UFO
UFO is not a university in a traditional sense—or in any sense. It is a model, continuously revising what a university is or could be. Its goal is to act as a transformative vehicle, capable of moving through impossible spaces and concepts. It operates with complexity, computation, dynamics, ontology, and intelligence, which form the bedrock of the transformative formations that emerge through its behavior and characteristics.
We are living in a time when existing structures and organizations are being stripped down. Their true face is exposed: a lack of care for humanity at their core, built entirely on power and struggle. Our task begins with recognizing this, and understanding ourselves as a force capable of transforming struggle into a different kind of power.
We have, historically, given our power away to a small few. But that no longer makes sense—these figures no longer carry any real organizational value. What is emerging is the possibility for any character to rise into such positions. Not the same positions, but new configurations—new forms. This opens up a global scale of resistance, because the mediatory connections that once held power in place are dissolving through the mutation of existing structures. Not their total destruction, but a selective removal and addition—a mutation that turns them into something far more horrible.
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Posthuman Studies Lab
Kiymet Dastan
About the author\artist:
Kıymet Daştan (b. 1980, Turkey) is an artist based in Istanbul. She holds an MA in Design from the Domus Academy in Milan, Italy, and a BA in Sculpture from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. She recently completed the fellowship of Homework Space Program at Ashkal Alwan fine art association in Beirut, Lebanon (2019).
Her experiments with form stem from conceptual projections and generate questions about memory, legacy, and conflict between systems and social roles, while exploring the poetic horizon of materials. She is looking for imageries of fragmented memory among the circulated and repeated symbols and signs of everyday life.
http://www.kiymetdastan.com/
Memory Burn
Am Afraid To (Not) Forget derives from my experimentation with melting discs – archival devices that now are becoming obsolete – creating pseudo-geological, crystalline disfigurements, highlighting the material and metaphorical ties between thick geological layers and today’s speeded-up technologies. These discs include CDs, DVDs, Archival Gold CDs-DVD’s, M-Discs and others. Taking off from the evocative patterns I traced along the Beirut National Museum and the Beirut Mineral Museum, ancient sites, and disappearing pirated video stores in Beirut, this process traces the way material conditions, human societies, and media technologies shape how memory is recorded, preserved, replaced or erased.