peer: how strict are you about controlling your works? do you let go or try to control every aspect of your works and their consequences?

Merve: Let’s say it depends on what the conditions are. I find the “political” context of exhibiting situations very important. If the work is in an exhibition, it’s very important to me what the framework is and what the institution stands for and who works there and how/whether they are paid. Granted, I have not yet been exhibiting widely, so these are perhaps hypothetical questions, which is all the more why I wanted to publish my will so that I’m held accountable to these standards once I exhibit more. On the other hand, I feel more relaxed about what happens to a work when it’s “bought.” If it’s destroyed, it’s destroyed. If it matches the couch, it matches the couch. There is a different set of guidelines there. I should also note that, though, I’ve been lucky enough to only have sold works to people that I know well and that are taking much better care of the works than I ever could.

peer: can you say more about why you are more relaxed about the control on your acquired works?

Merve: Acquiring a work or to put it in more simple terms, buying the work entails a purchase of something. It is a direct transaction and as an artist, I decide what is a sellable work and what is not. I draw the boundaries of what that sellability is and so in a way, once the purchase has been made, the work’s life is completed and the work is transferred to another entity. If I try to control what happens to the work once it’s somebody else’s, I think I’m stepping outside of that simple transfer of money for a good. Can the fashion designer tell me how to wear the shirt that they designed? Why should I be able to control my work when it no longer belongs to me? I’m the author and I’m more than happy to answer questions or be in dialogue with the person who bought the work, but I don’t want to have control over it.

Exhibiting a work, on the other hand, is a completely different ball-game. The work’s entry into the cultural and artistic realm with everything that comes attached to it is very charged, I think.

FORKED

peer: it’s important that you mention that your phone was password protected when you talk about the thought that you could get hit by a car as you were typing notes to your phone about your will. i am not sure if we all think about what will happen in the future to the digital data and information we are continuously creating. some of these data are protected behind our passwords. even though the service providers we rely on have access to those data, it won't be accessible to others after we pass away, unless we make a plan when we are still alive. i think this is an interesting issue to consider when we think about what "remains/should remain," not only from our works but also from us, after we pass away.

people used to keep private objects and information on physical media in safes or hidden locations. but these could be discovered or unlocked after they pass away, independent of their control. now we all have digital data and information hosted by various "service providers" accessible with our passwords and the amount of these are huge.

just think of your emails from last 5-10 years or even more. probably there is a lot of information that we didn't think about how private they should be and for how long they should remain private. also there is another aspect to consider: behind our passwords, we do not only control the data and the information about ourselves but also about others. we also rely on the service providers of our choice for the privacy of these data.

this reminds me of a text by benjamin mako hill about the email privacy, titled "Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours." email is not considered private anymore, unless it is encrypted. it took about twenty years to develop consciousness about encryption in information technologies and i am not sure if we already started considering all the consequences of our online actions, yet.

people always negotiate the privacy of their actions because they could picture the possible consequences. if we are in a public space, we lower our voice if we talk about something private and we know how far our voice could reach. we know that the private information we are talking about cannot be retrieved in the future, unless it was recorded. even if it was recorded and archived, retrieving a particular information from it used to require considerable amount of time and labour. consider doing research twenty years ago about a particular person in a newspaper or radio recordings archive. and also consider having access to a friends email account and searching for your name as a keyword. not only you would immediately retrieve how your friend has been mentioning you to others but also how others have been mentioning you to your friend. you would call this spying but all the service providers we rely on are continuously doing similar data mining operations on our data and also on our contacts'.

email is just an example but there are many other platforms on which we are continuously creating information about ourselves and others and i am not sure if we think about possible consequences of these, at least for the long term. we cannot negotiate the privacy of the digital information we create today because we cannot foresee who would access it in the future and how it could be mined with future technologies. the big data technologies of today already enable very complicated data mining operations on the digital information we have created without thinking of such a possibility then.

how do you approach these phenomena? what should remain from the digital information you create and control? what should be accessible by whom? what digital information about you and your work can be made public? i believe there will be valuable information about the works of an artist for future researchers if they have access to password protected data of the artist. but how should the privacy of these be negotiated after we pass away? information wants to be free but how about private information? what should remain private for us and our contacts today and also in the future? do you take any action to have more control on your data?

