Gokhan Okur is a director, artist and entrepreneur born in Eskişehir, Turkey in 1981. He attended Hacettepe University, receiving B.Sc. in Electric-Electronical Engineering in 2005 and Sabancı University, receiving M.F.A. in Visual Communication Design in 2007. Currently lives and works in London, UK. He is the executive creative director of Koff Animation.
His body of work ranges from animated short films to audio/visual performances. Okur directed a number of short films and acknowledged by many international festivals around the globe. He worked as a part-time professor at Maltepe University and Kadir Has University lecturing on animation, illustration and design. He founded Koff Animation Studio in 2012 and delivering bespoke and custom-tailored content for global agencies and brands.
Okur is no stranger to technology and new media; he wrote his engineering graduation project on Matlab by developing Genetic Algorithms for electromagnetic wave functions. His master's thesis, based on Lev Manovich's new media theory, was exploring the possibilities of internet database film making in 2007. Featured by the French newspaper Le Monde and replicated by Instagram after several years.
His passion for building worlds, creating characters and telling stories led him to animation and film making. He is now exploring a hybrid voice in the NFT art space.
My artwork is a paradoxical response to AI-generated, code-based, high-rendered hallucinations, hyper-real three-dimensional worlds, machines fed with human creativity and wisdom. I am merely mimicking them with my hands and humble algorithms; duplication, repetition, scale, movement, rhythm, offset, colour and symmetry. I draw, design and animate in real-time with errors and defections. As I perform, the artwork in our three-dimensional universe becomes imprinted in the Blockchain of our nature Spacetime, and shared "MemoryChain" with the audience will decay, falsified and forgotten, unlike the technology we are praising now. By minting the art piece as I perform, I explore a path to capture emotions, memories, location, music and audience into the artwork.
I start to build a visual language for a collection with forms, colour, movement and compositions. Elements of the language form complex yet harmonious animations. Cascading structure with human error in animation timing yields more than 10+ Millions frames for a perfect loop. The whole piece can be examined from the beginning till the end, only in a few thousand hours at a 50 fps video. I rehearse the language prior to the performance but let my intuition and emotions affect the art piece as I stand in front of the audience at that specific Spacetime.
I paint and animate in real-time. Use Tagtool as my primary tool, and experiment with many apps such as Looom and Alchemy. I am bounded by time and hardware limitations. No colossal render processes or code lines to generate moving images.