1:10:20
AM - Dancing with a rich woman:
Who
is paying the bill when everybody knows its the last night of the bar...
shall
we dance... shall we leave... shall we stay... do we do... you are killing
me softly with this gorgeous sight... where is the friend who borrowed
me five million for the last drink...
everybody knows its the last night of this bar...
.
1:56:19 AM - Layers of history:
I
live in the Galata district, down at the old Genuesian tower of Istanbul,
next door to the former English post office, opposite to the Jewish hospital.
This district is part of Pera, once Istanbul's most elite of neighborhoods,
a neighborhood of men in hats and tails and women with gloves and attire.
This was a neighborhood home to foreign embassies, churches, synagogues
and people of every ethic and religious background and persuasion.
In
time the character of this district changed. Today 90 % of the tenants
are eastern Anatolian immigrants in first generation, a rural and rustic
life style in the center of a city and in between unoccupied houses and
apartments...
I
walk the streets of the district in nights on end. Enjoying the theatrical
illumination of the alleys, cathedrals of light, fractal puzzels of urban
structure... The architecture of old Istanbul - the old Constantinopal
- became a screen watched through the interface, the window of my flat.
A view over layers of human beings history with all its world wonders
and mysteries: Hagia Irene, Hagia Sofia, the aqueduct, the Topcapi, the
Blue Mosque, the bazars, places of love, world politics and intriges in
the last tow thousand years...
Living
in Istanbul is living in a mega-city classified as the second category
of cities after the first category shaped by Sao Paulo or Shanghai. Living
in Istanbul is living in a town with 12 or 16 million citizens, is living
on an extended plateau in the human project, a non-space of simultaneity,
instability and instant transmission. Living in Istanbul at the end of
the millennium means living in a 2.500 year old city that never ends,
you are always discovering new districts you never went before, even if
you are born here you do so. The city shapes monthly new areas, new districts
as if a network shapes permanently new sites and new domains, growing
continuously with new layers, unlocated on any map. Over-night-build houses
are added night by night and everywhere, an utopian expansiveness, a fiction
and growing of urban environment that exists in our days.
In
that way planning daily life is living the presence in a science fiction
that never stops...
.
2:14:23 AM - Living in Istanbul is life on the liquid
edge:
On
a sunny spring day I wake up very early from a yelling dog in the garden.
First time I'm in bed with the woman I fall in love a couple of weeks
ago. First time I share the blanket with her and I don't understand why
all the sudden I get the feeling that I forgot to put the tube of the
washing machine into the outlet while I switched on the machine and left
the flat the other day. I imagine water is running down all six stories
from the top floor to the ground floor. I get in panic, imagine the neighbors
- mostly Anatolian immigrants in the first generation - are screaming,
fighting against the masses of water running down the walls. And I start
to think about if I should leave her in panic or if I should avoid the
trouble, I'm expecting at my place, and continue sleeping and smelling
her and holding her in my arms for another couple of hours.
Leaving
her in panic so early in the morning would be because of the guy - the
master of water and electricity - who reconstructed the bathroom where
the washing machine is located.
Leaving
her in panic would be because of him who reconstructed the bathroom without
any emergency outlet in the floor, he forgot it....
.
2:39:31 AM - Equality of time:
The
roof is leaking and it drips into my flat, I hear it dripping down to
the floor, it starts in the closet, continues in the living room and later
in the bathroom. And Im thinking about the words of the guy who described
himself as the 'master of water and electricity' and who reconstructed
the flat,....
I
needed weeks to understand the whole dimensions of this remark... The
city sleeps late at night. When the breath slows down, the rain of the
day stops and when you get the feeling time stands still, thats the time
when we are awake: cats and dogs, like junkies in need of a quick sensory
fix. The illumination is focused on points, shaping dark black areas in
between. Black holes that easily can be replaced and filled with meta-attributes:
hypercontent, hyperplaces, hypernothingness on a non-ORIENTable surface...
A
fascination of artificial illumination on stage...
...
the flickering computer monitor has become my replacement window on the
world...
The
view from my window during the last ten years is already a web project
with its own URL describing a feeling
of distance and neighborhood, a feeling of attraction and rejection: we
don't have a place - or this place is everywhere... seduced from the distance...
