Merve Ünsal "Try" - Osman Koç "Living Istanbul"

 I have chosen Merve Unsal's "Try" and Osman Koç's "Living Istanbul" for this exercise because both of the works has an idea or a content that lies behind the work. Both of the works are not mere technology but they have a say over something. 

 In "Try" Merve Unsal focuses on a macro issue rather then an individual experience. She tries to experiment on some political issues and creates an online, open and unfixed archive on issues like political crimes, human rights, freedom of expression, law, the relationship between the state and the individual etc. When you go to the website you encounter various different tags which respresent the keywords that she has in mind to think with, and they lead you to various different contents. 

 In "Living Istanbul" what Osman Koç focuses is much more individualistic. It stands between the micro and macro by linking the technological mechanism to heart beats of a human. The installation has sound recordings from different parts of Istanbul.  It needs at least one person's heart beat to start "living", heartbeats trigger the sounds of Istanbul. In that hense it poses a humanistic view and value to human experience over the city. It binds human experience and the characteristics that a city has. 

 Osman Koç we can see the new media as a technology producing a mechanism for the art work, in Merve Unsal's work we see a different use of a more common technology in the light of a different idea. Both of them has a content and an underlying idea behing their work. However while Merve Unsal was pointing attention to a political issue with a macro level an analysis, Osman Koç introduces a work which emhasizes the human experience and human existance for a city or a mechanism to work. In that sense they're posing attention to different sides of the coin by both placing a social content from human life behind their work.