cyber hideout

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Cyber Hideout is a self-assigned work (Daghan Dizdaroglu & Merve Sahin) imagining an architectural artifact within the videogame ‘Cyberpunk’. Spatial tools crawl between dystopian concepts such as cyber-monitoring, and cyber-bullying to find shelter in that cinematic universe.

Read the “Letter to V” in the consecutive posts to follow the journey.

“ Hello V.

I would have liked to tell you about these things in person, but I don't have the patience to wait even half a day in this state. You know, the cyberware we had implanted in that awful Ripper Doc on the streets of Night City, which was not an Arasaka production. I suspect that my dreams are being shaped only as they wish; that my position on the Net, my braindance sessions, and my messages are being monitored. I don't want to stay connected to this global network. It's impossible to continue living this way, we can't even remove our cyberwares. I have been looking for a way out.

There is talk of a building called Cyber Hideout. There's a shiny statue-like building in the city, actually, the inside is a cyber shelter. If you know the password, you can enter through the thorns that extend to the surrounding buildings. It is said that they have developed their own net inside. A net where no one can follow you, where the digital content you consume is not controlled, where your braindance sessions are not censored, and where the chemicals in the drink you drink are not uploaded to the insurance database...

In the middle of the building, there is a data core developed by netrunners. They allow you to reside in pods arranged around the core. While in these pods and surrounding areas, your cyberwares are not affected by the global network. A database core is a protected, closed box with no access from the outside and no data recorded. The metal walls they have set up to block signals from the outside enable the 300 or so people inside to digitally camouflage themselves. We thought last year that those walls were the cool windows of the apartments inside when we passed by in front of them. Most people continue to think so. To verify the rumor, I inserted an old netrunner in the middle. I'll try to enter through one of the secret passages on the north side in four hours.

If everything goes well, tomorrow at this time I will be able to dream freely with the new people I have just met, read the news I want from the screamsheet, and even watch the forbidden braindances and films in Night City. If neither digital democracy nor cyber privacy is possible, there can be no talk of freedom either in the digital world or in the meatworld.

Then it's time to hide.”

all watched over

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All Watched Over is a camouflaged interior as an impulsing artifact of data and images cultivated by the political exiles. The interior readapts the theatre and parliament typologies to exchange and circulate visual and linguistic elements in the digital age, while the exterior envelope employs strategies to trick the surveillance gaze for granting digital anonymity.

With the spread of surveillance technologies human to human vision transforms into machine-to-machine vision, resulting in great control for repressive. It is alarming since media is the commodity that regulates our social interactions. The skin color, gestures, sexual orientation, and protest movements are recorded in public spaces against communities. Under the light of discriminatory body politics, we trace an intellectual flow of academics, writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and activists from east to west, specifically from Middle Eastern countries to three large capitals London, Paris, and Berlin. Berlin is unique for attracting most of the flow. In the 30 km north of Berlin, an underground bunker is occasionally occupied in a dense forest. The project extends the bunker into a repository of counter-narratives hosting the individuals whose lives revolve around producing political commentaries and threatened because of this fact.

There are two different cycles within spaces. Data management and theatre feed each other through debates and curatorial practices. The first cycle happens permanently. The artists,
journalists, and researchers reside shortly and produce together in the debate chambers. The data is transformed into virtual spectacles on the second cycle to meet with the people out of this seclusion. The happenings are temporary at particular times. The theatre is physical, and the medium is virtual. It is a wild electronic data landscape of the fiction and inhabited stories.

The interior is lightly covered by the veil of anonymity that blurs and pixelates. The power of the digital age is to be able to be invisible, going off the grid. The veil is doing that by creating a fuzzy appearance of bodies. Another type of camouflage, like the bunker, hides from the camera lens, making undetectable.

To sum up, the building emerges in the shadows of the decaying nuclear bunker in Berlin, becomes an optical and political apparatus inhabited by liberated bodies, as a result, creating the intimate landscapes of reflections and playful spectacles.

pixel factory

Pixel Factory is a secret camouflaged interior, an impulsing artifact of data and images, and a mediatheque that we can act as scriptwriters while expanding physical bodies onto virtual. The main aim is to adapt architecture to the technological age as an electronic media suite in times physical nature is inseparable from the digital wilderness. Architecture becomes a visual and political apparatus inhabited by political bodies whose primary medium of resistance is cultural and intellectual property against the despotic digital regimes.

The exterior veil is a fragmented, dynamic visual camouflage apparatus that blurs inside and outside, fooling the physical and digital eye. The mutualistic relation and collisions between informal data stewardship by data sleepers and spectacles by objective dreamers are central resources of community synergy. The data management, learning, and theatre feed each other
through debates in the salon-like chambers leading to curatorial practices. The physical bodies expand to digital bodies through media extensions in the electronic landscape, while all practices happen with different rhythms cycles, and rituals, expanding physical onto virtual.

cyber hideout

all watched over

pixel factory

to bloom to glow to march