이스탄불 — IDAF 2026

At the invitation of the 6th Istanbul Digital Art Festival (IDAF 2026), we presented Color Shake at the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM). The theme of the festival was “Retell.” The wall of Color Shake does not end with the trace of a single person. One stroke overlaps the one left by the person before. What was drawn first is either erased or carried forward into another story. Through this wall, we witnessed someone’s stroke being reborn as it passed through many hands.

In Istanbul, the strokes carried sound. When visitors shake the spray can and spray, onomatopoeia flows along the path of the stroke, its vowels extending as the stroke grows longer. BOOM becomes BOOOOOM; WHOOSH becomes WHOOOOOSH. Instead of widening the letter-spacing or adding more words to fit the length of a stroke, we simply added vowels one by one. Just as elongated vowels in comics mark a sustained sound, here the vowels accumulate for as long as the gesture endures. Rather than sitting in fixed positions, the letters take the stroke itself as their baseline. A short, sharp stroke leaves a light, playful pop, while a long, sweeping stroke leaves an arc-like, lingering sound. Transcending the threshold of translation, these stretching vowels became the most intuitive universal language, connecting visitors across every background.

Istanbul is a city whose walls are layered with graffiti. Color Shake began with the gesture of graffiti, but what we looked at in this exhibition was less graffiti as a genre than the way color and movement pass between people: adding your color beside one a stranger left, leaving your voice where someone else’s trace remains. Over those five days, through this wall, we were able to become part of the very landscape that shaped the city of Istanbul.