweeney Art Gallery, Mesa College, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, and UCLA.

Renée T. Coulombe is a composer-performer, producer, media artist and scholar whose work dances on the raggedy edge between elegance and insanity, chaos and order, sound and silence. Her works have been published and performed across the globe since 1985. She is the founder, with Péter Terner, of Banshee Media, an art publishing company at the nexus of new art and new distribution methods.