Wings and Lungs
Scaffolding as form
Urban Atölye's second collaboration with artist Kerem Ozan Bayraktar after Live Display is Wings and Lungs, an installation presented at Sanatorium Gallery as part of the 16th Contemporary Istanbul. For the work, Urban Atölye designed an intertwined scaffolding structure that draws on bilateral symmetry and cruciate ligaments, its components encountering and connecting with one another in space. Rather than a neutral support, the scaffolding was conceived as a totem: a form that occupies space through a single arrested moment rather than a spatial sequence, with surfaces, niches and corners multiplied through the interlocking of its parts.
In the work, organs, bodies, animals, plants, architectural images, garments and undefined organic forms continuously transform into one another, producing hybrid shapes through a process that mirrors the iterative, feedback-driven logic of machine learning. The question of what structure looks like when it arises through accumulation and encounter, rather than fixed templates, runs through both the artwork and the scaffolding design. The scaffolding was not planned toward a final resolved form but discovered through the process: what began as two intersecting scaffold frames was gradually complicated, the joints kept deliberately ambiguous, until the structure locked into itself on site and found its own stability. The design asked what possibilities are latent in the act of putting up scaffolding, and how a structural logic can emerge rather than be imposed.
The parallels between installation production and digital production are not incidental but structural. Components that overlap, emerge from one another, envelop, repeat and accumulate, from scaffolding parts and cables connecting light boxes to electrical and infrastructure units, establish in physical space the same partnerships the work proposes between the biological and the computational. This collaboration was published in the Mental Age edition of Mercado, where the team interviewed each other and shared their internal process: how they handled the design and the implementation on site is depicted through Slack and WhatsApp messages, emails, candid photographs, hand sketches and post-it notes.
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