ARALIK
Interactive Projection Mapping
Project Team: Ayşegül Akçay Kavakoğlu, Bengü Özmutlu
Date: 2025
Exhbition: International Architecture Biennial of Antalya
Location: Antalya, Türkiye
Materials: Tulle Fabric, Aluminium, wood plate
Tools for design & fabrication: Drone, Rhinoceros, Touch Designer, Adobe After Effects
Tools for projection mapping: Touchdesigner
Sponsor: Ersaş Systems
Size: 2.40m x 2.40m x 2.20m
Aralık is an architectural installation that creates interactive cultural heritage experiences through artificial intelligence. Within the scope of the International Architecture Biennial of Antalya, it explores the use of artificial intelligence in design, sustainability, the permeability of social and spatial boundaries. While "Interval" questions the contribution of AI to the sustainability of cultural heritage in public spaces, it also opens a gate towards new means of interactions in public spaces. The word "interval" is generally defined in dictionaries as "the distance between two things, an opening, a gap…, a narrow passage," while in music, it is defined as "the distance separating one sound from another…," and in mathematics, as "all the numbers between a beginning and an end…." However, the definition of "interval" can also be interpreted metaphorically.
The installation "Interval" presents the viewer with a spatial representation of a multilayered architectural memory through projection mapping, focusing on the tectonics of the Mevlevihane (Mevlana) Gate of the Istanbul Land Walls having layers from the Byzantine and Ottoman periods to the modern era. Istanbul Land Walls were listed as the UNESCO World Heritage List Site in 1985. The wall structure, constructed in different periods in different architectural styles, construction techniques, and materials, is considered a spatial and temporal interval. In this context, the concept of interval represents the transformations, changes and threshold states of cultural heritage within continuity rather than a gap. The palimpsest gate and the "interval" are situated precisely within this state of plural temporality. It belongs neither entirely to a single time, nor to a single community or to a single culture. This intermediary position is conceptualized both as a physical interface and a transitional zone within cultural memory.