Memo Akten

Memo Akten was born in Istanbul, Turkey. He studied civil engineering at Boğaziçi University before moving to London, where he earned a Master’s degree in computer science from University College London. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, focusing on creative uses of artificial intelligence and meaningful human control over deep neural networks. Early in his creative life, Memo played in punk and metal bands and later worked in visual effects and commercial motion graphics. During that time, he also started making interactive installations and audiovisual experiments, building his technical skills alongside creative exploration. He currently teaches and researches as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego.

Akten’s work explores the relationships between technology, nature, consciousness, and culture. He draws from disciplines like physics, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality to investigate how intelligence shows up in both natural systems and machines. His practice centers on writing code and creating algorithmic systems that generate moving images, sound, immersive installations, and performances. These systems often simulate natural processes or dramatize data to reveal unseen forces shaping the world. He is interested in how human control and automation coexist, and how new technologies change the way we create and experience the world. Ritual and spirituality, especially how they evolve in a digital age, are key themes, questioning how new meanings and shared experiences form in a tech-driven society. His work invites reflection on reality, perception, and the boundaries between the biological and synthetic.

An interest in systems of belief, perception, and cognition runs throughout his work. In Deep Meditations, a neural network trained on thousands of images tied to science, nature, religion, and philosophy generates a continuous, dreamlike reflection on life, death, and the universe. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace continues this exploration, visualizing the rituals of a speculative techno-spiritual future shaped by machine intelligence. Earlier works like Forms use motion capture and physics simulations to explore the poetics of movement, while projects such as Sight Machine and Clouds reflect a sustained engagement with real-time data, custom software, and collaborations that push the technical and conceptual boundaries of computer vision. Across these and other projects, the work returns to the same fundamental concerns: how meaning is constructed, how perception is shaped, and how technology alters the way we see ourselves and the world around us.

Akten’’s work has been shown at major institutions and festivals including the Venice Biennale, Barbican Centre, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Royal Opera House, and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He has collaborated with choreographer Alexander Whitley on the dance performance Overflow, with Refik Anadol and Robert M. Thomas on large-scale immersive installations, and with writer and curator Katie Peyton Hofstadter on research-driven projects. His film Forms, made with Mick Grierson, won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. His work is held in private and institutional collections, and in 2021, he was part of the inaugural Vertical Crypto Art Residency.