This talk is based on Elif Eda’s first experience with Digital Arts. As a filmmaker, she has always thought the movies she makes or produces should create new “eyes” for the audience rather than telling a story written in stone.
She has always wanted the audience, eventually, to replace her/his eyes with the characters’ eyes and start telling the story of another person to themselves as if it is theirs. The VR project “The Thing Between Us” helped her to understand how New Media could pave a more solid way of doing this.
“A meeting of two: eye to eye, face to face.
And when you are near I will tear your eyes out
and place them instead of mine,
and you will tear my eyes out
and will place them instead of yours,
then I will look at me with mine.” ― Jacob Levy Moreno
If you have ever been labelled by the society, if you have ever felt stuck in a role that does not feel authentic and if you have been constantly looking ways of expressing yourself, you have to join Elif Eda while she talks about how her VR project “The Thing Between Us”.
Discover how it was born and developed. And, how this project helped her and many other Turkish women wearing a hijab to face their traumas, and find a way out of it. This is a place “beyond right and wrong” and we will meet there.
Watch this talk
This event was produced for you by our super Team of Volunteers. Lots of shine to: Tamara Brown and Katie Yook.
►► Music jingle by Samm Anga
In exclusivity for Agora Digital Art, watch “The Thing Between Us”. It is best in VR with a headset.
What did we learn?
- Can a gaze kill us? Is it a micro-aggression when someone stares at you?
- How society is reducing the “Hijabi Women” to a simple piece of cloth?
- How VR is transposing the viewer in reality itself.
- Discover how digital art can help us to love, to understand each other.
More info
- Speaker info: Elif Eda
- Can Digital Art helps you to Fall in Love? by Katie Yook, Digital Programme Curator and Moderator for this talk.
- Podcast available soon on Apple, Anchor, Breaker, Castbox, GoogleCast, Overcast, RadioPublic, Spotify, Vrubl
Artist’s Portfolio
Filmography
- The Thing Between Us, Video Art, 3’ (2020), Writer & Director & Performer
- Zor Yıllar, Feature Length Period Drama (2019), Scriptwriter
- Void, Short Movie, 15’ (2018), Scriptwriter & Director. Void, was chosen for several national and international festivals’ competition selections and won the best short movie prize in 7th Bosporus Film Festival and the first runner up prize in STFF.
- Öcüler, Web Series (2015), Scriptwriter & Director & Producer
- United Voice, Feature Lenght Documentary (2015), Scriptwriter
- Boxed, Short Movie, 12’ (2012), Scriptwriter & Director
- Games We Play, Short Documentary, 6’ (2011), Scriptwriter & Director
Web Series
Eda Elif writes, directs and produces the web series: öcüler tv
You Are Prettier This Way!
In the history of world conflict, men have used women’s bodies as political chess pieces. Poetry aside, the ramifications are real and devastating, not just for those who were killed or raped, but also objectified. This happened in Turkey in 1997. And that story and the coping that followed is told at an exhibit here in Istanbul. Showcase’s Nursena Tuter has more.
Curator: Yasemin Darbaz
Eda Elif in “The Thing Between Us” (2020), 3 min VR performance.
The exhibition is running until 10 September 2020. Due to covid-19 and for hygiene reasons, the film will be shown next year too.
Interview in Turkish, here below:
What’s Next?
Continue following the adventures of Elif Eda, she’s planning:
- a feature film, she’s at the early conception phase (by ’25)
- a short film about “womanhood” between a Turkish woman and a Turkish transgender (in ’21)
- a VR Film that will incorporate dance (Feb 21)