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Yogurt Technologies was founded by a group of artists and engineers in Istanbul in 1997. Since then, the firm has developed animation, animation tools, software and computer games for a wide variety of clients in Turkey and abroad.
[The word yogurt, which first appeared in Turkish dictionaries in the 11th century, is one of the most widely used Turkish words in Western languages. It refers to an ingredient which has been part of the diet of peoples all over Asia and Asia Minor for more than a millennium, and which is now found in grocery stores throughout the world. In naming themselves Yogurt Technologies, this young technology firm acknowledges a link between their place of origin, their global aspirations, and their commitment to develop products and systems that will contribute to the pleasure of daily life. Indeed, no less a thinker than Pliny the Elder once observed that a man may live without bread, but not without sour milk.]
In 1997 we developed a belly dancer system (actually, a seamless-mesh real-time human animation system) that would work on expensive graphical computers. At ZKM, we plan to create a similar system using personal computers.
On opening night, a real belly-dancer will be dancing in front of the audience and her motion data will be fed to a computer instantaneously. A virtual belly-dancer model will be dancing on the computer screen reflecting her movements, in real-time. The motion data will be captured using special hardware via magnetic sensors attached to the belly-dancer's body.
We thought a virtual belly dancer would be interesting for a show about Istanbul that is taking place at the most important media lab and research center of Germany. Since we are employing very high technology in this project, technically this is quite a difficult task to complete. But the way we use high technology, namely to animate a belly-dancer, is very akin to the symbolic dilemmas inherent in Istanbul's own identity.
We created the first virtual belly-dancer in 1997, in the crowded district of Istanbul known as Beyoğlu. You may remember Beyoğlu as one of the sites where Canadian writer William Gibson set his novel Neuromancer (1984), giving birth not only to the term ‘cyberspace’ but also to the genre of cyberpunk fiction. But belly dancing did not originate in Turkey any more than cyber culture originated in Istanbul. The dance had its origins in Egypt, but during the Ottoman Empire it became popular in Turkey. Since the West learned about it through the Ottomans, Westerners often assume the dance derives from Turkish culture.
In this event/performance, what we plan to do is:
-collaborate with a real belly-dancer from Turkey
-creating an interface in the exhibition space
-between a live performance, the public, and technology
-to perform the idea of transformation
-in an art exhibition about the many meanings of Istanbul
Text: Çemil Türün
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