Berlin, New York, Istanbul...
.
3:05:10 AM - Calling a friend:
Still
no answer on your phone... didnt you came back from Transsylvania by the
time you suggested... today they told me, you lost your passport... is
it true... but then I guess the guys in Romania are thinking you are a
refugee from Kosovo trying to enter illegal Turkey... trying to avoid
the bombing and killing in Serbia...
guess
they don't believe, that you are a man from Istanbul, born on a gorgeous
island next to Izmir...
guess
they believe you are one of the 10.000 refugees who disappeared ten days
ago in Macedonia...
.
3:23:33 AM - Stay out of crowds:
During
the time pkk fanatics (the fanatic members of the militant kurdistan liberation
group) started carrying out day by day bombs at crowded public places
instability and infinity of town was obvious, bringing a black hole into
time and life in form of hyperventilation. And it was not any more an
accident within the physical world, or a surreal aspect of life, or a
nightmare in between, the non-space, the vanishing became the physical
world itself presented daily on tv: blond females in miniskirts camouflaged
as expectant mothers moved to crowded public places like the Taksim square
- the city's main square in the European part of Istanbul - and blowed
themselves up during rush hours...
Using
this type of harmless look-a-like of an human, everybody becomes suspicious
for the other. Your feeling for being "afraid to lose" is already
on an integral level of life, it means being prepared for the event that
is not explicitly planned for (power failure, flooding, blasting, earthquake
or being a bomb suspect), - ready for the accident - as victim as much
as suspect, now everybody could be a potential will-be bomb...
Dont
forget your residence permit when leaving home, dont behave like a bomb,
stay out of crowds...
.
3:47:50 AM - Being connected:
Being
connected is a global, social seminar and a permanent learning process
for those who are interested in creating a successful on-line identity.
Super-language... Creating an on-line personality for the blinds... the
participants will get to know what are the personal characteristics of
a 23 year old blind Asian girl living in Singapore and they will learn
how to successfuly promote this identity in cyberspace and whats believable
or not.
Finally
they will complete the new identity in nightly role-playings using ICQ...
cutting and pasting... dragging and clicking...
Topics
include: living conditions of blinds, what makes for a good on-line personality
and for believable characters. Venture into cyberspace with multiple you's,
viable doubles and partial derivates... your body becomes one and several,
morphing from male to female, and back again...
Finally
try to imagine how aliens would use the global network and its chat structure
to study the human central nervous system.
.
4:12:10 AM - The trick with friendship:
If
you have a friend in a business you can get any special thing for the
price of a common thing. It works with everything: airplane tickets, phones,
computers; for example you can get a black label whisky for the price
of the red label one. The deal will be done with a trick - I never understood
the trick, but it works. The problem with the trick is it needs time.
They cant do the trick few days before holidays, or they dont do it on
Saturdays or Mondays, or they dont do it early in the morning or late
afternoon... and in between the dealer, your friend, will forget you and
your request.
So
you have to remember him. But if you would like to get the normal thing
instead of the special thing - because you need it immediately - or if
you would like to get the special thing for the real price of the special
thing, he wouldnt sell it to you. He wouldnt sell anything for its real
price to you, because he is your friend and because of that he will sell
it to you cheaper. And he wouldnt sell the normal thing to you if you
could get a better thing for the same price from him. And because of your
friendship you shouldnt buy it somewhere else...
Im
still waiting for some things I would need immediately in life...
.
4:23:10 AM - The trip to an illegal country:
Travelling
to an illegal country means going to a country - part of an island - with
its government, president and constitution not accepted by other nations.
Visiting the illegal country means finding yourself in a terrible hotel
in a divided town, that kind of hotels built in the 70th, with its special
view over both parts of the city. Laying in bed at night, not able to
sleep, you think they build that accident of architecture, taller then
everything in town, only for the international spys you saw the other
day during breakfast on the top level of the building...
Before
entering the country you didnt know that you would be out of international
law, that you would go to your bank branch office to ask for cash, and
they would not except your credit card, because you are in another country...
and it can be a nightmare being in an illegal country without cash...
Before
entering the country nobody told you that your passport would be invalid
after entering the country. With the entrance stamp in your passport some
other nations will not except your passport anymore; and it is the stamp
of a non-acceptable nation you find easily on recent world maps...
