Written by Pelin Şimşek
Project: "Morph" - Kuntay Seferoğlu
Ters-Yüz: Re-thinking the potentials was realised at the santralistanbul campus on 28 May – 16 August 2019. The exhibition, which featured the senior design projects of Department of Industrial Design students at Istanbul Bilgi University, invited designers and users to reconsider the relationships they form in a social, cultural, and economic context. Six students who took the course titled IND 324 Design Writing and Editorship wrote about six projects from the exhibition.
The relationship between the pieces and projects coincides with one of the aims of the Istanbul Design Biennial, which is forming a space of constant learning and reflection. In order to encourage young people to reflect upon issues that revolve around design, the IDB will be publishing these six pieces every week.
The final piece of the series is "Instrumentalised Time and Space" by Pelin Şimşek.
I have known Kuntay’s affinity to sound and music since I met him. As I talk to him and get to know him it is exciting and exhilarating to see how feeding his soul and body with music reflects on many things around him.
Kuntay Seferoğlu taught himself to play various instruments but never felt a belonging towards any particular one. His concern for music started in early age and carried on; in fact, he realises his graduation project through this ongoing search. His relationship with instruments has always been experimental and he is trying to preserve this experimentality.
Kuntay complains about today’s perception of music as comprising only 12 notes. He believes that music can be liberated, and this liberation can only be facilitated by giving all objects that were not assumed to be instrument the chance to be instruments. He actually proposes this liberation in his project, and designs necessary tools and experience to create it.
Liberation and rejuvenation of music actually showed its first examples a long time ago. People and collectives like John Cage and Musique concrète that explore electronic and acoustic intersections have shared the same concerns with Kuntay and in fact inspired him.
Kuntay’s output is called Morph. It is a wearable and programmable electro-acoustic instrument that can amplify and change the sound of any object through body movements. It is reprogrammable through the use of open source music software like Pure Data and SuperCollider, or the user can write their own code. This design and experience proposal that Kuntay brought together actually provides liberty on many different areas.
The elements that compose Morph are an audio microphone, a sensor, an audio processor and vibrating motors that provide haptic feedback. The fact that there is no need for previous knowledge or experience with an instrument means Morph can reach more people and its use can be freer. A curiosity and excitement towards this instrument, just like Kuntay had when he was a child, is enough to play it.
Although I have mentioned Morph as a tool it is not just a product, it is also a performance design. It creates an experience that can both be listened to and watched by manipulating the audio that was captured with the surface microphone in X-Y-Z axes through various movements. Kuntay claims that the stage performance of a DJ and a drummer is very different, and finds it valuable to re-evaluate the relationship between performer and listener.
It can be said that design can be taken into consideration not only as a physical object but in a more environmental dimension, and this makes the story stronger. Although the first connotations of industrial design today seem to be industrial objects, the field actually promises far more than this. When the designer also designs the context, form and environment of the design, it brings hope on the definition of design.
Spacelessness is another thing that this project touches on. When music is being liberated this much, daily objects are turning into instruments, where can the space of these events be? Kuntay has a special interest towards architectural elements, and finds the idea of playing them fascinating. The fact that they are massive, that they make crazy noises… The most exciting part is that even though their size prevents them from entering a recording studio, none of them have any obstacles towards being turned into an instrument.
In the end Morph turned into a physical object and took shape to be able to express the ideas that Kuntay believes in. The intellectual accumulation behind it not only formed the text but also the physicality/aesthetics of it. The relationship between technology and human body was effective for Kuntay in the process of turning Morph into a product. It was a consistent decision inside the narrative that this being which Kuntay sees as living is an extension of the human body, an entity that is attached to it. He argued that rather than hiding the technology into boxes, devices and cables can be redesigned. That’s why he took the design decisions in a way that is concerned with protecting cables and devices but not hiding them. The transparency in his idea reflects physically on the product. It was impossible to ignore the connection he made with the human body even in the colours he chose for the cables.
Every time we talked to Kuntay about his project, we talked about another development, another scenario that his design can perform. We always left without full stops at the end of sentences, instead putting ellipses. Something that really excites me is what can be done with Morph and everything it provides. The fact that design is open ended and without an edge is one of the strongest parts of Kuntay’s proposal. It is very valuable that Kuntay’s experimental approach is preserved in every stage of the project. I think that this approach has a significant place in today’s design stage and can influence various designs, disciplines, and ideas.
