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### Burak Arıkan

Website | Twitter

Burak Arikan is a New York and Istanbul based artist working with complex networks. He takes the obvious social, economical, and political issues as input and runs through an abstract machinery, which generates network maps and algorithmic interfaces, results in performances, and procreates predictions to render inherent power relationships visible and discussable. Arikan’s software, prints, installations, and performances have been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally. Arikan is the founding member of Graph Commons, a collaborative platform for network mapping, analysis, and publishing.

## Presenting

### Data Asymmetry: Interrogating How Power Accumulates in Complex Networks

Information asymmetry was one of the drivers of capital and power in the past century. When one side aggregated more or better information than the other, it gained power. Industrial-era players prospered using this circuitry. Since the emergence of the internet and the web, information has grown increasingly abundant and far more people have gained access to formerly enclosed knowledge. This began to change the power imbalance in every field as we know it.

Today, the role of information asymmetry is being replaced by that of data asymmetry. Now, those who can aggregate and hedge data emerge as the new power centers. We all know that our activities are captured by the services we use, our metadata linked to other data to build giant graphs. The graph emerges as one particular mode of understanding this situation. When data points link to one another, the whole generates better intelligence and more value than the sum of its parts. From the social graph to the knowledge graph, the interest graph to the transactions graph, proprietary data networks drive the generation of new power. Graphs are used to make algorithmic predictions and optimizations about our future activities. As our behavior is systematically forecasted, we have gradually entered a “society of control” that monitors, simulates and pre-mediates individual identities in relation to their data trails.

In this talk, I will discuss and speculate on data asymmetry with examples from my recent artwork.

## Workshop with Zeyno Ustun

### Creative and Critical Use of Complex Networks

The workshop asks how to map complex networks, how to read those networks with methods such as graph analysis, and also includes practice-based work sketching diagrams, drawing graphs, and more. As a workshop participant, you gain creative skills to answer your complex data questions, which would then inform your decisions. Workshop participants use the Graph Commons platform for collaborative mapping and analysis. View the past participants' work from the workshop archive.

### Materials & Requirements

Each participant should bring a laptop.