Tactics for Quotidian Anthropocenes (2019)

The Quotidian Anthropocene project explores how the Anthropocene is playing out on the ground in different settings. The aim is to create both situated, place-based and comparative perspective, building new modes of collective knowledge and action. Extending from Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan’s conceptualization of the “quotidian Anthropocene” in work on environmental crises in urbanizing Asia, the project is designed to be global in scope while also fine-grained and local. The focus is on anthropocenics — the dynamic interactions between scales (local to planetary) and systems (ecological, atmospheric, technological, economic, political, social, cultural and so on) — that produce the Anthropocene at the local level. The project is organized around a shared set of questions, addressed through a series of Field Campuses, an on-going Open Seminar and a lively archive project. Organized by Kim Fortun (University of California Irvine) and Scott G. Knowles (Drexel University). Video edited by Tim Schütz (University of California Irvine). Sponsored by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Hacking Istanbul (2015)

This student documentary film takes its audience to an easily overlooked place within Turkey’s metropolis: the Istanbul Hackerspace. Based on an ethnographic approach, the aim is to shed light onto a contemporary hacker institution that proudly calls itself the ‘first in the Middle East’. The outcome are brief portraits of people and their projects that try to navigate a growingly authoritarian political climate as well as hyped up, economic visions of the future.

In the course of the film, our protagonists challenge the stereotype of hackers as criminals and data thieves. Instead, they articulate many different interpretations of what hacking as a practice can or should be. Examples include a tiny do-it-yourself detector that challenges excessive tear gas usage by Turkish police forces; learning how to program the world’s tiniest computer; or simply having a place to chat about your next start up project over a tasty ‘hacker soup’. All this, and much more, can be found in the Istanbul Hackerspace.

‘Hacking Istanbul’ was produced by Konstanze Scheidt and Tim Schütz during the autumn semester 2014/15 at Bahçeşehir University and premiered on January 22nd, 2015 at the Pera Museum, Istanbul.