Research

Embodied Technofeminism

Eda Er’s artistic research asks how bodies, materials, and culturally transmitted forms of knowledge can enter technological systems without being flattened into information. She describes this field of inquiry as embodied technofeminism. The name carries a lineage: cyberfeminism imagined technology freeing the body by making it virtual; technofeminism, after Judy Wajcman, asked how gender and technology shape each other; new-materialist thought treats bodies, matter, and machines as inseparable. This work takes the last step literally and stays with matter.

Where technologies are often imagined as extensions of human control, Er builds systems around listening, instability, reciprocity, resistance, and transformation. The instrument is not simply a device operated by a performer but a relationship between body, material, memory, machine, and environment. Gesture, breath, voice, water, pigment, and surface carry forms of knowledge that are not reducible to notation or data; her research begins from the proposition that these forms of embodied knowledge can themselves generate technological and compositional structures. The question is not only how technology can represent the body. It is how technology might be changed by encountering it.

Feminist Instrument Design

Within this broader practice, Er develops a methodology of feminist instrument design. Instrument design is treated as both a compositional and a political act. Every instrument distributes agency: it determines which gestures become meaningful, which kinds of virtuosity are rewarded, how performer and system interact, and which forms of knowledge can become audible. Augmented instruments become sites of feminist practice: rather than increasing control, precision, or efficiency, they may listen, resist, transform, remember, or remain partly unpredictable, and material behaviour participates in musical form.

The approach draws on new media studies, postcolonial thought, embodied knowledge, and the philosophy of technology, and stays grounded in artistic practice. It asks how traditions peripheral to Western concert music can function not as references or decoration but as foundations for new compositional systems, and what new forms of authorship become possible when the instrument itself is built from them.

Methodologically, she develops compositional systems grounded in material process — water, pigment, breath, surface — and translates these into notational frameworks, live electronics, and spatial audio structures. Extended vocal techniques, multichannel diffusion, and real-time computer vision form the technical substrate of her practice, always in service of a deeper inquiry into embodiment, rupture, and cultural transmission.

Fluid Narratives is Eda Er's doctoral artistic research project and the central case study for these questions. It rebuilds Turkish marbling (ebru) as a live augmented instrument: a tray of water, pigment, contact microphones, transducers, and computer vision, with live electronics and multichannel spatialization, through which a single gesture produces sound and image at once. Historically, ebru entered the record largely through male masters and male master-apprentice lineages. Contemporary practice has shifted dramatically: women now constitute a major, and by some accounts dominant, presence in the field. Fluid Narratives begins from this tension between who practices a cultural form, who becomes visible as its authority, and whose ways of knowing enter its history. The project takes it up in three strands: the instrument, in which the physical act of marbling becomes a real-time compositional gesture, pigment dropped into water, combed into form, translated into sound and image simultaneously; a notation of sixteen ebru gestures; and a feminist archive of interviews recorded in 2024 with ten women marblers in Istanbul.

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Fluid Narratives — teaser (3 min)

The first finished work under this research is Instructions for Not Disappearing — a piece for solo soprano, Ebru instrument, live electronics, live video, and movement. The work is structured around a five-section alchemical arc moving from Prima Materia to Gold, using the transformative logic of alchemy as a metaphor for the processes of grief, reclamation, and survival that animate the project's feminist and postcolonial concerns. It was followed in 2026 by The Ceremony of Almost Saying (Conservatoire de Strasbourg) and Echopraxia (GMEM, Marseille); The Daughter of Oceans, for Ensemble éclat, is premiered on 5 October 2026.

Central to the research is the development of an Ebru Notation System — a gestural score language that maps the physical vocabulary of marbling (sixteen gestures, from damlama, dropping, and tarama, combing, to bülbül yuvası, the nightingale’s nest) onto musical parameters, enabling Ebru to function not only as visual art but as a compositional tool with its own internal grammar. This system bridges the intuitive, improvisatory quality of traditional Ebru with the structural demands of contemporary composition and live performance. The project does not use ebru as visual accompaniment to music. Ebru is played: surface tension, pigment density, accumulation, dispersal, and collapse participate directly in musical form.

To perform is to transmute. To compose is to reclaim. To create is to survive.

Dick Higgins introduced the term intermedia in 1966 for work that falls between established media rather than combining them — as distinct from mixed media, where the elements remain separable and each could stand on its own. Fluid Narratives meets that condition literally. A single gesture across the water produces sound and image at the same instant: the comb drawn through pigment is the sonic event and the visual event, not one accompanied by the other. There is no audio that could be released without the image, and no image that illustrates an already finished score.

The material sets the grammar. Surface tension, pigment density, and the rate at which a pattern collapses determine what can happen next, so the physical behaviour of the medium and the musical form are not separable decisions. This is also why the project is not documentation of a craft: Ebru is not filmed and set to music, it is played. Instrument, score, and image are one object — which is what makes the work intermedia rather than multimedia.