Turbulence Commission: MYPOCKET by Burak Arikan [Needs a Java and Flash enabled browser; best on Firefox or Safari; optional RSS reader for Transaction Feed] MYPOCKET discloses the artist’s personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist’s two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today’s techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process.

MYPOCKET is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Burak Arikan is an artist and designer creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. He shows the instances of these systems through diverse media including prints, animation, software, electronics, and physical materials. His work has recently been shown at Ars Electronica, Venice Biennale, and Art Interactive in Cambridge.

Arikan completed his master’s degree at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Physical Language Workshop (PLW) led by John Maeda. While at MIT, he pursued research exploring systems that address the transition from connectivity to collectivity in the context of creative expression. Sparked by this research, Arikan initiated the “Open I/O” platform for artists and designers to collaborate through composing distributed electronic objects and space over the Internet.

Prior to MIT, he worked as an information architect and visual designer in the United States and Turkey. He received an MA degree in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2004, and a BS degree in Civil Engineering from Yildiz Technical University in 2001.