Visiting
that country means you are on the best way to end up in the no-whereness
of airports, - the areas between borders, that sections of airport terminals
without windows, where you find all the duty free shops, coffee shops
and bars....
...
and you will wondering how this kind of a country can exist at the end
of the millennium, where everything seems to be clarified for centuries.....
Its
not a dreamland, its not the end of world, its just one hour by plane
from my home...
.
4:42:13 AM - Rendered at zero:
My
last contribution to an exhibition in Istanbul with the title living room
was an installation with a white wall.
It
was a simulation of a white wall where I would have removed a physical
picture after 75 years from the wall, non-art of pure emptiness: art rendered
zero and void... (some visitors not even saw this work)...
The
installation looked as we would have removed the picture of the father
of the revolution after 75 years from our living room wall...
.
4:58:13 AM - Fake dollars:
Because
of the high inflation periodical payments are valued in US Dollar. So
once a year you tax your monthly payments or your rent in US Dollar. Often
the payment is in cash using 100 and 50 Dollar notes. You are going to
change it in Lira in the amount what you will need for the coming week
because at the end of the week you will get much more Lira for the same
amount of US Dollar.
My
first fee here was paid in 100 Dollar notes. I picked it up on a very
hot summer day from the account office. Compared with outside the light
in the office was very dark, coming from outside I saw hardly the details
of the room and the details of the notes I got. First time in my life
I took 100 Dollar notes without proofing them, first time in my life that
I accepted 100 Dollar notes at all, I never did it when I was living in
New York City. I went to an exchange office and could be lucky that I
didnt end up at the police station and that the guy behind the counter
gave me back the tow notes I tried to change. Looking at them carefully
I recognised that they were primitive fakes, made on a Canan color copier.
I took a cab back to the account office. The guy, who gave them several
hours ago to me, took them, apologising he put them back into the safe
and gave me real notes which by that time I proofed.
The
inflation is so high that mostly everything cost millions and its hard
to handle the notes you get as change. But people like to deal with that
numeral of numbers. Easily you are loosing the feeling for any value and
even the poorest wretch is a millionaire. Prices are increasing approximately
monthly, and of course normally the price increase is higher than the
inflation, so life in Istanbul is already very expensive.
.
5:15:00 AM - Distribution:
Imagine:
you enter a cab, saying to the driver "distribution" and after
a ride of ten or fifteen minutes you will end up on one of the worlds
most chaotic and crowded squares.
Thats
the Taksim Square in Istanbul, the busiest center in the European part
of the city with an anarchic traffic. The Turkish word Taksim means distribution.
In the last century Taksim was the original water distribution for the
European district of the old Istanbul, of the Pera district. Today it
is a chaotic traffic junction, a pulsating passage. Everybody tries to
find his or her bearing within the chaos.
You
are leaving the cab, and as a stranger not knowing that you have to jump
between the approaching cars without looking at them to cross the street
you don't know how to get through the place. The Taksim square offers
only few regular pedestrian crossings.
If
Taksim shows something, then a hidden order. In that way Taksim is the
opposite of squares in north European cities with their stone made locations,
their perspectives and their radial structures. At Taksim you dont rest
like on squares in Italian cities. If you look at Taksim from above you
recognise an irregular chaos, manifold outlines, and you sense an intention
of a planed structure, a network and the try to organise it. If you are
looking from above you see an artificial place where things are keep going
in the dimension time is running. You see a world being pending. You are
kidnapped into a chaos of turbulence: everything is thrown together, getting
its order, waves 24 hours each day. From above you see between racing
cabs, busses and cars a fountain, the never ending construction site of
the subway, the Atatürk monument and the former water contribution
of the city.
This
view of a pilot defines a position that seems to vanish the horizon, towards
a zero of form, towards a zero of design. A position that allows you to
become absorbed in the indefinite.
.
5:35:00 AM
The
Imam starts to sing for the first time of the day. I hear it from the
mosques I see in the dawn.
It
is one and a half hour before midnight, still the other day in your town,
no time to sleep...
...shall
we dance on the roof, watching the boats criss-crossing the Bospherus,
criss-crossing the waters between Europe and Asia at sun rise...
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