2026 / Four-channel video and sound installation
Kontact
Kontact treats Garanti BBVA's 80-year archive not as a company's chronological record, but as a record of its shifting contact with society and culture. Commissioned by SALT and Garanti BBVA for Salt Galata, the piece runs across four screen surfaces built around memory, analysis, narrative, contact, and transformation.
My role was creative coding and visual production. Thousands of archival items (visual, textual, and auditory) were processed through AI-based analytical methods, then reclassified by semantic relationships, textual content, color, composition, and motion data. That reclassification became a semantic map, and the map became the spatial logic the installation's four channels move through.
Turning an analytical structure into a sensory one was the core problem. A semantic map is not a viewing experience by default; it needed motion graphics and spatial sound design (Gökalp Kanatsız) woven through it before archival data could read as a memory environment rather than a database. Data visualization had to carry the emotional weight of eighty years of material without losing the structure that made it navigable.
What visitors move through is an archive rebuilt as perception: thousands of fragments reorganized until they behave like memory, not metadata.
Kontact is a four-channel video and sound installation by Nohlab, commissioned by SALT and Garanti BBVA for Salt Galata, Istanbul, running June 3 through September 30, 2026.
The work approaches Garanti BBVA’s 80-year archive not as a chronological company record, but as a record of its shifting forms of contact with society and culture over the years. Visual, textual, and auditory data from the archive were processed through AI-based analytical methods, then transformed into a multilayered memory environment.
Thousands of archival materials were reclassified through semantic relationships, textual content, color, composition, and motion data, and reconstructed as a semantic map — forming the basis of a spatial experience structured across four screen surfaces around the concepts of memory, analysis, narrative, contact, and transformation. The result interweaves data visualization, motion graphics, and spatial sound design into a single sensory experience, exploring new ways of perceiving and engaging with archival data.
My contribution sat on the creative coding and visual production side: taking the AI-processed semantic map and turning it into the motion graphics and real-time visual system running across the four channels, so eighty years of archival material could be experienced spatially rather than read as a list.
Credits
DIRECTION, DESIGN: Nohlab
CREATIVE CODING & VISUAL PRODUCTION: Çağatay Güçlü
MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN: Gökalp Kanatsız
ARCHIVAL RESEARCH & DATA SUPPORT: SALT
EXHIBITION DESIGN: PATTU
PHOTOGRAPHY: Flufoto
SPECIAL THANKS: Deniz Ova, Canan Erbil, Eray Özcan, Derya Açar Ergüç, Sinem Ayşe Gülmez Saydam, Mehtap Kuru, Lorans Tanatar Baruh, İzzeddin Çalışlar, Özde Karadağ, Pınar Akkurt
