When the international public art community gathers in Washington, D.C., for CODAsummit: The Intersection of Art, Technology and Place this September, the opening keynote will be delivered by one of the field’s most compelling voices: Ferdi Alıcı, Founder and Director of Ouchhh Studio.
For more than a decade, Ouchhh has been at the forefront of merging art, science, and technology. Headquartered in Istanbul with partnerships in Los Angeles, Barcelona, and Berlin, the studio operates as a multidisciplinary hub where artists, coders, architects, designers, and data scientists collaborate. Their shared ethos is simple yet radical: data as paint, algorithms as brush. The result is a body of work that transforms knowledge into poetic civic experiences.
Ouchhh’s impact is global. The studio has produced more than 75 public art projects on nearly every continent, with installations in cities including Tokyo, Paris, Chicago, Seoul, Dubai, and Singapore. Their work has appeared at leading institutions and festivals such as Ars Electronica, the Mori Art Museum, Atelier des Lumières, and the Singapore ArtScience Museum, and they have collaborated with research organizations including CERN and NASA.
Two recent projects exemplify their reach. Mother Earth, commissioned for the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, translated environmental data into an immersive projection that made the realities of climate change immediate and visceral. Data Cosmos, mapped the real-time interactions of millions of users into a monumental visual score of collective knowledge. Both works demonstrate how Ouchhh reimagines data as a material for public encounter—at once analytical and deeply human.
Alıcı’s keynote will extend these ideas through the metaphor of live music, positioning machine learning and algorithmic design as collaborators that can generate rhythm, variation, and shared experience in civic space. Joining him on stage will be composer and performer Ben Neill, known for the Mutantrumpet—a groundbreaking hybrid electro-acoustic instrument. Together, they will deliver a performance that expands on these ideas through sound and innovation. His presence underscores CODAsummit’s role as the leading forum where art, technology, and place converge.
For practitioners, curators, and commissioners, Alıcı’s work is not only a model of scale and ambition but also a provocation: what does authorship mean in the age of algorithmic creation, and how can public art continue to shape meaning when its forms are drawn from systems we cannot always see?
By opening the Summit with this address, Alıcı sets the stage for three days of dialogue, debate, and exchange—offering a vision of public art that is as rigorous as it is transformative.
CODAsummit takes place September 24–26, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
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