Reimagining Yeşilçam // Queer Reflections on AI

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As AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday life, its exclusionary mechanisms are gaining ever greater significance. Since technical standards today determine what is even possible, designing alternative futures requires the development of new ways of engaging with these standards.

The workshop offers insights into Orhun’s artistic practice at the intersection of this critical engagement with AI and drag. Rather than viewing AI merely as a “neutral tool,” Orhun conceives of it as a performative instrument and treats systems such as deepfakes, voice cloning, and lip-sync animations as “drag technologies”—

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technologies that can be turned against themselves through their own failures. The practical component focuses on using these technologies to reinterpret old Turkish films—particularly from the Yeşilçam era—as well as other diasporic media in new, queer ways; in doing so, it examines where the underlying models fail and what ideologies are revealed through these failures.

Through artistic practice and “queer-iose” explorations, the workshop aims to raise awareness of what people actually mean by “artificial intelligence,” as well as the philosophical implications associated with the use of these systems.

Orhun Mersin, alias Kekik, is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist born in Izmir and based in Berlin who works at the intersection of science, the exhibition scene, nightlife, and theater. With training as a contemporary dancer and a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Orhun was part of the research platform “New Practice in Art and Technology” at TU Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

IN ENGLISH