Object-9

Object-9 is a ten-minute audiovisual work made in 2018 with the visual artist Mercan Şeker and presented at the Sónar D festival in Istanbul that year.

The ninth object is the one that does not fit in the set. Şeker’s visuals are a slow, cold inventory of forms — eight clean geometric solids rotating under a clinical light, and a ninth that keeps changing, refusing to be catalogued — and the music is an inventory of the same kind: eight short electronic studies, each built from a single recorded object (glass, a metal lid, paper, a zip, a key, a bowl, a chair, a breath), stacked into a tidy, almost minimal grid. The ninth object in the sound is a voice, mine, and it does not behave. It enters between the studies, does not keep to the grid, and by the end of the piece has contaminated all eight of them.

It is a piece about classification and the thing that refuses it, made in a country and at a time when being the ninth object was not a comfortable position.