Merve: I always feel guilty reading letters that people wrote. Especially if the letters were not published in their lifetime. While there are a lot of things that would be useful for researchers, I’d think that the artist/person can/should decide what is useful and what is not and what should go unseen and what should not. I had a recent dilemma about a text that was written about a dead artist’s work—somebody mentioned that he wouldn’t have wanted that to be said about his work. I consulted someone whose opinion I really respect and asked for her opinion. She said, “In your situation, the artist being dead is an advantage, use it.” In other words, there are projections and conversations that can be had only without the artist being present or only because we don’t know enough. And that’s a good thing, somehow.

Aslı: I’ve been concerned about these questions since an acquaintance passed away in 2013. His Facebook page was on, until it was reported to Facebook that he was dead. What happened to his messages and all the other information he created remains a mystery. There was this program called suicide machine, through which you could erase all the information on social media and then delete your account. It was active a couple of years only until FB interfered legally and somehow managed to ban the program. Then I quit Facebook and asked all my information to be erased from their side. I haven’t received an answer. It shows their ambition on collecting data even though you’re no longer online. The same goes for online storage where all the information on my phone automatically updates on the cloud. I really don’t know how to classify my private data and decide what should be inaccessible. Are you familiar with digital estate discussions? Could you tell us about the possible measures we can take?

peer: IMHO, we should have a better understanding of information technologies and how they alter the world we have known thus far. then, everyone may reconsider the meaning of privacy for themselves in the age of information technologies.

accordingly we should develop strategies for ourselves and make required investments (in terms of time and even technology) to have control on what we consider private for us. but i think there is also another important issue that i have mentioned above: our responsibility for other people’s data that we keep. how can we be confidants while we cannot control even our own data?

also, there is the issue of how we negotiate each other's understandings of privacy. i may not care much about my privacy and post our photo with you online but what if you do care? how about the passerby in the background of the image?

this makes me think about meriç algün ringborg's work The Risk of Being in Public , a slide projection installation where the slides feature her notes she has taken during a one year time frame whenever she noticed she was being photographed in the public space. she makes a reference to a quotation from diane arbus, possibly from the times of analog photography. but a lot has changed since then. i would say that the "risk" got much bigger. face recognition technology allows filtering all digital photos in a database and finding out the ones in which we somehow appear. and this technology will only improve in the future.

online images already cause problems for many people today and i think it is a very important issue. paolo cirio has a project titled Obscurity that addresses this issue and the notion of the right to be forgotten. There is also a campaign he initiated.

getting back to your question, some people employ various strategies of obfuscation to protect their data body. there are some examples of this in the book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest by finn brunton and helen nissenbaum. also i'd like to mention critical art ensemble here since they published some of the early texts about the issues around “data body” back in the 90s.

well, again getting back to your question, i should mention encryption. it’s about maintaining our own servers for our own data instead of using other people's computers—a practice being called "cloud," which creates a confusion. a speech by eben moglen titled "Freedom In the Cloud" has been very effective for creating awareness about this issue-. having control on our computing-using free/libre and open source software is the only way to achieve this. employing safe backup strategies for preventing data loss—paying extra attention to how we handle the data which may be/come private for ourselves and/or our correspondences tomorrow, if not today. and of course one may employ the strategies of richard stallman, the founder of the free software movement, as he explains in various parts of his text "How I do my computing". but...

yeah, i think this is the short answer for your question: but… :)

peer: to be honest, when i was asking this question i forgot that merve and özge's contributions to Vasiyetimdir were already published online. i had read them when they were first published and now i also remember their content as well as the content of many other contributions. but i do not think i can attribute most of the content to their authors. one of my personal reasons for this could be that i am more interested in the content and what it makes me question, what the work has to say, rather than who is speaking, who the author is. that's because i see cultural production as a collective practice where everyone builds on the works of each other. trying to isolate "a genius author" to whom an "original idea" can be attributed does not add much to the culture besides creating hierarchies such as that of the author and the audience, etc.

if this is the reason why i forgot that you have already contributed to Vasiyetimdir, then it may be my own problem and it should be ok. but if it is a sign of cultural amnesia at large, then it shows how important it is to have projects like Vasiyetimdir through which we can look back and cure our amnesia.

