olsaydı (Turkish: “if it had been”) takes a short encounter apart into 99 small decisions, from breakfast at home or outside to the green or the blue toothbrush to a kiss in the middle of the street, and lets an optimisation algorithm search their combinations for the one world in which it would have worked out.
The search, in plain words
Imagine looking for the highest point of a landscape in the dark. At first you jump far, even downhill, so you do not get stuck on the first small hill. Over time you become more careful and only take steps that lead upward. That is how the search works here, only not across a path but across 99 moments at once. The curve below the image shows its way: how high it climbed, which peaks it left again, and how far below 1 it stayed.
How to read the image
- Points on the ring, M.01 to M.99: the 99 moments. Each one is a binary decision variable: 0 = as it was, 1 = changed. Light means changed, dim means as it was.
- A world is one assignment of all 99 variables, a candidate solution. The world as it was is the one in which nothing is changed. The search space holds 299 worlds.
- Faint lines: the jumps of the search. Each line connects a moment the search changed to the next moment it changed. Together they become a weave of thought jumps.
- Red figure: the current world. It connects the moments that are changed in this world, in the order in which the search changed them.
- The strands on the right: M.01 to M.99 from top to bottom. Grey is the world as it was, a straight line. Red is the current world: with every changed moment it takes one step to the right, so its distance from the grey line grows with Δ. The faint threads are the worlds tried on the way. Tap a point or a row to read the moment in both versions.
A partly fictional work
The probabilities and the weights of the 99 moments are invented. They were set by the artist, not measured. The method is real: the parametrisation of the moments, the model of decisions that depend on one another, and the algorithm that searches for the world with the highest probability are ordinary tools of engineering. Even with data he set himself, the probability never comes anywhere near 1: the world in which it would have worked out could not even be invented.
What it is about
The work shows the futility of a mind that takes a situation apart into ever smaller details, runs through the possible combinations again and again, jumps from one thought to the next, and arrives at the same result every time. The mind needs order to process what it has lived through. Turning 99 screws in an encounter this short, to force a different outcome, is one example of it.
It is the process of an obsessed mind trying to create order in its world with the means at hand: engineering, optimisation, the parametrisation of the most banal decisions and of unlucky facts that can end up having an outsized impact on a life. At the end, the search returns to the world as it was.
Why 99
In Islamic tradition, God is called by ninety-nine beautiful names, al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā. The tespih, the string of prayer beads, has 99 beads. With each bead a name is spoken and counted. This repetition, dhikr, is meant to quiet the mind and bring it into the presence of what it remembers. A tradition holds that beyond the ninety-nine, a hundredth name remains hidden.
olsaydı borrows this count. Its 99 moments pass through the search like beads through the fingers. But where the tespih counts toward stillness, the search counts toward control. The hundredth stays hidden; here, too, what is searched for is not among the 99.
Study for The Translation Device
olsaydı is Attempt 03.4 in Series I, a study for the thermal printer of The Translation Device. In the installation, a printer writes observations of intimate moments onto endless paper, and steel rollers render them illegible again. The 99 moments and the worlds the search runs through are material for that paper: written down, run through again and again, erased.