göt lalesi / ass tulip
"Göt Lalesi": The Ottoman dream, now fully programmed! 🌷⚡ Once smuggled from empire to empire, now tracked like an immigrant at border control. 🚪🛂 A tulip once worth a palace, now blinking with sensors like a cyborg expats. 🤖💸 Will it bloom? Will it get molded? Or will it just be another wilted export in the grand bazaar of failed luxuries? 🥀📉
How it started?
Over the semester, my work unfolded like the slow, deliberate growth of a tulip—each phase a new petal of discovery. I began with deep research into the historical mystique of tulips, from their fabled role in Tulip Mania to their intimate ties with Ottoman lore. With this narrative in mind, I sourced high-quality bulbs and nurtured them in a controlled space, documenting every stage with close-up photography, time-lapses, and detailed notes.
Workflow: From Personal Journey to Exhibition
1. Concept & Narrative Development
- Inspiration:
At 13–14, a chance encounter in a Turkish café—drinking expensive coffee and meeting a wild-haired fortune teller—sparked a lifelong embrace of uncertainty.
- Narrative Script:
Draft personal logs and diary entries chronicling your evolving relationship with uncertainty and identity, paralleling the lifecycle of tulips.
2. Documenting Tulip Growth & Decay
- Visual Capture:
- Use high-resolution cameras to shoot macro footage and time-lapse videos of tulips growing from bulbs in plastic bags.
- Record daily changes—from hopeful sprouting to gradual decay—as a metaphor for personal growth and the challenges of crossing borders.
- Personal Logs:
- Maintain written and video diaries detailing emotions, observations, and environmental context (e.g., two weeks of gray clouds before the sun emerges).
3. AI-Enhanced Video Generation & Data Visualization
- Post-Production Editing:
- Compile raw footage and personal logs into a cohesive narrative timeline using video editing software.
- AI Generation:
- Utilize AI tools (e.g., Luma, RunwayML) to generate surreal video segments reflecting themes of transformation, decay, and the expat experience.
- Integrate AI-generated visuals that abstractly represent your journey—symbolic imagery echoing tulip decay and renewal.
- Data Visualization:
- Extract key data points from logs (dates, weather conditions, emotional states) and create visual charts/timelines using data visualization software.
- Overlay these visuals on your video for an analytical, layered perspective on the narrative.
4. Exhibition Curation & Assembly
- Content Integration:
- Design the exhibition to guide visitors through your documented journey—from that fateful café encounter to the transformation in Berlin, mirrored by the tulip’s lifecycle.
- Display a combination of video projections, high-resolution prints, and interactive data visualizations.
- Narrative Flow:
- Use text overlays, voiceovers, and personal diary excerpts to weave the story together, emphasizing themes of uncertainty, growth, and resilience.
Conclusion
This workflow transforms your personal journey and botanical documentation into a powerful, immersive exhibition—melding detailed visual records, AI-generated imagery, and data-driven storytelling to explore the beauty and complexity of growth, decay, and transformation.