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Aslı: Sometimes I also forget the content of contributions or their authors. I guess Vasiyetimdir is more like a one body of work for me, where all the chapters compose the final work. This happens to me when I receive art-agenda reviews or e-flux opinion texts, too. I read a few from what get through my email but I can’t remember the contents soon after. I’ve never been a good online reader because computer screen is too distracting for me and the reading list is too long.

peer: merve, your contribution includes many terms against the creation and the exploitation of the artist myth. could you elaborate on these ideas? do these measures only cover the situations after your death or do you also employ those rules for your current practice? do they protect your privacy or to set your work free from an author-centric perspective? are there other strategies you employ to protect your position? Also, another question about identity politics in art: how do artists speak on their account, how do they speak for other people and how does an institution speak about an artist or about the others?

Merve: You touch on something very important for me, which is probably my main incentive in being a part of this project. Everything that is a part of my will is part of my practice now. I wanted to take ownership of my practice and write these things out, because if you are not an established artist, you might not get the opportunity to exercise these “principles.” By putting them down, I got a chance to reconsider them and also perhaps hold myself accountable for the future. I think a lot about my authorship and how the different facades of that authorship circulate in the world. Is it possible to always present yourself the way you want to be presented? No, but it’s good to think about how/whether these things can be negotiated.

peer: i have another question for merve. in your will, you have strict terms about how your work should be exhibited, in which context and by whom. but you also say that once acquired, you do not want to have control on your work. but what if a collector or an institution wants to exhibit one of your works in their collection in a context which conflicts with the terms you mention? such an exhibition would mean that you endorse the exhibition and it can even be used as a whitewashing mechanism by the institution.

i remember a tool called "the creator-endorsed mark" developed by nina paley. this is a tool that can be used along with a free cultural work. such works do not require permission by the author for sharing, building on, making money, exhibiting etc. the author would let the exhibition organizers use the creator-endorsed mark only if s/he endorses it. so people would know about the artist's position about such an exhibition. this may also be against the logic behind free culture that criticizes conventional intellectual property laws by calling them "permission culture," a term coined by lawrence lessig. (here i must add that i find lessig’s approach to free culture problematic because of the "some rights reserved" approach he introduced with creative commons. "some rights reserved" approach does nothing more than reproducing the power given to the author instead of distributing the power to the public and this conflicts with the approach of free and open source software, which is the main inspiration for the idea of free culture.) the creator-endorsed mark is an example of how to let your work be free for everyone but prevent the author’s identity to be exploited.

do you have any measures to prevent the collectors from exploiting your identity as an artist, once they acquire your work?

Merve: I definitely recognize the contradiction in letting go of “control” once the work is acquired vs. the attempt to have control before the work is sold, if ever. I do care about consistency though, so I’d say that my rules don’t apply to the works in people’s collections, but since this will is on the Internet, people can see my wishes for the contexts in which my work is to be exhibited and I also do hope that there is caption information that notes the work is lent by the collection and not the “estate.” Will I turn in my grave or dissipate in my urn? Maybe, but that’s OK.

peer: i think the posthumous productions you mention as a "Black Mirror-ish" scenario is already being practiced in various ways. there are some practices with economic interests but also there are others with cultural and even artistic interests.

(re)inventing/discovering a forgotten dead artist through research or various other investments may enrich the cultural domain but it also serves to create economic or symbolic value for the collectors of the "then underestimated dead artist.”

it is also a fact that our culture has been dominated by culture industry for more than a hundred years now and that model is based on profit driven capitalist economics. one of the key rules for the maximum profit within that model is to limit the number of the authors and also the number of editions for creating artificial scarcity, and to maximize the demand for them through various forms of promotion. so, many authors were left out of the culture industry to limit the supply and thus many artists couldn't meet wider audiences. so, such posthumous production also serves for curing amnesia in a way.

there are also practices of repackaging a dead "star." and there are also artists questioning the intersection and the tension between both outcomes of posthumous productions. but i think what you have in mind is different from those posthumous productions where artists construct their own legacy as a source for their future productions that can even be continued after they die. as we know, this works for a brand but can you elaborate on how it can be possible for the artistic production which is still evaluated according to the author who "touches" it?

Aslı: “Discovering” an artist, whether dead or alive, is definitely part of the cultural industry; it is related to its demands from professionals working in the field. It creates a canon with “Columbus’ discoveries” as well. I remember a project presented by a curator years ago: His focus was on vanished artists, based on speculations on how they might have decided to withdraw from the art world. I remember thinking that art industry can’t even let them vanish, somebody should do a project about their disappearance.

