CLICKTRANCE
.jpg&h=800&q=100)
It’s 4:07 a.m. You’re threading through the hours of tiresome darkness, wishing the sky would brighten up. It's your third hour in the depths of Reddit, with 48 tabs open in Chrome that you had to restart because it had crashed earlier. It feels like your brain will evaporate from your ears as sleep leaks from your eyes. You can’t look away from the screen, and your eyes have a hard time grasping what you read. You open a new tab to google the possible causes of the pain you’ve had in your shoulder for the last two days. You click on the first reliable link you come across and start reading through the items of the article. It is recommended to see a doctor if the pain gets worse; turns out it could have several causes. You visit the website of a hospital and check for appointment times that might fit into your schedule for the next day. Soon you get distracted and find yourself back at the top of the subreddit you left unread. According to some users, the price-performance of the coffee grinder you plan to order from Amazon is fine, while others have complained about its chamber being too narrow. Just when you’re on the brink of placing the order, you become weary of the comments and go back to the YouTube links. Here is the unboxing video of the other grinder playing again. You should probably order one more item to store the ground coffee. Your shoulder hurts but you won’t have time to go see a doctor tomorrow. You don’t think you will be able to tolerate the bad coffee at work in the morning. If you order it now on Prime, maybe it can be shipped within a few hours and arrive at the office by the time your shift starts. A notification pops up on your phone. Still no word from that person you've been chatting on Feeld and planning to meet on the weekend. Browsing through your Instagram feed, you see some photos from the opening party of the film festival, which makes you feel overwhelmed. Your gaze shifts from your phone to your computer screen again. It’s 4:57 a.m. If you don’t go to sleep now, you’ll never be able to get up. Your eyes are open, but it feels like they are closed: Here is CLICKTRANCE.
Berkay Tuncay constructs a narrative of getting lost in the depths of the internet. Combining the words ‘click’ and ‘trance’, CLICKTRANCE, which points to a kind of hypnotic state that digital culture drags users into, presents the artist's recent works, or in other words, his poetic experiments.
At the center of the exhibition, there is a 5-channel video titled The Story of Writing ASMR. Produced by Tuncay in collaboration with THOCCnology, who posts ASMR [1] videos on Instagram and YouTube, these 5 videos focus on the continuous movement of hands on the keyboard, introducing the viewers to a hypnotic experience. The texts being typed on the keyboard are from the book [2] that gave its title to the video installation, rearranged and divided into sections by the artist. Each section completes the story of the text with a 'clean girl' aesthetic and objects that set the mood of the related video: Titled Beginning of Writing, Pictographic Writing and Alphabetic Writing, the sections follow a narrative that is in parallel with the history of writing. The clicking sounds of the keyboard in the videos, but we don’t see actual excerpts from the book. In fact, Tuncay's textual abstractions, which will be presented in different forms in the rest of the exhibition, begin to manifest themselves in this video installation. The sound of The Story of Writing ASMR echoes in the background of the other exhibited works. Such intertwining of the works points to a polyphony that is similar to the common experience on the internet.
In the display window of the gallery, Tuncay's installation Inbox is on view, created by abstracting the elements of language such as words and letters. Using elements of the text as stains, this installation transforms the showcase into a physical e-mail box. In Inbox, where words turn into foils, text is both abstracted and materialized. Another work based on a similar dichotomy serves as the continuation of the artist's Passive Aggressive Poems series. Placed on the wall behind the window, these poems reinforce the physicality of the words/symbols by making them mostly illegible. The letters, which appear to be submerged under water, occasionally become visible when they surface and then blend into the paper itself and seem obscure. Inspired by asemic writing, which is a form of writing that does not force a specific meaning but an open one, the artist is able to expand the possibilities of meaning. He explores the boundaries of how writing can be transformed into a visual experience beyond being a text that expresses meaning.
Exhibited right next to the series is Poems from Descriptive Noise, a publication that brings together the subtitles describing the sounds and noises featured in the television series Mr. Robot. In this publication, inspired by the question “What kind of text can be created with only descriptive sounds when all the dialogues in the script are removed?” a series of words describing environmental sounds are juxtaposed, producing new meanings and turning into experimental poems. This publication also gives us the opportunity to closely observe Tuncay's practice, which is shaped by the processes of writing, gathering, editing and re-organizing texts.
The internet slang, which points to a repetitional, cyclical and depressing state of mind, is transformed into metal objects as still abstract but materialized phrases. Reminiscent of the names of metal bands, these terms consist of reduplicates that convey the feelings of internet users when they spend too much time in front of the screen: Virtual fogginess, feed hypnosis, content overdose, screen burn, information frenzy, doom scrolling, data glut, scroll fatigue, click trance, techno sloth and browser coma. Tuncay draws parallels between his own artistic practice and users who get exhausted from moving between web pages and platforms.
The improved ways of communication and the transition from handwriting to typing accelerated the speed of writing, which consequently paved the way for different forms of expression and increased the diversity of production. Berkay Tuncay explores the reflections of this very change and concentrates on how technological developments have been shaping the visual language as well as writing. Bringing together the artist's recent works, CLICKTRANCE centers on Tuncay’s close relationship with text and constructs a multilayered world of meaning by materializing not only the text but also certain elements of the online realm.
1- ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is an experience triggered by certain sounds or visual stimuli that have relaxing and calming effects.
2- THE STORY OF WRITING, Parker, Bertha M., Washington: American Council on Education, (1932). The book is in the public domain.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
