Kernel Panic
Installation: HD Video Loop, Multi-Channel Slide Projection, Xerox Poster Prints
Various Dimensions / Poster Sizes: A4 & A3 & 70×100CM (Limited Edition)
2019
Kernel Panic is a pop-up exhibition and temporary intervention created for NOKS Art Space in Kadıköy, emerging from the collaborative practice of Cenkhan Aksoy and Burak Dikilitaş. The project borrows its title from a critical security mechanism in operating systems, where the kernel—the core program managing a system’s operations—detects an irreparable internal error. When such an error occurs, the system enters a state of kernel panic, halting all functions to prevent catastrophic failure or data loss. This suspension often stems from an infinite loop: a malfunctioning script that runs endlessly, overwhelming hardware until it becomes incapable of processing further commands.
The installation translates this digital phenomenon into a meditation on contemporary human experience. In an era defined by rapid acceleration—of labor, information, and sensory stimuli—individuals, like systems, develop layered safeguards against overload. Physical, psychological, and emotional “security mechanisms” emerge to mitigate collapse, whether through temporary withdrawal, compartmentalization, or adaptive rituals. Kernel Panic interrogates these parallels, framing the gallery as a speculative site where systemic fragility and resilience intersect.
The artists’ distinct methodologies reflect two facets of the kernel panic moment. Cenkhan Aksoy’s contributions engage with motion as both a generative and destabilizing force. His mixed-media works capture dynamic tension through blurred geometries and kinetic abstraction, evoking the infinite loop’s hypnotic repetition. Traces of gesture—whether brushstrokes, projected light, or suspended forms—suggest movement frozen mid-collapse, as though arrested by an unseen command. These elements destabilize the viewer’s sense of temporal continuity, mirroring the disorientation of a system caught between progress and paralysis.
Burak Dikilitaş’s interventions, by contrast, interrogate spatial conditions through fractured imaging techniques. Architectural elements are manipulated via digital glitches, mirrored surfaces, and recursive projections, transforming the gallery into an unstable interface. Doorways pixelate into abstract grids, walls dissolve into static, and surveillance feeds loop endlessly, their frames misaligned. These distortions expose the invisible frameworks governing spatial perception—thresholds, sightlines, scales—while evoking the hardware overload of a system pushed beyond its operational limits. The result is a liminal environment where boundaries between physical and virtual, function and dysfunction, blur.
Ultimately, Kernel Panic does not diagnose failure but maps its contours. The installation positions collapse as an inevitable byproduct of systems—digital or human—that prioritize perpetual function over sustainable rhythms. Like the infinite loop, it offers no resolution, only a recursive space where crisis and adaptation coexist, each a precondition for the other.
