Bio

Ayhan Aytes is a media and communication scholar whose work ranges across an intellectual combination of critical media studies, history of AI, cognitive science, ​and speculative design. Aytes has a PhD​ in Communication and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, and Masters in Design degree from the Institute of Design, Chicago.

Ayhan Aytes’  upcoming book is contracted at Amsterdam University Press, as part of the series, Recursions: ​Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Techniques edited by Jussi Parikka, Anna Tuschling, ​and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. The book is an inquiry into the permeable interface between the machine, the Self and the Other, the fertile nexus that incubates human/machine subaltern hybrids.  By focusing on the examples of automata within the Orientalist traditions of perception of technology and labor, it retells the stories of the buried archetypes of Artificial Intelligence and how they simultaneously acted as performers of technological and cultural alterity.

Ayhan Aytes recently contributed to Transmediale, 2017 in Berlin;  Istanbul Design Biennial, “Are we Human?” in 2016; ZKM exhibit “Allah’s Automata” in Karlsruhe, 2015; Amber Art Festival “Laboro Ergo Sum” in 2015; and Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, and Barricades, New York in 2014.

email: ayhana {at} gmail {.} com