Ali Bozkurt | Bilkent University (original) (raw)
Papers by Ali Bozkurt
The seemingly endless ocean of online data on the platform level is the most prominent element an... more The seemingly endless ocean of online data on the platform level is the most prominent element and the most persuasive proof of the immersive and concern-inducing characteristics of social media today. When being handled from a perspective of historical, sociological and political perspectives, the active status of social media can be persuasively traced back from the era of antiquity. As it has been also a common recurring theme of most critical and media theorists, social media as an entity is built upon the concept of a transgression of certain behavioral tendencies of human being over time. In other words, the term social in social media is a redundant one just because a medium already holds a communicative characteristic, thus being a social notion a priori. What reflects into the term social media from the past ages of human being is that it relies on certain levels of activities that can be generally labeled as a wish to stay updated and synchronized to the current set of events. With Pettman’s words, it is our one of the most basic evolutionally developed behavioral patterns: to use language as a carrier of rumorous information to keep up with what’s going on around.
The study of visual perception embraces a wide range of scientific and social disciplines of scho... more The study of visual perception embraces a wide range of scientific and social disciplines of scholarly study. Through the ages, the question regarding the phenomenological and epistemological characteristics of the visual perceptual space of our consciousness became a central question in the studies of philosophy, psychology, aesthetics and recently, neuroscience and neuropsychology. The " visual perceptual space " is the broadest term we can use for the series of impulses that the light-sensitive sensory mechanism of our visual system can produce. In other words, everything that we can call " vision " has a fundamental dependence on " light moving in time " (Wees, 1992), and that what we call an image is the shape given to light's movement by the computations of the eye and brain and by the mechanical and optical apparatus we developed. In this broad definition, the vision embraces many different ways of seeing. Besides the focused and full-color foveal (occurring in the cavity of the eye) vision, there are varying degrees of " less focused and colorless peripheral vision " (Wees, 1992), as well as hallucinations, optical illusions and " closed eye-vision " (as Brakhage calls it), which includes hypnagogic imagery, prosphenes, and the grainy visual " noise " that are perceptible when we are in a dark room or have our eyes tightly closed. These and the many other less familiar ways of seeing have been studied and documented in scientific studies of vision, as well as in the works of visual artists, while being handled more subjectively. These different notions of seeing can also be discovered through our own processes of visual perception, when we allow ourselves to notice everything we are capable of seeing. In this paper, our main endeavor is to question one particular type of image, or way of seeing; which we call the kaleidoscopic-hallucinatory image.
The seemingly endless ocean of online data on the platform level is the most prominent element an... more The seemingly endless ocean of online data on the platform level is the most prominent element and the most persuasive proof of the immersive and concern-inducing characteristics of social media today. When being handled from a perspective of historical, sociological and political perspectives, the active status of social media can be persuasively traced back from the era of antiquity. As it has been also a common recurring theme of most critical and media theorists, social media as an entity is built upon the concept of a transgression of certain behavioral tendencies of human being over time. In other words, the term social in social media is a redundant one just because a medium already holds a communicative characteristic, thus being a social notion a priori. What reflects into the term social media from the past ages of human being is that it relies on certain levels of activities that can be generally labeled as a wish to stay updated and synchronized to the current set of events. With Pettman’s words, it is our one of the most basic evolutionally developed behavioral patterns: to use language as a carrier of rumorous information to keep up with what’s going on around.
The study of visual perception embraces a wide range of scientific and social disciplines of scho... more The study of visual perception embraces a wide range of scientific and social disciplines of scholarly study. Through the ages, the question regarding the phenomenological and epistemological characteristics of the visual perceptual space of our consciousness became a central question in the studies of philosophy, psychology, aesthetics and recently, neuroscience and neuropsychology. The " visual perceptual space " is the broadest term we can use for the series of impulses that the light-sensitive sensory mechanism of our visual system can produce. In other words, everything that we can call " vision " has a fundamental dependence on " light moving in time " (Wees, 1992), and that what we call an image is the shape given to light's movement by the computations of the eye and brain and by the mechanical and optical apparatus we developed. In this broad definition, the vision embraces many different ways of seeing. Besides the focused and full-color foveal (occurring in the cavity of the eye) vision, there are varying degrees of " less focused and colorless peripheral vision " (Wees, 1992), as well as hallucinations, optical illusions and " closed eye-vision " (as Brakhage calls it), which includes hypnagogic imagery, prosphenes, and the grainy visual " noise " that are perceptible when we are in a dark room or have our eyes tightly closed. These and the many other less familiar ways of seeing have been studied and documented in scientific studies of vision, as well as in the works of visual artists, while being handled more subjectively. These different notions of seeing can also be discovered through our own processes of visual perception, when we allow ourselves to notice everything we are capable of seeing. In this paper, our main endeavor is to question one particular type of image, or way of seeing; which we call the kaleidoscopic-hallucinatory image.