We recently connected with Naz Karagöz and have shared our conversation below.
Naz, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I have worked on is “mind simulator”, a room scale multimedia installation and performance, depicting the four corners of my mind. Not only was it about revealing this system but also for me the performance was a way of letting go of silence and fully embracing the weird and the suppressed. I am very interested in the mind, in the, what goes without saying, living with different operating systems, the mind as a machine, as a software, mind as our filter of reality. This was meaningful as I had put together all my skills (live sound recording and manipulation (throughout the performance I recorded different objects around the room and manipulated them real time)), improvisational singing, projection mapping, text based art, sculpture, AR, AI, installation… as an attempt to create a simulation of the mind.
I start in the backroom where there are lockers with old journals and empty cans, on the walls there are questions and statements towards the self, representing the weird, the silenced, the suppressed self. After some singing in the backroom I proceed to the first corner, the programmer’s input: home. Through removing a tiny mirror from in front of the projector, I. reveal this projection mapping of manipulated Turkish kilim on the wall. I remove fabric and reveal a monitor installed as a mirror, showing images of Turkey, next to it a photo that reveals news about femicide in Turkey when scanned (image detection augmented reality). On a pedestal a hollow tv I made from wires and plaster, with fake political ads projection mapped on top of it. (there are more political elements but I wont talk about them as they can get me in big trouble in Turkey) I go around giving people kolonya (Turkish traditional antiseptic given especially when you enter a Turkish household) then I fill two glasses of Rakı (Turkish traditional alcohol) pass one to someone in the audience and click our glasses, I record the sound and manipulative live, this was the ritual of this corner. After this corner, I reveal the second: anxiety, shame and eroticism. This acts as the reaction to the first corner, trivialisation of desire amongst cultural norms. Here on boxes I have manipulated images of lips and noses of a former lover, creating weird and sensual imagery. on a monitor there are different videos I created that explore delusion, intimacy, anxiety, and shame. For the ritual of this corner I pick out a tiny piece of mirror and put it on my face as I walk around the room looking at people so they see their own reflection on my face, which alludes to the self not being able to see itself through the confusion. The next corner is about lucid dreaming, mindfulness and nature, pieces of wood are installed on the wall mixed with yarn, a bed cut into half, one part is hanging from the wall, the other part is on the floor with a monitor installed inside, the two beds are connected by an entanglement of year. On the bed on the wall lucid dreaming journal entries are projected, the monitor inside the bed has mindfulness lucid dreaming music practices I created playing, and on the walls, projections of depictions of dreams are present. This corner represents alternative ways of thinking and escaping traditional norms of forced belief. For the ritual, I pick tarot cards, with a box cutter, cut pieces of my hair and put on them. I cut more pieces and write little notes and put them in the notes, and give it out to people in the audience. The forth corner is about technological revolt, philosophy as belief, and delusion as faith. There are journal entries projected on the wall, the monitor has my propositions from my philosophy playing. For my ritual, I wrap my head with yarn and continue to do so with my whole body, reflecting this way of seeing that doesn’t feel accepted, but also feels like the truth. I crawl back into where I started, the backroom, I cut my yarn as I sing and cry, letting go of so many bottled emotions, people are watching me through a CRT with effects. After I cut the yarn, I grab a piece of mirror, improvising Turkish words, singing, and doing vocal cries, I grab a razor, and continue to cut my hair, I laugh and cry as I shave my head, feeling this kind of lightening in my soul, I am saying goodbye to silencing my self, silencing my weirdness, I let go of who I was, embracing what can come next. I tape the razor to the floor and place the mic next to it so it can still pick up the sound. I get up start walking towards the exit, I remove the chains I was wearing on my neck, drop it to the floor without looking back, and leave the room. I feel… power, freedom, and a burning passion. For the first time in a long time, I feel so free, like I can say or do anything… I feel like I have changed my reality multiple times within my life time, changed the way I think, the way I see, it has been hard to express it and I felt like I finally showed what goes on in my head when I am silent, I showed my essence without fear for the first time. I was just able to be myself, I never felt that real before.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’ve always had a need to create, and always had art in my life growing up, whether it was painting, ballet, design, poetry, piano, or drama, there was always something I was passionate about, I knew I wanted to be an artist, that was the only dream I had, the only thing I would wish for ever since I can remember. In 2019 I came to New York thinking I would study classical voice, I wanted to sing opera and was taking lessons at my university. Sooner or later, I found myself in a contemplative state, I’ve always wanted to be creative, but was this really fulfilling my desire? Then COVID happened, I had to go back home and take a gap year, that’s when I decided, opera wasn’t giving me the creative playground I needed, so I decided that I would learn how to play the guitar and compose my own songs. I started composing and singing, and later started recording. That for me started really changing things as I started experimenting with sound. I came back to school and decided that I was going to focus on creating experimental electronic music. I was sick of all the norms and rigid ways of making music, I felt the need to break all the rules. The same year I started doing performance art, which opened up a new gateway in exploring myself, and started getting way more into philosophy. this was a time where I was struggling with an eating disorder for 5-6 years and I had finally decided that I wanted to heal, and not have this as a part of my life, I used performance art to explore that and philosophy as a form of healing. My performance art piece for my class that was due end of the semester I decided that was going to be my official goodbye. This creative sources next to me, showed me that in fact it was possible to change your reality. Reality than became a big part of my persona, as I was writing to understand