Neyran Turan on the Outcomes of New Cadavre Exquis
We were thrilled to offer Neyran Turan a 2017 Faculty Seed Grant for her project New Cadavre Exquis. Below, she describes the work she completed as part of this program!
New Cadavre Exquis speculates on architecture’s materiality in the context of digital accumulation. The project consists of four architectural assemblies in which forms are created via a sampling process of digital readymade objects as an almost surrealist cadavre exquis, investigating questions of assembly, ruination and waste.
By depicting the formation of an architectural project from the accumulation of digital debris to material debris, the project builds alternative linkages between architecture, digital media, and geology, and opens up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for public imagination. This project extends my previous research project on the spatial and temporal long-span of architectural materiality through a new focus are on digital media. As the digital objects gain physical characteristics in the project, New Cadavre Exquis re-stages the making of digital images as part of architecture’s materiality.
Thanks to the BCMN Seed Grant, in the summer of 2017, I had the opportunity to launch this project and developed its conceptual design and production during this time while completing the project in Fall 2017. I presented the outcomes of the project during a lecture that I gave in October 2017 at the Berkeley Center for Media. In December 2017, the project was awarded with an Honorable Mention at Architects’ Newspaper 2017 Best of Design Awards. Between January and March 2018, New Cadavre Exquis was exhibited at the Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech exhibition at the Druker Design Gallery of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Curated by K. Michael Hays and Andrew Holder, the group exhibition brought together specific works of various emerging architects across the American academy. I will be extending the research trajectory of this project further with new upcoming projects in the near future and would like to thank again BCMN for allowing me to initiate a new line of inquiry in my work and expanding the audience of this work to a wider public spectrum.