Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen

Beyond Datafied Futures: Postmigrant Aesthetics in Contemporary Europe

This project examines the historical conditions and cultural politics surrounding the rise of the terms postdigital and postmigrant in Europe since the late 2000s. The postdigital refers to the pervasive integration of digital technologies into all aspects of life, while the postmigrant emerged from artist-led discussions within Germany's cultural landscape to describe the cultural production of second and third-generation immigrants in Europe. The term has quickly expanded to address the increasing participation and visibility of migrant communities more broadly. The current project positions these two popular and yet contested terms as reflections of societal shifts following the 2008–2009 global financial crisis—an era marked by the rise of technology-led, technocratic solutions to escalating crises that have reshaped finance, labor, migration, and urban and environmental planning. Taking the urban scale as a starting point—where the abstracting forces of capital and data intersect with the material realities and cultural encounters that shape them—this project investigates the intersections of materialities and imaginaries surrounding postdigital and postmigrant conditions as they manifest in artistic and cultural production. Rather than categorizing specific artists or art practices within rigid labels, it explores how these frameworks are continuously negotiated and redefined on the ground. In doing so, the project critically unpacks the conditions from which these terms emerge and explores alternative future narratives for Europe and beyond.

Since 2023      Technische Universitat Dresden, Schaufler Lab
                         Postdoctoral researcher and Kolleg training coordinator

2023-2024       Against Catastrophe (PI: Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern, part of “Governing  
                          Through Design,” funded by SNSF, Sinergia Grant)

2022-2024       ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
                          Affiliated research fellow

2020-2022       ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
                          Postdoctoral research fellow

2014-2020       Duke University, Durham, United State
                         PhD, Computational Media, Arts and Cultures

2011-2014       Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
                          MA, Interactive Arts and Technology

2006-2011       Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
                          BA, Psychology; Sociology (double major)

• Digital Media and Arts
• The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Media Infrastructures
• Decolonial Media Theory and Materialist Critique
• Environmental Humanities
• Critical AI Studies
• Migrant Futures and Digital Diasporas

Edited Volume

Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen (Ed.), Displacing Theory Through the Global South, ICI Berlin Press, 2024.

Peer-reviewed Articles

“The Racial Politics of Smart Urbanism: Dubai and Beirut as Two Sides of the Same Coin,” In Special Issue: The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East, ed. by Burcu Ozcelik, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44:12, 2282–2303, 2021.

“Revisiting Cognitive Mapping: Extractive Capitalism and Media Arts in the Middle East,” In A Peer Reviewed Journal About Research Networks (APRJA), Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox, eds. Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020.

“Forensic Aesthetics for Militarized Drone Strikes: Affordances from Whom, and for What Ends?” In Special Issue: Rethinking Affordance, ed by. Ashley Scarlett & Martin Zeilinger, Media Theory, 3 (1), pp. 239–268, 2019.

“In-between Soundscapes of Vancouver: Acoustic Experience of a City with a Sensory Repertoire of Another Place,” Organised Sound, 19 (2), 125–136, 2014.

Book Chapters

“Gulf Futurism and Its Discontents: A Quest for Multi-Cosmotechnics,” In Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence & Speculative Computation, ed. by the Critical Computation Bureau (Luciana Parisi, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Tiziana Terranova, Oana Pârvan, and Brian D’Aquino), in progress.

“Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital,” in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 91–115, 2022.

“The Mediated Sounds of Palestinian Exile: Technics and Memory in Bernard Stiegler and Soundscape Studies,” In Sound, Media, Ecology, ed. by Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 199–216, 2019.

“‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’: The Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics of Confronting the Past in Turkey,” in Animals, Plants, Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, ed. by Irmak Ertuna and Hande Gurses, New York: Routledge, 13–47, 2019.

Other Publishing

Özgün Eylül İşcen and Shintaro Miyazaki, “Counter-Futuring the Internet: A Conversation,” In TECH | IMAGINATIONS, ed. by Christian Schulz, Jens Schröter, Christoph Ernst, Navigationen - Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturwissenschaften, 2023, 2.

“Golf-Futurismus: Wie Post-Carbon-Imaginationen die Systemkrise reproduzieren” (Gulf Futurism: How Post-Carbon Imaginaries Are Reproducing the Systemic Crisis), Berliner Gazette (After Extractivism Series), 17 May 2022.

“Cognitive Assemblages,” In Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition, edited by Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt. Athens: Onassis Foundation, 2022.

Özgün Eylül İşcen, Geoffrey Aung & Sudipto Basu, “Refusal to be Refused: On the Modes of Resistance to Logistical Capital in the Global South” In Research Networks A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, Volume 9, Issue 1, ed. by Christian Ulrik Anderson and Geoff Cox, Transmediale, Berlin, Germany, 2021.

Arab Culture in the Digital Age: Futurity Without Guarantee. In Beyond the Echo Chamber March Meeting 2019, ed. by. Reem Shadid, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019.

