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1 min

The music that we lost…

Which is also the America that we lost… Because regardless of whether we ourselves were Americans or not, the music was ours. We lost the music. They bid their silent adieus and gracefully vanished into the night. So gently, so quietly that we didn’t even hear them leave. Maybe the last bloom of Western Civilization – they knew it was time, these American musicians. And they fell silent. This is a song list. It is random. There is no particular order. I add whatever comes int

2 min

Üsküdar

I haven’t wandered inside this market area for years. Normally I have no business there, no shops to go to, no friends to visit. I made the whole specifically for the page. What surprised me was that it wasn’t nearly as conservative as I remembered it to be. Obviously there are far more women wearing scarves, and shorts are somewhat thin on the ground. But the difference between my avowedly “progressive” neighborhood and “conservative” Üsküdar is far less pronounced. Which is

2 min

Beşiktaş

I am not terribly patriotic when I think about Turkey as a whole. Sure I want the country to be OK. Sure, I want it to get out from under this yoke of oppression and tyranny – which I am fairly confident that it will, sooner or later. Sure, I like hearing the music, or eating the food. But, I do not well up in tears when I see the flag or anything like that. I do not think we are better than anyone else on the globe. I become a bit more involved when it comes to Istanbul. Bu

2 min

My city is Istanbul

I may have found a way to put my street photos to some use. Not in terms of creativity, or design. I still have no ambitions or confidence in that regard. But there is something else that has been bugging me for ages, and there I may be able to do something with them. Which is trying (against all odds) to change the perception that people have of my city by starting a Facebook page (awful design, but nothing to be done about that, it is the thing that has the reach) where I s

2 min

Produsage

There is this, in my view terribly misplaced, myth that while using off the shelf software is an unavoidable evil, everything that gets built inside that software should be made by you. Painstakingly. Path by path. Or writing the code (that particular myth especially). Taking your own photos. Sculpting your own 3D models. Otherwise you are not really the “real thing” as a designer or an artist or whatever. I am not a big proponent of this idea that it is somehow more virtuou

2 min

About Graphic Design

I decided to become a graphic designer in 1970 after seeing an exhibition of Polish theater posters. And although I found out very quickly that the job wasn’t really about designing cultural posters and book jackets, that instead it was really all about the advertising industry, that was still perfectly acceptable: All those brilliant British commercials back then? And – yes, of course one put one’s services to Capitalism, but Capitalism was not the monster that it has become

1 min

From Azimuth to Cypher

Once upon a time there was a great free app called Mural.ly with which one could create boards. I assembled the material of a research project on just such a board. The full board looked like this: And here are the detail screenshots: No other place to really put this, so it goes on this blog. And also, it kind of plays into my ‘minimalist and yet not minimalist’ musings. #Design #Influences #Research

1 min

Curio

Curio is playing into my ‘minimalist and yet narrative’ obsession in a way that the others aren’t. Here, the ‘tale’ is in the steampunk textures with which I clothed the basic prims – mostly cubes actually. And the avatar, of course. I am not sure I want to do it with lots of textures when it comes to this new thing rummaging around in my head. But still… Could something this elaborate be combined with dot arrays and nod and link abstractions? No idea. But then I usually get

1 min

Going back to minimal?

While I was putting together images for the new ShapeShifter 2012 site I re-rezzed some of the stuff that was on that sim in order to photograph it (yes, don’t ask – I was inexperienced and silly enough not to have made an OAR). And I remembered that I really liked what I had done back then. I am not sure if this stuff was as popular with visitors as the more ‘storyworld’ type of stuff that I also do. I am fairly certain that when this stuff was rezzed at alpha.tribe there w

1 min

The Miro Sphere

I had forgotten about this. It was a self contained environment inside a sphere filled with 3D objects that were inspired by Joan Miro’s critters. I made this 4 or 5 years ago and the objects were in fact mesh. Made in photoshop where I could be intuitive, by which I mean following what coincidences or even accidents give me. And back then they gave me these guyz. Could I reproduce them or make something similar today? Probably not. I have made quite a few things in SL that w

