Hayal Pozanti

UPSTAIRS

Hayal Pozanti's work is informed by her ongoing exploration of cyborg anthropology, a framework for understanding the effects of technology on human beings and culture.

Visually, Pozanti's work relies on an invented alphabet of 31 shapes, which she has named 'Instant Paradise'. This lexicon is source material for all her paintings, sculptures, animations and sound pieces. Each shape in Instant Paradise has been assigned a number and a letter from the English alphabet, allowing her to literally 'translate' information through a personalized encryption system. She has created a typeface from her characters, as well as phonemes that she resources for her animations and her sound pieces, respectively.

Fuzzy Logic is a programming method that resembles human reasoning. This rule-based system imitates intuition by providing all intermediate possibilities between digital values YES/NO, TRUE/FALSE and 0/1. It is used in household appliances, industrial automation and artificial intelligence programming and aims to enhance computers by imbuing them with human qualities.

In her latest work, Pozanti likewise aims to splice the automated with the organic. Her sunshade paintings merge a mediated technology with the imperfections of manual mark making; creating hybrid objects that oscillate between mass produced sculptures and intuitive paintings.

The titles of the work refer directly to this process of splicing. A specific number of mechanical parts are conflated with a specific number of emotions. Initially, each number is painted as a single shape on each side. The translucency of the surface unites the two individual shapes, allowing the compositions to inform one another. The result is the unity of two distinct paintings and of two opposing states that are now mutually dependent on each other.

Pozanti’s most recent canvas paintings celebrate properties of humans that most distinguish them from machines. Encoded within their shapes are phrases and idiomatic metaphors that relate to emotion, imagination, intuition, daydreams, imperfection, nuance and sexual desire. She believes these particular qualities will be integral to an ideal human-machine symbiosis that will form a future post human race.