Özgün Eylül İşcen, Diane Gromala and Maryam Mobini, “Body Image and Body Schema: Interaction Design for and through Embodied Cognition,” In Human-Computer Interaction. Advanced Interaction Modalities and Techniques. HCI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8511, edited by Masaaki Kurosu, 2014,  Springer, Cham., 556–566.

Amber Choo, Özgün Eylül İşcen, and Mehdi Karamnejad, “Serious Indie Games for Social Awareness: Gamifying Human Characters with Disabilities,” Gamification ’13: Proceedings of the First International Conf. on Gameful Design, Research, and Applications, 83–86, 2013.

• Postdoctoral Fellowship, ICI Berlin, 2020-2022
• Evan Frankel Fellowship in Humanities, Duke Gradate School, 2019-2020
• Julian Price Graduate Fellowship in Humanities and History, Duke Graduate School, 2018-2019
• International Dissertation Travel Award, Duke Graduate School, Fall 2017
• Graduate School Fellowship, Duke University, 2014-2019
• Graduate School Fellowship, Simon Fraser University, 2012-2014
• Academic Excellence Scholarship, Koç University, 2009-2011

Co-organizer with Governing Through Design project team (Claudia Mareis, Kenny Cupers, Orit Halpern, Laura Nkula-Wenz, Özgün Eylül İşcen, Nadia Christidi, Sudipto Basu, Anke Gründel, Tania Messell), Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures, ICI Berlin, October 23-25, 2024, and a public program at Spore Initiative, October 26, 2024.

Co-organizer with Tunay Altay, B Camminga, & Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Drag! Queer Crossings in Global Contexts, ICI Berlin, May 13, 2024.

Co-organizer with Iracema Dulley, Translation, Mediation, Power, ICI Berlin, June 12, 2023.

Co-curator with Nadia Christidi, Against Catastrophe, led by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern, funded by SNSF Sinergia Grant, January 2023-Present.

Affiliate member of Critical Data Lab, led by Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, October 2022-Present.

Co-organizer with Shintaro Miyazaki, Counter-Futuring Symposium, ICI Berlin, Berlin, Germany, September 22, 2022.

Co-curator/editor with Shintaro Miyazaki, Counter-N, a web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection, supported by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Co-organizer with Iracema Dulley, Theorizing Through the Global South Workshop, ICI Berlin, March 9-10, 2022.

Co-organizer with Shannan Hayes and Max Symuleski, “Data Determinacy: A Multi-Disciplinary

Symposium on Race, Algorithms, and Critical Intervention,” Duke University, Durham, NC, United States, April 12-13, 2018.

Founding Member with Shannan Hayes and Max Symuleski, Aesthetics & Politics Reading Group, Duke University, 2016-2019.

Member, Social Practice Lab, led by Pedro Lasch, Duke University, 2016-2018.

Co-chair, Graduate Student Association, The Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies,  Duke University, 2015-2016.

Member, S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, co-directed by Dr. Mark Hansen and Dr. Mark Olson, Duke University, 2014-2017.

Member, Pain Studies Lab, led by Dr. Diane Gromala, Simon Fraser University, 2012-2014.

Speaker, “The Multitude of Turns: Postmigrant Aesthetics in Postdigital Europe,” Beyond Smart City Transitions: Thinking Through Structural Violence and Possible Radical Futures International Workshop, Polytechnic and University of Torino, Italy, October 17-18, 2024.

Speaker, “AI is not a Metaphor, but an Allegory,” Shifting Natures (organized by Federica Buongiorno, Xenia Chiaramonte, Alberica Bazzoni), ICI Berlin, March 14-15, 2024.

Roundtable discussant, “Ether’s Bloom: A Programme on Artificial Intelligence,” Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany, November 4, 2023.

Speaker, “Black Box & Oil as Imperial Allegories: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Gulf Futurism,” KW Digital: Poetics of Encryption Conference, Berlin, Germany, October 27- 28, 2023.

Speaker, “Reprogramming Utopias through Media Arts in the Middle East,” Coding Utopias, ICI Berlin, September 28-29, 2023.

Keynote speaker, “Counter-Futuring: Past Futures and Speculative Presences of Computing,” AI: Ancestral Immediacies, HKW Berlin, Germany, July 28-30, 2023.

Speaker, Politics and Memory of Transitional Time, organized by Gal Kirn, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, May 4, 2023.

Roundtable discussant, Counter-digital > mining / critique / dancing, in conversation with Martin Howse, Jan Distelmeyer and Shintaro Miyazaki, Acud Macht Neu, Berlin, May 2, 2023.

Speaker, “The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital,” Lecture Series, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, November 30, 2022.

Workshop leader, 12^th Berlin Biennale Curator's Workshop, organized by Reem Shadid, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, July 9, 2022.

