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Mehmet Akten 

(1975) is a visual artist, musician and engineer working at the intersection of art and technology.

Driven by the urge to make the seemingly impossible, possible; and awaken our childlike instincts to explore and discover new forms of interaction and expression; he invents new ways of creating and performing images and sound. With a focus on creating emotional and memorable experiences, his work ranges from live music/dance/theatre performances, large-scale immersive interactive installations, music videos; to online works and mobile applications. He has given talks and workshops around the world and is currently on the selection committee of Siggraph. Also an open-source advocate, his experiments and source-code are documented on his blog. In 2007 he founded The Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company - a network of artists, designers, musicians, engineers, hackers and tinkerers.

Recently his Body Paint installation has been shown at exhibitions around the world including the Victoria & Albert Museum as part of the Decode exhibition. His collaboration with Mira Calix and Flat-e My Secret Heart - a sound and film installation - has toured countless locations including the Royal Festival Hall in London, Edinburgh Film Festival, the Sydney Biennale, the Creators Project in New York, Sao Paulo and Beijing. He has collaborated on a music video for Depeche Mode; accompanied the BBC Philharmonic with a visual performance; programmed a twitter dress for Imogen Heap; collaborated with CERN Physics Professors to visualize cosmic rays in a giant projection dome; created 40ft long interactive digital artworks for the lobby of Deutsche Bank flagship HQ in hong kong; directed and produced projection mapped visuals for Blaze - the west end dance show; worked with dancers ranging from ballet, contemporary, hip hop, street and breakdance and worked with brands such as Apple, Google, Rolls-Royce, Samsung, Vodafone, Toyota.

Selected exhibitions and performances include Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Creators Project (New York, Sao Paulo, Beijing), Sydney Biennale, Science Museum (London), Design Miami, Ars Electronica (Linz), onedotzero, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Cannes Lions Festival, Manchester Bridgewater Hall, Edinburgh Film Festival, Mapping Festival (Geneva), Yota Space Festival (St. Petersburg), Glastonbury Festival, as well as exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo, Cape Town, Venice, Hong Kong, Pittsburgh, Madrid and more.

Memo was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Fascinated by the hacker demo-scene of the 1980s, he started programming music & graphics demos at an early age on the 8-bit computers of the era. In 1997, after completing a BSc in Civil Engineering, he moved to London where he worked in the video games industry as an artist, designer and programmer. Leaving the industry in 2003 to pursue more immersive experiences, he now balances his time between personal work, collaborations, research and commissioned projects.

 

Source: The Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company

 

 

Mehmet Akten, processing, super collider, london

Reading

Notations 21 (2009) by Theresa Sauer features illustrated musical scores from more than 100 international composers, all of whom are making amazing breakthroughs in the art of notation. Notations 21 is a celebration of innovations in musical notation, employing an appreciative aesthetic for both the aural and visual beauty of these creations. The musical scores in this edition were created by composers whose creativity could not be confined by the staff and clef of traditional western notation, but whose musical language can communicate with the contemporary audience in a uniquely powerful way. (Notations 21 Project)

Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2002) by Richard E. Cytowic disposes of earlier criticisms that the phenomenon cannot be real, demonstrating that it is indeed brain-based. Following a historical introduction, Cytowic lays out the phenomenology of synesthesia in detail and gives criteria for clinical diagnosis and an objective test of genuineness. (MIT Press)

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SEE ALSO

CONTAKT (2008) was a series of interactive performance events to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Richie Hawtin's label Minus. Ali M. Demirel, Hawtin's visualist, produced the show's video and also interacted with the audience. (Kineme Interactive Media)

Ryoji Ikeda (*1966) is one of Japan's leading electronic composers and focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound's physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology to the utmost limit, Ryoji Ikeda has been developing particular microscopic methods for sound engineering and composition. (Ryoji Ikeda)

Art That Moves: The Work of Len Lye (2009) by Roger Horrocks, author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed 2001 Len Lye: A biography, shifts the focus from Len Lye's life to his art practice and innovative aesthetic theories about "the art of motion," which continue to be relevant today. Going beyond a general introduction to Len Lye and his artistic importance, this in-depth book offers a detailed study of his aesthetics of motion, analyzing how these theories were embodied in his sculptures and films. (Amazon)

Robert Hodgin is a commercial designer and artist from Boston, Massachusetts. He was the co-founder and Creative Director at the Barbarian Group. Robert Hodgin's creative outlet is flight404.com, an interactive experimental Flash site that has also garnered him international recognition. His work has been featured in virtually every major design magazine. Robert earned a bachelor's of fine arts degree in sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. (Austin Museum of Digital Art)

META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (2007) by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack digital sampling of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world gone wild while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. (The MIT Press)