Having taken part of the Occupy movements in Istanbul that took place in 2013, Muk worked in the following years on a series of self-directed projects about Occupy and its use of online tools, or more specifically social media.
Based on the critical essay titled “What is the potential of #publicspace as a #medium?”, Muk set up a Twitter account, that randomly pulls, scrambles and reposts #Occupy Tweets. The bots purpose is to generate content for (and therefore support) the #Occupy movement, while also potentially contradicting its very fundamental arguments.
Antitheses paradoxically strengthening the core theses is already a well known phenomenon. However the idea of using this in the context of political movements (and social media) came from an in-depth research into the topic.
This inspired Muk to explore the potential of this medium through its own memories of #OccupyGezi. The exciting part about this project, and @OccupyTwitter bot is the possibility of generating completely contradictory statements to the values of Occupy, while ironically acting as an accelerator of the movement at the same time. On one hand, the communication tools of this century does not differentiate between biased and unbiased opinions. And on the other hand, technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence are becoming more efficient in curating most effective languages that manipulate our ideas and feelings.
We can claim that the success of conveying a message online depends on a repetitive use of keywords, more so than the essence of the message itself. Instead of endorsing authentic content, the medium acknowledges metadata, such as hashtags, which helps structure networks around a specific topic that lacks an essential statement. Coincidentally, this forms a very specific tone of voice that is similar to protest slogans. Hence arguably the most popular political movement of 21st Century, #Occupy, was embodied hugely online.
To dive more into this topic, take a look at Muk’s #OccupyOccupy project, or check out Muk’s essay “What is the potential of #publicspace as a #medium?”, which was tweeted sentence by sentence via @muk_design.