Roundtable discussant, Abstraction and Abjection, in conversation with Alan Díaz Alva, Seb Franklin, and Marina Vishmidt. diffrakt : zentrum für theoretische peripherie, Berlin, Germany, July 7, 2022.

Panel Discussant, Heavier than Air: Resisting the Military State, organized by Sam Dolbear, the ICI Berlin, June 15, 2022.

Panel presenter, “The Dialectical Condition of Diasporic Post-Internet Aesthetics,” Haunted by Homes Symposium, the ICI Berlin, May 5-6, 2022.

Panel presenter, “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Digital Media and Theorizing Through Arts,” Theorizing Through the Global South Workshop, ICI Berlin, March 9-10, 2022.

Panel presenter, “Reclaiming Algorithmic Media: Forensic Architecture and Machine-Enabled Public Truth,” Algorithms in Film, Television and Sound Cultures: New Ways of Knowing and Storytelling (online conference), Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey, April 29-30, 2021.

Panel Discussant, Caliphate Pop, organized by Hasan Özgür Top, Mandus Ridefelt, and Assem Hendawi, Index Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden, February 3-4, 2022.

Speaker, “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Smart Urbanism: Counter-Futuring in the Middle East,” Domino Lectures, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey, January 11, 2022.

Roundtable Discussant, The Rightness of Wrong: Error and Progress in Science and the Arts, in conversation with Christopher Chamberlin, Işıl Eğrikavuk, hosted by Kata Katz, Mafalda Sandrini, and Anita Jóri, Vilém Flusser Archive, The Universität der Künste Berlin, October 28, 2022.

Roundtable Discussant, Suspending Touch: Haptic Skepticism for Life During a Pandemic, organized by Rachel Aumiller, the ICI Berlin (online), May 20, 2021.

Speaker, “The Politics of Digital Rendering: Counter-Futuring in the Middle East,” Design Culture International Lecture Series, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, December 16, 2020.

Panel presenter, “The Racial Politics of Smartness Mandate: Counterfuturisms Arising from the Middle East,” Recursive Colonialism Artificial Intelligence, and Speculative Computation, Online Symposium, December 1-12, 2020.

Roundtable Discussant, Beautiful Seams: Unraveling the Intelligence of Everything, organized by KairUs, Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO), Linz, Austria, May 23, 2020.

Roundtable Discussant, “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media in the Middle East,” Research Networks Panel, Transmediale Festival: End-to-End Symposium, January 31- February 2, 2020, Volksbühne, Berlin, Germany, 2020.

Panel presenter, “Historicizing Digital Media in the Middle East: The Geopolitical Aesthetics of Imperial Infrastructures and Neoliberal Symptoms,” Media Infrastructures in the Middle East Conference, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, January 9-11, 2020.

Panel presenter, “Passages Between the U.S. and the Middle East: Racialized State Violence and Predictive Algorithms,” The Neil Postman Graduate Conference, New York University, New York, NY, United States, November 1, 2019.

Panel presenter, “Socio-Technical Imaginaries of the Middle East: Petropolitics & Digital Colonialism,” Annual Conf. of Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, LA, United States, Sept 4-7, 2019.

Panel presenter, “The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Computational Media: Counter-Futuristic Imaginaries from the Middle East,” The Limits of Growth of the Smart-City Symposium, The School of Architecture, Cities and Territories, Paris-Est University, Marne-La-Vallee East, France, June 5-6, 2019.

Panel presenter, “Anthropocene and Digital Colonialism: Speculative Narratives from the Middle East,” Without Computer: Anthropocene and Digital Imaginaries Conference, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, April 8-9, 2019.

Panel presenter, “Digital Media Arts in the Middle East: Affordances for Whom?” Rethinking Affordance Symposium, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, June 7-9, 2018.

Panel presenter, “Alternative Histories of New Media: Telecommunication Technologies and Media Arts in the Middle East,” Re:Trace: Media Art Histories, November 23-25, Vienna, Austria, 2017.

Panel presenter, “Affective Methodologies for Digital Aesthetics and Resistance: Media Arts in the Middle East,” The Coils of Politics and Aesthetics, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 4, 2015.

Panel presenter, “Body Image and Body Schema: Interaction Design for and through Embodied Cognition,” In collaboration with Diane Gromala & Maryam Mobini, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) International 2014, Crete, Greece, June 25-27, 2014.

Instructor of Record - Akademie der Künste Berlin
“The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Digital Media Arts in the Middle East.” Spring 2024

Instructor of Record - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
“Decolonial Approaches to Digital Media,” Fall 2022

Teaching Assistant/Section Instructor - Duke University
“Digital Durham,” Spring 2018
“Introduction to Visual Culture,” Fall 2016

Teaching Assistant/Section Instructor - Simon Fraser University
“Interactive Arts,” Fall 2013
“Media Across Cultures,” Spring 2013
“Writing Methods for Arts and Technology,” Fall 2012