Image: Deconstructions #11

Türkçe okumak için: https://www.buzdokuz.com/2025/02/dist-cs-soylesisi-ses-temelli-algoritmik-sanat-otodidaktizm-ve-nftler/

Interview and Translation to English: Ömer Faruk Karaşahan

This interview is published for the first time on this website (buzdokuz.com). For citations, this link should be used to give reference.

The name of dist.cs evokes several different concepts such as organic esthetics, glitch art, and interactivity. When it comes to your fields of interest, you have quite a wide spectrum. As an artist duo, in what aspects would you say that you are completing and complementing each other?

We have been creating together for many years. This journey, that started at the university and continued with us being in the same master program, has naturally enabled us to develop a shared language and a collective consciousness. While working with different mediums has helped us to better recognize our individual identities, it has also, over time, transformed and evolved our collaborations as dist.cs. This process allowed us to approach our projects in a more flexible and necessity-oriented way. With no precise boundaries, we decide which one of us will handle it and with what approach, depending on the requirements of the artwork.

Moreover, since we work only with digital tools, we can consider our computers as a third member of the team. In this context, our artworks are turned into collective experiments.

In many of your pieces and installations, there are experiments conducted on the audio-visual dimension. Also, in the global generative art community, you are among the artists/teams that are known for integrating music into their work. Is audio-based generative art your primary medium?

In fact, our creative endeavors started with audio-based projects. While we were making music together at the beginning, we started to incline towards web-based audio-visual artworks. However, our generative and algorithmic work heavily consists of visual projects. When you are just getting started with a new tool, you usually spend a good amount of time experimenting and finding your own path. For this reason, creating code-based generative visual artworks has been our main focus for a while.

Recently, we realized that we were missing our audio-oriented work. So, we intend to give equal weight to visual and auditory elements in our current work in progress. In this sense, we are in a process where we are focusing on practices that bring together our acquired experiences on a common ground, while making audio-based generative art one of our main artistic mediums.

Especially on the fxhash platform, you have over twenty collections that are experimental in approach and presented in the form of studies, almost all of which are now sold out. As artists who learn their mediums by themselves, what would you like to say about experimentality and autodidacticism?

This is a very good and also a very important question. We continue to use the tools and principles we have encountered during our individual academic training. We reinforce this knowledge, however, by exploring our fields of interest, and by conducting research and experiments in areas where we want to improve ourselves. Because, we think, learning never ends, and art-oriented creative practices necessitate this constant learning.

In this sense, the age that we live in is extremely interesting and has limitless potential. New tools are constantly being developed, and these tools offer artists endless creative possibilities, the limits of which we do not know yet. At this point, however, academic institutions can only teach how to use these tools in a limited way. Unfortunately, most schools offer quite a limited education, especially when it comes to digital tools. Of course, this is not true for every art form, as some disciplines may require special expertise based on technical knowledge. However, if you are creating with digital tools, it naturally leads you to a process of self-learning and development.

Another important point is the following one: Whether you are an art student, or a self-educator, learning and development are completely individual processes. Learning methods and development paths are different for each individual, so that a method that is useful for one person may not be effective for another. Therefore, the main focus in making art is to find the right path that suits one’s own needs. This process needs to be approached in a more holistic way, rather than being limited to an experimental and autodidactic approach, or to academic training alone.

Most of your generative work has been put up for sale on NFT platforms that are specifically designed for generative art. When and how did you start to take an interest in the NFT world?

Our interest in the world of NFTs started during our master’s degree as artists who create entirely with digital tools, with the intention of experimenting with different business models. In fact, we first heard about the notion of NFTs in 2019, when it was getting a lot of attention and being talked about everywhere. Our curiosity started with the question “What exactly is this?”, and it took some time to understand the concept and delve deeper. However, we soon realized that it offers a very innovative and functional business model for digital artists.

Especially if you are creating code-based artworks, the possibility of creating pieces that live on the web and are interactive or generatively evolving over time thanks to the blockchain technology has been a great source of inspiration for us. Beyond just making your digital work tradable with cryptocurrency or transparently tracking the market value, this model offers you as an artist an unlimited space for experimentation. The idea of creating personalized artworks by interacting with or receiving data from blockchain has added a whole new dimension to our creative process. Moreover, this is not limited to the examples that have already been explored; there are many potential possibilities still waiting to be realized.

Our approach is to consider the NFTs not just in terms of tokens or market cap, but as a process that questions how we can creatively integrate them into our artistic production. We think this perspective allows us to consider the concept of NFTs as a tool that pushes the boundaries of our production.

NFTs are sometimes associated with illegal activities due to the anonymity provided by blockchain technology. Have you ever worried about your medium and the NFT market?

Of course, there were times when we were worried. When we started researching what NFTs were, we heard and read a lot of news about the market, and there were times when we questioned how reliable the NFT market was. At this point, however, we think that it’s important to reflect on the community in which you are being active.

The community we are in is an art-oriented one, sharing artistic work, supporting each other and trying to create a new culture within Web3. Of course, from time to time, there have been fraud attempts and cases of scam, and there have even been people who have been harmed, including us. But in such cases, it is very important for communities to keep track of these activities and support their members.

After all, it is possible to experience good and bad events in every human environment. The important thing is to prioritize safety and solidarity by being in the right community when faced with such circumstances.

There are many Turkish people interested in generative art, although they are few in number and mostly independent from each other. Would you like to have a generative art community in Turkey?

We have met most of the Turkish artists interested in generative art through blockchain-based platforms. While it is now quite common for people with the same interests to come together online from anywhere in the world, we are still surprised and delighted by this process.

We would definitely like to have a generative art community in Turkey. We have tried to take small steps in this direction, such as bringing people who are interested in generative art together on a Discord server. However, building a community is a process that requires time and individual labor. We believe that over time, generative art will gain more attention in Turkey and that this community will grow and grow. We would love to contribute and be a part of such initiatives.