DATA is a moving-image meditation on the fragile state of being human in an age where existence is increasingly defined by information. It confronts three elemental questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it take to see each other as equals? When do we collapse?
The work unfolds as a series of allegorical visions suspended in darkness. A boy illuminated by the projection of a family film, a knight carrying an old man across a hill, a house burning in isolation, a mass of bodies spiraling toward light — each scene captures a threshold moment where identity, memory, and survival collide.
Here, human figures appear not only as flesh but as fragments of systems — fused into structures, ascending toward impossible heights, dissolving into machines, or flowering into strange organic forms. They echo the contradictions of our digital condition: at once fragile and resilient, deeply individual yet irreversibly networked, shaped by streams of information that both connect and divide.
At its core, the piece questions how we define humanity when bodies become landscapes, when technology redraws our boundaries, when inequality is reinforced by algorithms, and when collapse itself becomes a universal gesture encoded into data. The figures in the work are not heroes or villains — they are embodiments of longing, grief, hope, and judgment, reflecting the silent struggles that bind us together across networks and systems.
By blending mythological allegory with contemporary digital dystopia, DATA invites viewers into a world where salvation and critique coexist, where tenderness and violence intertwine, and where every vision becomes a mirror for our own unanswered questions about life inside coded structures.
It does not propose answers. Instead, it holds space for reflection — reminding us that to be human in the age of data is to exist within uncertainty, to search for meaning amidst collapse, and to recognize fragments of ourselves in one another, even as we are endlessly translated into information. Ümüt Yildiz