Murat Germen

The Reflexive Campus: A Study of Dynamic Architecture in a Virtual World

This paper describes the creative as well as computational processes involved in the creation of a generative, emergent architectural construct destined to become the virtual campus of a Real Life University on a dedicated island in Second Life®. Designed around a core spiral structure the virtual building re-configures itself based upon user demand, adding classrooms, exhibition and meeting areas as well as conference halls and auditoriums, as and when required. Thus, a user-centric, emergent, dynamic construct has been implemented for the creation of a virtual campus, which evolves and changes over time and based upon usage. The ensuing design system also attempts to configure itself based upon the nature of activity undertaken within it: Thus spaces required for survey based learning spread themselves out over the “shallow” horizontal axis, whereas areas of research and deeper levels of inquiry utilize the “deeper” vertical axis in a visual representation of different strategies of learning and levels of epistemological inquiry.

Maestro: Design Challenges for a Group Calendar

Maestro - 3D group calendar visualizer aims at handling multiple schedules and highlighting common free times. One of the most powerful skills of Maestro is scalability according to the number of group members, which can be up to 18 users. The use of color and shape intends to create a more lucid picture of an organizationpsilas schedule, as opposed to traditional calendars which can overwhelm the user with information. The goal is not to produce yet another calendar application, but to define an interactive information visualization technique. This work concentrates on highlighting the relevant information, using primitive shapes and color differentiation to avoid a complicated depiction.

Keynote Talk: From Analog to Digital, Fictive vs. Documentary: An Ongoing Journey

This talk will focus upon a personal update of my sojourn as an artist/academician - a journey that has led me from the analog to the electronic medium spanning a timeline of 30 odd years. The exploration, still in progress, will start with city planning, architecture and photography where I acquired, and developed my analog skills. Following this, I will focus on my encounter with the digital revolution, right at a time when the foundations were being laid at one of the leading institutions of the world. I will then ponder on the possible common grounds between analog/digital also by bringing in notions such as serendipity, surprise, uncertainty, inadvertence that lie at the heart of my creative practice. These will constitute the grounds upon which I base my computational art experimentations and my academic research on various transformations in contemporary aesthetics that I believe arose out of digital creativity. Since my main visualization area is photography; indispensable conceptual components such as representation, real, surreal, objectivity, subjectivity, construct will be mentioned and linked to an empirical process based practice.

3 Case Studies: A Hybrid Educational Strategy for ART/SCI Collaborations

In this paper we report on a transdisciplinary university course designed to bring together fine art/visual communication design and computer science students for the creation and implementation of collaborative visual/audio projects that draw upon the specialized knowledge of both these disciplines. While an overview of the syllabus and the teaching methodologies is undertaken in the introduction, the focus of the paper concentrates upon an in-depth discussion and analysis of 3 specific projects that were developed by 3 distinct teams of students comprised of one artist/designer and one engineer each.

Kanyon reconstructed

Source International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques archive ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 art gallery table of contents San Diego, California SESSION: Wall-based work table of contents Page: 267 Year of Publication: 2007 Author Murat Germen Sabanci Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey Sponsor SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Publisher ACM Press New York, NY, USA

Reading the space as an entity - Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, Italy

No matter how wide of a lens you use, the perception area in a regular one-shot single photo is limited with the particular instance of the spatial sphere around you. On the contrary, when you photograph multiple images and stitch them together in order to widen the perception area, you obtain an entity that brings multiple instances of a particular sphere / world together in one image: A world that cannot be seen to the naked eye at one instance of time, an augmented perception...