BIOGRAPHY

Aras Ozgun is a media studies and sociology scholar, and a media artist living and working in New York City. He is currently teaching media theory and digital media related courses as a Part-Time Assistant Professor at the graduate Media Studies Department of The New School University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Communications at the University of Sharjah.

Aras has been interested in experimental media production and media theory since his undergraduate education in Political Science at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. After completing his B.A. in 1994, he earned his M.S. degree from METU in Sociology with a thesis on the theory of televisual communication. He moved to New York in 1998 to pursue a second masters degree at the Media Studies Department of the New School University, which offered him the chance to combine his two main fields of interest: media theory and practical video/filmmaking. He earned his M.A. in 2001, with a thesis on Deleuzean theory of electronic visual media. He then continued to pursue a Ph.D. in the Media Studies program of the New School for Social Research's Sociology Department, and completed his Ph.D. dissertation, The Political Economy of Contemporary Cultural and Artistic Production: A Comparative Study of New York, Berlin and Vienna  in January 2011.

In addition to his academic work, he has been producing various artistic, documentary, experimental, and educational media projects for more than fifteen years. He has directed and produced experimental and documentary videos that were screened at various film festivals and artistic events, and he has collaborated with other artists and scholars for a number of international productions and performances. His four-channel video installation won the Best of Show  award in the annual Mixed Messages show of the New School University in 1998. He received the Media Studies Departmental Scholarship in 1999-2000. Between 1999 and 2002, he designed and produced the web publication of this department, Immediacy, and worked on the editorial board of this publication. In 2000, he assisted in organizing and producing DeCenter, an international online collaborative education project initiated by the New School. Since 1998, he has been providing consultancy, and designing, directing and producing commissioned media projects and video works for a clientele of cultural and educational institutions, artists, architects, scholars and musicians.

He has also published articles on issues relating to media, popular culture, social theory, politics, and urbanism for various scholarly journals. In Ankara in 1996, he was among the founders of Korotonomedya, a collective of scholars and artists working in social theory and media, which has become known outside of Turkey as an intellectual resource, with more than 600 participating subscribers to its online publications. His interest in collaboration with other scholars and artists led him to found Pyromedia, a cooperative platform for experimental media arts in New York. In order to explore the potentials of digital and interactive media technologies towards social science practices and social theory, he produced and published a series of interactive interview/lecture DVDs with critical scholars, titled redTV Series. During 2006-2007, in a similar context, he collaborated with a group of European philosophers, artists and scholars for a three-year research/performance/publication project in Vienna, Philosophy on Stage, which was funded by a number of Austrian foundations. In 2007 he designed and facilitated a podcasting site for sharing artistic and experimental audiovisual works, and during 2008 he worked in the organization of two international conferences related to digital media arts and cultural studies in Ankara. He received (with sociologist Amy Holmes) a documentary film grant in 2008 from Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, for a feature-length video documentary on the US overseas military network, for which he finished the post-production in 2009. He received a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the Department of Performing and Visual Arts at American University in Cairo in Spring 2010, and a project grant for the Istanbul 2010 European Cultural Capital Program for organizing Art and Desire, an international seminar series on contemporary cultural theory and art practices.

His recent works include; a multilingual book he co-edited with art historian Angela Harutyunyan, titled The Book of St. Ejneb, which has been commissioned for the Sharjah Biennial 2011 by Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates; Black Sea, a photo series/essay published by ArtMargins Journal of MIT press, and exhibited at Print Margins Exhibition in Beirut in March 2013, and Spaces of Commoning, an international collaborative research project on the making of urban commons, artistic practices, and visions of change, funded by Vienna Science and Technology Fund.