my disorder, these dual themes started coming up, they were rooted in nature and technology, which then revealed to me the necessary form of things: the totality of duality, and duality then became my name as I investigated my philosophy of changing reality with “nature and technology”, my philosophy became the building block of all my art practices. The next semester I got introduced to TouchDesigner and started creating visuals, now I knew what I wanted to do, live music, projections, with a strong philosophy. I had electronic music only 2 hours a week, so I decided to do study abroad somewhere where I can really focus on music technology, then I found myself in a small town in England: Falmouth, where I would spend my time studying creative music technology. I was obsessed, so obsessed that they asked me if I wanted to graduate from there, which I did, not only with a full set creative music technology knowledge, but also new passions: creating installations with projection mappings, doing field recordings to create my own unique sound designs, and live music performance at venues. I started playing live techno finally to audiences there, but there wasn’t an electronic music scene there, so I was anticipating my return to New York. I came back to New York with my heart out my sleeves. I wanted to make crazy installations with performances and find opportunities. My return also brought an ongoing passion outward: lucid dreaming. I started using lucid dreaming as a creative practice, I was bringing elements from dreams to my art. I kept singing in Turkish in dreams in this interesting way, and sooner or later, I started doing it in real life. Throughout this, mindfulness practices were very important to me. Lucid dreaming was unlocking a new way of thinking and experiencing life and art. At the end of that year I started my journey of multimedia installations, as well as strengthen my philosophy and start investigating technology as a tool of transformation, de-limit, and expansion. Throughout the past year, I have sound designed, composed, and performed it live for dance pieces, started playing at different venues and events like House of Yes, SLIST, MoodRing, Artifice at ZeroSpace, started working with an incredible artist Nina Sobell, gotten into XR creation and installations (I am currently doing an online XR residency), and continued my passion for installations and performance art. I believe in the power of transformation and change, I could talk about my philosophy for a while but it will take a long time, but a few themes I explore are: cultural reality, language, technology, nature, different forms of thinking, rotating the cube, lucid dreaming, true innovation…. these are influenced by thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Ludwig Wittgenstein etc.. I create simulations to alter reality, I see my work as different machines, as different operating systems that are meant to reveal.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
YES! Luce Irigaray’s The Sexual Difference and Way of Love taught me the concept of “loving to” which I believe is the form of love that we need in every relation and configuration we create. She taught me how to love.
Donna Haraway’s CYborg Manifesto, and Staying with the Trouble has taught me that we need oddkin an unexpected collaborations to create new opportunities. It has revealed to me the importance of harmony within nature and technology, to form relations with nature and cyborgs, to stay with the rebel as an attempt to change, and has shown me that change is possible. She taught me that we are all cyborgs already, and we can decode and recode our brains.
Karen Barad’s post humanist performaitivity has revealed to me the entanglement, interconnectedness, and intra-activity within things. She has shown me that reality is created and the world is limited through the lens of the narrator, and that we must be able to understand the universe.
Maria Lugones has taught me loving perception, playfulness, and world-travelling.
Audre Lorde has taught me to embrace the power of the erotic and resist silence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein has revealed to me the layers of configurations that make up the world, and language, showing me the logical systems that exist, which for me is a system we can use to alter reality.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Everything I do is an attempt to change, alter, and transform. Art is a powerful tool of change, it has helped me change in so many different ways, and I want to help people not only change their reality, but also understanding this individual change in order to create a collective one. My goal is to cultivate these different forms of technology to create different ways of thinking, to think back from an imagined future to be able to create it. Understanding the self, understanding the other, understanding the world.. deconstructing and reconstructing the systems that create our reality, having agency in changing them. My work investigates the mechanics of perception, thought, relation and reality, through incorporating technology as a tool of translation, delimit, and expansion that can be applied to different models of reality to transcend and transform. I want to dive in more in creating these systems, using XR,AR, and VR to put people in different states of the mind, unraveling personal and cultural reality.
//technology is the system that underlies the model of reality because it is how we see the world, the other
and ourselves. It is the revealing of systems that not applies to technology as machine itself but it can also
apply to thinking, perception, and the systems of the world, the social reality
//dreams reveal that there is no inherent division between entities
//in dreams, every object belongs to the dream world, the substance and the essence are the dream itself
//everything that exists can be put in the framework of logical space. This reveals that everything that
exists, including people, animals, AI, share the same cause, logical space mechanics. There is no point in
division or discrimination
//we are different systems operating in similar mechanics
//if I am aware of this system I can use it to change it, if I can change my software of the mind, it means
that there is a possibility that I might change the system we are all controlled by.
//expanding the logical space as technological revolt.
//the system of mechanics is created through relation
//nature is the first relation
//nature is the closest thing to reality, technology is the extension
Contact Info:
- Website: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HT1IEd1rZrdTYQ8JKtPTF3Dgsk-PqeDI/view
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duality.live/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naz-karagoz-a45141237/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@duality1800
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/itsfuckingduality
Image Credits
@mengtiian
@inmymindscove
@kidbrwn
@josie.gark