Beste Ileri & Toprak Firat
Artist & Researcher @ www.toprakfirat.com
Toprak Fırat (TR) is an emerging digital artist, researcher, and computer engineer based in Istanbul, Türkiye. Toprak examines the fractures and contradictions inherent in contemporary human connections by analyzing the social metastructures that shape societal networks. With a multidisciplinary approach, their work bridges the fields of digital art, computational research, and social critique, offering unique insights into the complexities of modern existence. Through their art, Toprak employs cutting-edge technologies such as real-time data processing, mixed reality, and interactive media to create immersive experiences that challenge the boundaries between the digital and the physical.
Beste İleri (TR) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose practice builds upon a hybrid background grounded in psychology, design, and visual arts. With an evolving approach shaped by conceptual inquiry, they interlace research-based methods with diverse media, constructing intricate ecosystems of thought through digital expression. They engage digital technologies not merely as tools, but as conceptual agents expanding the poetic and political dimensions of their practice. Rooted in conceptual art, their current practice spans virtual reality, artificial intelligence, data aesthetics, and multimedia installations. Recent works explore themes such as cyborg, post-humanism, fluid identity, and queer ecology, often taking form in speculative and chaotic compositions that resonate with post-internet aesthetics, alongside archival and research-based pieces grounded in the Anthropocene and shifting urban imaginaries.
Actively engaged in activist artistic initiatives, they continue to explore intersections of collective creation and social impact. Through these collaborations, they facilitate community-driven storytelling and speculative co-creation, emphasizing care, collectivity, and transformation. With a strong commitment to socially engaged art, they use their practice as a critical lens on systems of surveillance, control, and erasure, reclaiming digital tools to foreground collective memory, dissent, and resistance. Whether working independently or collectively, their practice probes the thresholds of the real and the virtual, the individual and the systemic, always seeking new ways of sensing and scripting the world.