© 2012 | amberTXT / BIS ISBN 978-605-88807-7-1

In 2005 Elif Ayiter and Selim Balcısoy
started a multidisciplinary course at
Sabancı University, which was open
to both CS and VAVCD students, which
emphasized collaborative work of design
and engineering students. Koray
Tahiroğlu who is a musician educated
abroad, started similar courses at the
Music Department of Bilgi University
and in 2008 the students presented
their interactive compositions in a
club. This was the first event of its
kind.
While there are several –mostly individual-
attempts to develop the new
media education, none of them ended
up as a separate program that focuses
exclusively on new media design
and art practice. Although one could
find a few extraordinary new media
works in the student output, design
and, until recently art programs could
simply not go further other than just
changing the design tools to the digital
medium. New media did not become
mainstream even among the
potential young generation. It is not a
coincidence that almost all of the few
Turkish new media artists in the world
scene continued or completed their
education abroad.
In 2005 Istanbul Technical University,
which is the oldest and one of the most
respected technical school of Turkey,
started a master degree program titled
Information Technologies in Design.
Since the academics started the
program with a new perspective and
based on the experience gained till
that time, the program could have
been one of the foremost new media
programs of Turkey. Unfortunately, it
could not manage to survive because
of bureaucratic complications.
On the other hand a new generation
of young academics are started taking
over. These days, many Universities
opening up more space to new media
in their curriculums and some of them
are started some programs titled “new
media” under the communication
faculties. But these “new media” programs
are in fact journalism programs,
not design or art programs. Therefore
the Visual Communication Design programs
or departments are still the only
creative resources for new media art
and design in Turkey. This field is still
waiting for its dedicated programs.
The earliest attempt to create a platform
in new media art in Turkey was a
media art and theory magazine titled
“h@t” (Hybrid Arrested Translation)
only one issue could be published in
1998. Fatih Aydoğdu was the editor and
initiator of the magazine. In its first
and only issue, “h@t” was focusing on
the “body in the information age” with
the texts featuring (a.o.) P. Virilio, V.
Flusser, A. Kroker, H. Moravec and Artists
like Stelarc, Orlan, Aziz + Coucher.
NOMAD was founded in 2002 as an independent
formation and registered as
“association” in 2006. NOMAD, in their
own words, aims to produce and experiment
with new patterns in the digital
art sphere by using the lenses of various
other disciplines. Başak Şenova,
Emre Erkal and Erhan Muratoğlu were
the initiators of the project. NOMAD
realized the first sound art festival
titled “cntr_alt_del” in 2003 then continued
in 2005 and 2007-2008. NOMAD
developed an important local network
and carried out many projects, which
evolved into networking and to projects
concurrence of contemporary art
and social issues.
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