This is similar to the intention of big data, your information is kept without your consent. For instance, JD Salinger or Maurice Blanchot wouldn’t give any interviews or let their pictures be taken. This helped create an artist or philosopher myth around them and eccentrism became part of their oeuvre with or without their intention. I don’t know what the way is to escape from all these re-creations/re-branding of artists by the culture industry.

About the posthumous artists’ production, I was trying to say something that legally if you have a production company as an artist, paying taxes and giving invoices etc, the company would be entitled to be purchased after the artist’s death depending on the heirs actions. Usually we are familiar with foundations in the art field, but that doesn’t mean it will remain as the only option. I just have the feeling that soon we’ll see post-mortem productions where the literal “touch” of the artist won’t be desired anymore— similar to a Chanel bag that doesn’t need Coco Chanel to be produced and sold now.

peer: your contribution is titled “(On) Vasiyetimdir” and i also read it in relation to one of the readings you suggest above—about "how artists position themselves and their works in the larger cultural production." how do you feel when artists speak about their works with an ego as in the example of "a statue to be worshipped by future generations?" or in a more humble way, as in the example of "a simple stone," if we take these as the two extreme positions?

the contributions inevitably reveal a lot about the artists' ego and i think this was something you have been wondering about when you started this project. it is believed that one cannot be an artist without a huge ego. i also think it is true to a degree but i also believe that there might be a distinction between how artists feel and behave to construct a charismatic artistic persona. i think Vasiyetimdir is a good opportunity for an artist to construct (or add to) an artistic persona and i also think this is why many artists are excited about it. as you said, you also know many of the contributors personally so i would like to ask whether you think the contributions reflect the artists' feelings and actual wills or they are artworks that would directly contribute to the artistic persona they would like to create?

Özge: I’ll backtrack here to ask you about the contributions that resonate with you. I find it interesting that you want us to talk more about our own contributions rather than the other contributions in Vasiyetimdir. Is is perhaps because our own contributions reveal more than what we’re saying about the project?

peer: i went through all contributions to answer your question. i still feel like the project itself as a whole, with all contributions, is more interesting for me than any singular contribution itself. there are literal texts i like there but i am more interested in the ones seeking an artistic expression. and again, the main thing that keeps me busy about Vasiyetimdir is interpreting how people have approached this project in general, and also in particular. and no, i will not single out some names. :)

Özge: OK, fair enough. For me, Vasiyetimdir does something more interesting than exploring artists’ egos: It reflects on the current ownership models in the arts. I’m curious about the changes we will see in this field in the coming years.

Let me try to give an example through an artwork—Julien Bismuth’s Mime Works I-IV, 2010, a performance piece that my colleague Haro Cumbusyan and I exhibited at collectorspace in 2013. This is a half an hour performance produced in collaboration with the mime artist Gregg Goldstone who was the only person who could activate the work according to the artist as well as the sales contract. For this exhibition, Gregg came to Istanbul and performed the piece at least twice a day. One day I asked Gregg about the “real owner” of this work. He said it was his own body that “knew” and therefore owned the work. Another interesting turn happened when Gregg had to leave Istanbul before the end of the exhibition. Before he left, he rehearsed with another mime artist, Eric Wilcox, who took over the performance and reinterpreted it a very different way. It was the same choreography but it was another work. For me, Eric became another owner of the work as an interpreter/activator.

I also learned a lot from the collectors Josée and Marc Gensollen who loaned the work to us. As collectors, they are interested in works that are transmitted through words, sentences, instructions, dates, and traces. This type of immaterial works don’t necessarily appear but you can still talk about them. This idea resonates with Mime Works I-IV where the performer creates a story around an invisible artwork: We don’t see the work but we watch what happens around the work. After all, the work needs a temporary caretaker and transmitter. It also requires audiences beyond its collectors suggesting an ownership of participation. With Vasiyetimdir, I’m thinking more about different modes of ownership, much more than individuals’ egos.

FORKED

peer: i also think that the notion of ownership in art is an interesting topic. well, the "owner" of the work is simply the one who paid for it, to whom the author sold it, namely the collector, at least in the legal sense.

what excites me is another mode of ownership where works are not exclusively owned by an individual, or by an institution, or even by "public," but instead by everyone in the world. This is beyond the historical notion of the commons, which have been governed by the local community around them. this is the ownership model of peer production.