E-culture scene

The digital culture producers are contemporary artists, bloggers, DJs, VJs, advertising agencies, art and design studios, and media production boutiques. Such actors often move between industries due to self-thought skills, interdisciplinary positions, and a lack of human resource in the creative industry. There is rarely a feeling of a digital creative scene, nor of a community of digital artists. Actors in digital art and culture scene in Turkey can be divided in two categories. The first group consists of the users of digital tools, who create new narratives or use them for presentation purposes regardless of the critique of its media context. The second group consists of the users of digital media who comment on the techno-social and techno-political environment. For such artists, software and systems are not tools for reworking data such as a digital photo or digital video, but the writing of the concept in text and code is the core of the artwork. The critique of people working in the digital culture scene particularly involves topics such as censorship, copyright, surveillance, remix, virtualization of body, databases, archiving, fragmented identities, participation culture, network mapping, and online communities. Although there are exceptions of digitally literate unique artists, it is hard to talk about consistent local interactions that would flourish a digital milieu in Turkey. In fact, the majority of such artists lack dedicated time for cultural production. Instead, they create new work besides their main jobs by utilizing their surplus energy and intellect.