Human Colony, 2015 Hakan Gündüz

 

Our cities are gauged to match our mentalities, our will to die leads to enthusiasm to live and we cannot tell which one inspires us, we keep rushing to run ever repeating errands and bragging about how we have risen to the peak, we are slaves of excessiveness and constantly keep constructing buildings without thinking it through. The world soon will be a construction site only. Here, billions of  blinded, just like white ants will toil and moil in the midst of humming roar and stenching smell like automats until they are left without a breath...
Albert Caraco / “Handbook of Chaos”

Life in the city is under the invasion of those living spaces that power holders impose on us, the power holders persistent on a vicious cycle, distant from and even daring and eager to destroy nature. We, on the other hand, resemble the ants stuck within it with our movements from here to there, seemingly dictated by a mechanism we have forcefully memorized, and not by free will. Even if we like it or not,life is stuck in between home, work/school and shopping center, and it has no more room for breath.
By using the ant colony algorithm, I have created a simulation organically generating a traffic between the city’s self-imposing locations. Here, as virtual individuals move randomly, they leave traces behind them and gradually reorganize in lines to find the shortest routes to the destinations they are supposed to reach. However, this orderly traffic between the points representing their modern daily life routines is open to disruption thanks to the viewer’s intervention. Thanks to it, these virtual individuals divert from their routes and get dispersed around in completely different directions. Yet, after a while,
they will find their way again and restore the cycle until the next viewer’s action disrupts it again.
The only way to destroy this vicious cycle perceived as normal that exists thanks to the limiting of
options is through action.
With all my respect for Caraco…