Black-Boxed Allegories of AI and Counter-Futuring
Black-Boxed Allegories of AI examines how data-driven and AI technologies model the world and the future to manage uncertainty amid planetary crises. Eylül reframes this drive to quantify and predict externalities by flattening locality and difference as an imperial project rooted in the long duress of colonial modernity, reconfigured through the coupled cybernetic and logistical turn after World War II, and intensified with the “smart” turn following the 2008-9 global financial crisis. Focusing on the intertwined trajectories of the (cybernetic) black box and imperial allegories of late capitalism, such as oil and high-tech spectacles, she exposes the contradictions behind modern fantasies of total oversight and limitless growth. This analysis situates AI within the shifting dynamics of capitalist accumulation that have reshaped regimes of subjectivity, labor, and visuality. By highlighting the limits of AI as a totalizing force mediated across scales and material contexts, İşcen engages artistic practices affiliated with the Middle East and beyond that confront and reprogram contemporary visual and epistemic regimes to imagine alternative modes of world- and future-making. A creative practice component of the project is an ongoing walking tour and workshop series developed with Berlin-based artist Aslı Dinç, exploring the entangled transformation of Berlin as a platform city, from gentrification and the gig economy to everyday policing and technopolitical centralization, and the counter-platforming and social organizing that emerge in response.
Against Catastrophe: Reclaiming Futures
Against Catastrophe interrogates how the concept of catastrophe is defined, analyzed, and mobilized, while exploring anti-catastrophic practices that envision alternatives to our present. Focusing on design, technology, and environment, the project opens possibilities for more equitable, sustainable modes of survival and expands thinking beyond apocalyptic frameworks. Led by Orit Halpern as part of the Governing Through Design initiative funded by the SNSF, Against Catastrophe encompasses an edited volume, art and design commissions, and online exhibitions. Eylül has been an active member, alongside Nadia Christidi and Sudipto Basu, since early 2023. Their recent work includes the art commission and exhibition series Reclaiming Futures, developed with design support by Tal Halpern. The exhibition features creative works by seven practitioners, including Solveig Qu Suess, Antonia Hernández, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares, Bahar Noorizadeh, and the collective Arazi Assembly (Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir). Based on extensive research, the commissioned works interrogate how neoliberal regimes of resource management, urbanization, and state-led development remake ecosystems and lifeworlds. Drawing on design research, science fiction, forensic architecture, and political organizing, they document and contest these processes while foregrounding situated ecological knowledge and relations. In collaboration with the team, Eylül is preparing an edited volume that brings together scholarly and artistic contributions addressing restorative and speculative themes across diverse disciplines and contexts.
COUNTER-N
COUNTER-N is a web-based platform for publishing, exchange, and research, curated by Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki. Online since April 2021 and supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the project explores alternative histories and practices of computing and futuring. It investigates the notion of “counter” in its many meanings—as opposition, encounter, device, surface, and mode of action. “To counter” implies resistance and engagement, while “to encounter” suggests openness and curiosity. In Counter-N, the variable N represents an open field of possibilities—inviting practices, concepts, and institutions to be reimagined and reformulated. The curators invest in forms and networks of praxis that invert the contemporary enframing of technological systems and their underlying colonial, racial, and patriarchal epistemologies. To this end, we dig into forgotten and suppressed past futures and speculative nows to envision, encounter, and enact alternative modes of computing – informing, scaling, modeling, mapping, speculating, rhythming, networking, communalizing and (…). The platform features interview-format contributions such as Metabolic Computing by Jamie Allen, Queer Futuring by Yener Bayramoğlu, More-than-binary Computing by Juan Pablo García Sossa, Weird Futuring by Bahar Noorizadeh, Counter-Futuring by Jussi Parikka, and Dreamful Computing by Ned Rossiter and Geert Lovink, along with other contributions available on the website. See also: İşcen and Miyazaki, “Counter-Futuring the Internet.”