Upstairs Gallery: Hayal Pozanti: Fuzzy Logic
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hayal Pozanti: Fuzzy Logic
September 10 – October 23, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10, 2016, 6 – 8 pm
Hayal Pozanti's work is informed by her ongoing exploration of cyborg anthropology, a framework for understanding the effects of technology on human beings and culture. Visually, Pozanti's work relies on an invented alphabet of 31 shapes, which she has named 'Instant Paradise'. This lexicon is source material for all her paintings, sculptures, animations and sound pieces. Each shape in Instant Paradise has been assigned a number and a letter from the English alphabet, allowing her to literally 'translate' information through a personalized encryption system. She has created a typeface from her characters, as well as phonemes that she resources for her animations and her sound pieces, respectively.
Fuzzy Logic is a programming method that resembles human reasoning. This rule- based system imitates intuition by providing all intermediate possibilities between digital values YES/NO, TRUE/FALSE and 0/1. It is used in household appliances, industrial automation and artificial intelligence programming and aims to enhance computers by imbuing them with human qualities.
In her latest work, Pozanti likewise aims to splice the automated with the organic. Her sunshade paintings merge a mediated technology with the imperfections of manual mark making; creating hybrid objects that oscillate between mass produced sculptures and intuitive paintings. The titles of the work refer directly to this process of splicing. A specific number of mechanical parts are conflated with a specific number of emotions. Initially, each number is painted as a single shape on each side. The translucency of the surface unites the two individual shapes, allowing the compositions to inform one another. The result is the unity of two distinct paintings and of two opposing states that are now mutually dependent on each other.
The CSS animation is based on a chat session Pozanti had with Cleverbot, a web application that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to have conversations with humans. The source code contains the full dialog in English. The sound piece accompanying the animation is a recording of her reading this same conversation in Instant Paradise, interlaced with emotive sighs and other non verbal vocal communication cues.
Pozanti’s most recent canvas paintings celebrate properties of humans that most distinguish them from machines. Encoded within their shapes are phrases and idiomatic metaphors that relate to emotion, imagination, intuition, daydreams, imperfection, nuance and sexual desire. She believes these particular qualities will be integral to an ideal human-machine symbiosis that will form a future post human race.
Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) has a BA from Sabanci University and a MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the JP Morgan Private Bank Collection. Pozanti’s work was recently presented in her first solo museum exhibition “Deep Learning” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. Her work was also recently shown in group exhibitions at The Kitchen (New York, NY, 2016), MCA Santa Barbara (CA, 2015), Cornell Fine Arts Museum (FL, 2015), Sabanci Museum (Istanbul, 2015) and Prospect 3 at the New Orleans Biennial (2014). Pozanti lives and works in New York City.
