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Chance The Writer, Begüm Çelik, 2022, Interactive Installation___Raspberry Pi, camera, thermal printer, GPT-3 text-davinci-002 AI model, dice, six different news portals

The work refers to the news sources that people encounter in the course of ordinary life. The fact that these encounters can be accidental as well as intentional is addressed through the pseudo-randomness of the computer. Playing with luck, the work presents its subject, who impersonates both the writer and the reader, with a news item that was written on that day, but has never been written until that day. In doing so, it uses dice, which we associate with luck, and makes the audience throw the dice. The “randomness” based on 41 dice, forty of which is white and one is red, appears as an alternative structure to this concept, which we cannot reach in computer systems but can imitate. The numbers on the dice determine which news that are present in six news sites at the time, will be presented. However, not the original news, but a new version reproduced by artificial intelligence is read by the audience. While the subject of the work determines the parameters of the selection and rewriting process of the news, the work continues to play with its subject in the background. On the stage that the artist has built including herself, she presents a play that is performed “with an ordinary passion, simply spontaneously” by Chance the Writer, audience and herself.

____This work has been exhibited in the Akbank 40th Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition.

© Begüm Çelik

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