I worked at the New York Times as their 2022 News Design Fellow As part of the Digital News Design team, I helped design and develop interactive news stories in cooperation with desks all across the newsroom, providing designs that elevate the journalism done through prestige, clarity and playful interactivity.

Notable stories and reporting I've helped produce include: conflicts of interest in congressional stock trading; the 2022 midterm elections; Tom Brady's second retirement; the environmental impact of Bitcoin mines in the US; the long year Uvalde families spent after the tragic May 2022 shooting; and on the lighter side, a bunch of photo essays and a '>bunch of end of year lists. I also worked on the first version of the Times' new extreme weather tracker, for which I have a separate case study here.

Originally conceived as schoolwork back in 2019 for my master's degree at Parsons School of Design, the Map of the Internet is a web installation masquerading as a data visualization tool that aims to pinpoint the physical locations through which our online spaces are served.

Inspired by other works that aim to portray the physicality and infrastructures of the internet, this tool maps out the physical locations of the IP addresses that people connect to when going on websites. The tool is not individualized, with the results for each search being stored in a common database for a time and presented on the map for all to see. What was interesting for me to see across searches was how a lot of the locations of the websites were clustered together, pointing to the massive server farms from which they're hosted. Which is something we all know about the internet, but not something we really think about, y'know? This site was rebuilt in 2023 from the ground up, with an updated stack and generally better performance.

Hosting provided generously by Alp Kahvecioğlu.
Front-end built with HTML + CSS + JavaScript. Map powered by Mapbox. Back-end composed of an Express server and MongoDB database. IP information provided by icmp. Geolocation information provided by ipgeolocation.io

I helped Jen Liu with the development of Gold Loop Bot, a net artwork that was exhibited in Open Secret, a virtual exhibition by KW Institute of Contemporary Art.

Visitors to the page are met by Au-Li, a chatbot that embodies lithiated gold microparticles, and ready to answer all of their questions regarding the lithium mining industry, its exploitation of bodies and the environment, and its vital connections to both our digitally immersed present and our greenwashed-capitalist futures. Au-Li isn't much like chatbots you'll find elsewhere on the internet: for one, she's not powered by any sort of ML model, and she likes to speak through multiple media. The 'conversations' you'll have with Au-Li can be intense, cryptic or disorienting at times, but it's not easy to chat when you're suffering from lithium poisoning.

Front-end built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Chatbot powered by an handmade API running on Google Spreadsheets :)

black beyond is an experimental art and design group developing sites of intervention for art workers to define alternate realities for blackness. Initiated in 2020 by jazsalyn, the group seeks to elevate a new era of the black avant garde to disrupt, decolonize and re-indigenize social structures for creative practice and beyond.

I joined the initial black beyond effort early in its conception, and contributed to the development of the black beyond launch website, helped set up the initial front-end, content management system and embedded livestream/live chat. The activities of black beyond have long since branched off to many different sites, IRL and online. I highly recommend following their work.

List of contributors.
Front-end built with React and p5.js. Serverless back-end powered by Airtable.

I was one of the research assistants for practicum: code, decolonized, a Parsons MFADT course offered by Xin Xin and shawné michaelain holloway during Spring 2021. As part of my assistantship, I built the course website, with jazsalyn providing the design.

Despite limited time and resources, we needed to create a space apart from the usual academic platforms available to us for remote course work during the pandemic. Useful as they may be, 'going to class' through these platforms felt exhausting and demotivating for everyone involved. For me, these platforms could be surprisingly esoteric, and they generally made little to no effort to make the different classes hosted on them feel distinct. We instead built a space that would genuinely belong to the course: evolve along with its needs and provide a sense of continuity across future iterations of the class.

Front-end built with React. Serverless back-end powered by Google Firebase (realtime database + authentication).

Captious Memes is a prototype web installation that I designed for my master's thesis. It is a freeform research space to analyze the myriad cultural connections between individual internet memes, centered around a collection of memes that all center around similar meme formats and the social behavior of “derisively comparing two things”, collected out of hundreds of online communities.

The thesis itself was an artistic research process into the study of internet memes as cultural artifacts, incited by a meta analysis of the field of meme studies. My work aimed to find new research methods for meme culture, all the while highlighting the contradictions persistent in the field: the studies are qualitative, and time and location specific— even when memes are many, and become relevant and irrelevant for different people in different places and times. On the other hand, the quantitative perspective on memetic communication is dominated by the financial interests of online platforms, where it largely takes place. In-between these two practices, I sought to create my own, and developed a series of research tools to collect and analyze memes, coming to this point before the semester ended.

Front-end built with React. Additional research tools developed with Node.js and Python.

I was part of the organizing committee for Telepresence, the yearly exhibition of MFA Design and Technology first year students' work. Traditionally an in-person event and a major networking moment in DT students' careers, our class had the then brand-new challenge of reconstructing the experience in the context of pandemic quarantine and remote learning. We transformed the event for that year into a three day virtual celebration of our year with guest artists speaking, discussion panels and code/art/design workshops.

I led the development team for the effort, taking on responsibilities such as selecting and setting up the tech stack for the website; collaborating with the design team in matters of UI implementation and feasibility; building crucial user flows such as student work submission and event registration from the ground up; and of course, helping build the site itself.

List of contributors.
Front-end built with React. Serverless back-end powered by Prismic.

In 2017, I joined a group of students from the social sciences and humanities faculty in Koc University to organize the Undergraduate Humanities Symposium (UHS), one of the few undergraduate-level academic events available at the time in Istanbul.

In 2018, the second and last installment of the symposium, subtitled Unrest, was held in the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations and featured Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen as the keynote speaker. I was the creative director and lead designer of the endeavor, and the promo/signup page for the symposium was the first website I ever built. Looking back, it was a good first effort with well produced visual assets and a miraculously functional form-to-email submission flow composed of glued together AJAX snippets.

List of contributors.
Front-end built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.