2 min

Self Evaluation in SL

The new island is more or less done. It looks OK, but it is nothing like what I achieved with Fool’s Gold in 2015. The dark sky level is probably the best part visually speaking, and the ground level seems to work, if not entirely from a design point of view (lots of flaws that I see but can’t figure out how to fix), then in terms of being a weird little playground. However the thing that makes me write this is not really about my building skills. It is the way in which the

1 min

But, it isn’t just the gold

I am finding it quite hard to rebuild the island. Nothing seems to work quite how I want it to. And the truth of the matter is that the island that I built 3 years ago is probably the best thing I have ever made in Second Life and it is quite hard to even try to get close to that. Gold or no gold, the place had a mood. And it told a tale. Which is quite a hard thing to pull off – as I am finding out, trying to set up another “mood” now. Which is probably why I put off rebuil

1 min

Too much gold…

When I built alpha.tribe in 2015 I even called the sim “fool’s gold” – there was so much of it. But it isn’t just that one sim. I also went completely overboard when I built “from here on there be dragons” for Dividni Shostakovich a couple of years later. Of course I have been around long enough as a designer to know to combine it with plenty of neutral colors so that it doesn’t get completely out of hand. But nevertheless, I cannot deny the obsession. Also here, for example,

1 min

While transferring the blog…

I encountered myself from years ago. There is even a photo that Lanfranco took in Singapore in 2008 where I look not just 10 years, but 20 years younger than my current age of 65. I could not transfer the blog from wordpress to blogger with an xml file, like one would normally do, but had to bring the posts over one by one. And, I ended up reading a lot of them, of course. For the most part, I cannot believe the naivete. I certainly cannot believe how shut off I seem to have

1 min

After 6 years…

I want to start blogging again. shorter posts this time around. Mostly, just jotting down ideas, really. But maybe sometimes a bit more. During the years that I neglected this blog I became engrossed with how our planet is run. How totally screwed up it is. It started out with my being no longer able to ignore what was happening in my own country. But, then from there I quickly spread out since I came to realize that what happens here is completely tied to what happens “there

1 min

Reasons for staying around

Animals are a good reason to stick around. And then I like walking in the streets and sitting in cafes, I guess. Watching the animal-loving population of my city, I really like to do that. Crossing the Bosporus is nice. Buying nice clothes is another good one. Making stuff, that’s probably one of the most important ones. And I guess, that’s it. Those are the reasons to still be sticking around, continuing to live. Other than that – forget it… I would bid my farewells tonight

5 min

Is the Internet making us crazy?

I came across this on facebook (of all addictive places!) thanks to an old friend of mine, Nazif Topçuoğlu, who posted it there. And yes – I too think that online social networks and domains are wreaking havoc on our psyches. And if I am saying this, if I am observing some very adverse effects in myself that have come about from being a virtual worlds resident of 5+ years, then I may well be a good candidate for some of the research that these folks are conducting. http://ww

5 min

Bidding farewell to an old sweetheart…

I was away for two weeks, went to San Francisco and New York. I lived in New York for seven years during the 1980s. I had initially gone as a Fulbright scholar, so after going through many legal hoops to obtain permanent residency I was finally told that I had to fulfill my J1 visa obligations; in other words return to my country of origin for 2 years, after which point I could then come back. Thus, I returned to Turkey in late 1986, completely brokenhearted since I was leav

2 min

There is a definite change

I am noticing it from my favorites on Flickr, which are mostly RL things. And what I put on flickr myself, for that matter. I seem to sort of have shifted from one plane of perception to another. From 3D to 2D. Probably won’t be forever, but right now this is how it is. I prefer to hang around in photoshop. Check out 2D creative authoring platforms online, latest obsession being issuu. Do things with my tumblr blogs. Stuff like that. Also I am writing/reading a lot these day

3 min

A Eureka moment

I have been sitting here all weekend – reading, taking notes, even starting the draft of the draft of a draft of a paper. (Need to read a lot more before I even get to the draft of a draft stage ;-). I really am somewhat obsessed with the question which I keep asking, you see. The one about my students. I am, after all, attempting to do a PhD, the subject of which is art education… How can I even write a dissertation without taking all this into account? Or so I was thinking

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