Alaz Okudan

Climbing Out of the Abyss: On Tearing Objects, Injecting Values, and Automating Work

Authors:Alaz Okudan

Published in:Flusser Studies 41: Special Issue on Vilém Flusser and Artificial Intelligence

This essay is an expanded discussion following Vilém Flusser’s unpublished essay On Being Subject to Objects in which he argued that the human is split between what is and what should be, living in the abyss between phenomena and values. By turning branches into sticks and rare minerals into data centers, the human makes a vain attempt to produce things to climb out of its abyss while increasingly becoming subject to its own cultural objects.

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Camera Archaeologia: A Media Archaeological Investigation into the Contemporary Use of Nineteenth-Century Photographic Processes

Authors:Alaz Okudan

Published in:19 / Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2025

As digital technologies determine the practice and experience of everyday life today, the earliest photochemical processes resurface to provide stimulating and provocative modes for visual production. Around the world, a small but attention-worthy number of photographers attempt to rediscover what nineteenth-century photographic processes can offer without turning their backs on digital. This paper explores the role of cuh "old" practices in the contemporary context.

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Our Collective Noise (OCN): A Tactical Response to Computer Vision, Surveillance, and Noise

Authors:Alaz Okudan

Published as part of:xCoAx 2025, 13th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. Dundee, Scotland, 9-11 July

Our Collective Noise (OCN) is a research-based tactical media project. As an attempt to transform the top-down pervasive qualities of machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), and surveillance technologies into a bottom-up tactical tool, it plays around the concepts of noise, de-identification, accidental aesthetics, and human-machine collaboration.

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Infra-ordinary Images: Machine Vision's Ways of Permeating Everyday Life

Authors:Alaz Okudan

Published as part of:Politics of the Machines 2024: Lifelikeness & Beyond. Aachen, Germany, 22-27 April

French cultural critic Georges Perec suggests that people should shift their attention away from the spectacular and extraordinary to the everyday, habitual aspects of life, as these hold the true essence of our experiences. Perec uses the term 'infra-ordinary' to describe these unnoticed, routine elements of life that, despite being constructed, feel second nature to us. This my attempt to think about images that become infra-ordinary.

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Eye-pparatus: Re-imagining the Human Eye in the Nineteenth Century

Authors:Alaz Okudan

Published in:Flussera Robionica, 2022

"In a Foucauldian sense, like any other institution, with the presupposition of the human eye as a recording apparatus lying in wait, the medium of human vision became a site for imagining regulatory and disciplinary institutions. The emergence of automated cameras and video devices has been foreshadowed by imaginary practical properties of the eye-pparatus. The functional embodiment of the previously imagined aspects resulted in a more precise and comprehensive form of visual surveillance in the century to come. Yet, this is not to say that optography's ultimate aim was to arrive at contemporary surveillance technologies. An intricate network of technologies and discourses lies beneath the idea of surveillance, of which the optographic desire could only be read and interpreted as a contributing part."

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