Who Are You When the Labels Disappear?
Who Are You When the Labels Disappear?
Inside SS21.art, a generative installation that asks you to give up your name
By SS21.art Team - Nazlı Derya Öztürkmen & Merve Güven Özkerim & Begüm Tarako
Think about your name for a moment. Not what it means, not who gave it to you, but what it does. Every time you book a flight, sign into an app, or fill in a form, your name becomes something else entirely. It becomes a data point. A variable in a system that classifies, predicts, and tracks you without asking permission.
This is where SS21.art begins.
SS21.art is a generative installation built around a deceptively simple proposition: what if you could temporarily let go of the name you were given and choose a new one? Not as a game, not as escapism but as a conscious, deliberate act. An act that asks you to confront how deeply your identity is shaped by systems you never opted into.
The experience takes place inside a black cabin, a small, enclosed space designed as what we call an anonymity chamber. The reference is deliberate: it recalls the intimacy and the weight of a confessional booth. You step inside, alone, and the outside world disappears. What remains is you, a screen, and sound.
On the screen, a manifesto greets you. Not a wall of text to read and forget, but a visual unraveling, an animation that breaks down the idea of a given name into fragments of code and data. It is a mirror, of sorts. It asks you to see your own name the way an algorithm sees it: as an input, a category, a prediction.
Then comes the choice. You can accept a code name generated randomly by the SS21.art platform by chance or you can compose your own, building a name that belongs to no database, no classification, no history. This is not a username. It is not a pseudonym for a social media account. It is a moment of decision about who you want to be, even
if only for a few minutes.
And the cabin responds.
The moment you claim your code name, everything changes. The sound that has been surrounding you, a continuous, rotating sonic layer we call the manifesto loop, quietly pulls back. In its place, a unique sound composition emerges: a combination of textures drawn from a pre-built archive, assembled in real time, distributed across three speakers arranged in a triangle around your body. The sound is directed at your chest, your waist, your skin. You feel the Reveal.
Each Reveal begins closed and intimate, a low-pass filter keeps the frequencies tight, the space small. Then the filter opens. The spectrum expands. The room grows. It is the sonic equivalent of stepping out of something old and into something unnamed. And it lasts exactly ten seconds and then the manifesto returns.
The combination of textures, the timing, the way the sound moves through the space, it is generated once, for you, and it will never be repeated in exactly the same way for anyone else. Your code name appears on the screen. The system never speaks it aloud. Sound does not name you. Sound transforms the space around the moment you name yourself.
SS21.art does not end when you step out of the cabin. The project is also a growing community. Through monthly thematic cycles, members contribute to the platform. The team behind SS21.art brings together different perspectives. Prof. Dr. Merve Güven Özkerim, based at Giresun University, provides the theoretical and artistic foundation, drawing on critical theory, surveillance studies, and computational aesthetics to frame identity as something that is not just socially constructed but algorithmically produced. Nazlı Derya Öztürkmen, through Rastro Studio, shapes the platform's experience design, community structure, and communication strategy, ensuring that the project lives and evolves beyond any single exhibition. Begüm Tarako, through Audio Rituals, designs the spatial sound architecture, the speaker configurations, the generative textures, the low-pass filter choreography that turns a digital choice into a bodily event.
Together, they are building something that refuses to sit still. SS21.art has already been presented as part of the "Human and Machine" exhibition in Istanbul and is currently being prepared for submission to Ars Electronica's Expanded Play Gallery. The platform is live. The community is growing. The cabin is waiting.
So, who are you when the labels disappear?
Visit SS21.art today and name yourself on your own terms.
