Introduction to the exhibition
P61 Gallery presents What Time Is [Your] Color? - Bosphorus: A Field of Becoming, a new exhibition by Faruk Bil and computational artist Calin Segal, opening 5 June 2026 and on view through September. The exhibition activates both floors of the gallery at Potsdamer Straße 61 in four phases. RAUM A–B: THE ARCHIVE Nearly 10,000 surface photographs of the Bosphorus, all taken from the same vantage point: Latitude 41.0708, Longitude 29.0564 - Faruk Bil’s lifelong home on the shore. But the archive carried a limit: one gaze, one life. To move beyond it, the work had to open. RAUM C: THE ENCOUNTER Visitors choose a photograph from the archive and bring it into the present encounter. They select colours that have never existed before, and these colours begin generating a new image of the Bosphorus. The viewer becomes both the agent and the subject of an ever-changing field of becoming. In collaboration with Calin Segal, the project entered its generative phase. Segal built a system that allows every visitor to look through Bil’s window and contribute to the unfolding of the work. Through an interface, viewers engage with the archival material; the system captures their selections, extracts their chromatic field, and generates - within seconds - a new image of the Bosphorus. No moment is static. No colour is repeated. Each encounter is encoded by the precise date and time of the viewer’s presence. RAUM D: THE PASSAGE Viewers witness how one image becomes another. The work never settles into a fixed state. One moment feeds the next. RAUM E: THE FLOW OF FUTURES A new archive is continuously built through the encounters of visitors. The experience reveals a synthetic future constructing itself upon its own past. Nothing remains stable. Everything is in flux. The experience marks a decisive detachment both from preset narratives of normative encounters and from the digital looping that reduces viewing to limited data cycles. Its life-like architecture rejects sameness and values multiplicity, divergence, and emergence in revealing the future. Bil’s proposition - that art and the human journey are bound together, and that art can generate new possibilities for the human condition only when emancipated from imposed forms of seeing - becomes a living experience here. The work resonates with a long artistic lineage: post-impressionists searching for truth in perception, romantics pursuing the sublime in lived experience, Baudelaire breaking from inherited codes to reveal modernity in the fleeting moment. Yet it moves beyond them. Authorship here is not held by the artist. It is distributed, communal, and continuous. As long as one presence remains in the space, the work does not end.
The artists
Faruk Bil, PhD.
Faruk Bil’s existential question formed around time: can one truly exist while merely functioning as a representative of the preordained? An unlikely childhood friendship with a young economics professor transformed Bosphorus afternoons into improvised Collège de France lectures on Sartre, labour value, behaviour, modernity, and the systems organizing human life.
Galatasaray high school gave him the lenses of critical reading and an axis of liberty while in Economics (BA, MA 1983) he found the language of the analytical. 25 years in advertising, deepened Bil’s his observations on manufactured sameness. semiotics Self-taught in art, he received his PhD in Fine Arts in 2020 while teaching semiotics at Yeditepe University. His dissertation, Utility of Encounter With Art in the Public Sphere, argued that the more existence is enclosed by fixed narratives, the less space remains for liberty and human dignity.
Calin Segal
Calin Segal studied architecture in Paris and began his career designing humanitarian projects before turning toward computational media. Across these experiences runs a constant thread: a persistent, almost childlike curiosity about how things work, and what happens when complex systems are taken apart and reassembled in unfamiliar ways.
Calin’s practice approaches research, investigation, and analysis as creative acts. He studies ecological processes, algorithmic logics, and social systems in order to understand how they behave when reduced, abstracted, and set in motion. His works emerge from tracing interactions, feedback, and accumulation, where outcomes are shaped less by intention than and more by the underlying relation.
Calin creates installations and sculptures built from computational models that function as metaphorical, mathematical approximations of larger systems. These environments act as computational anecdotes: deliberately simplified worlds where systemic dynamics can unfold, become perceptible, and be experienced rather than explained.
Exhibitions are conceived as temporary inquiry spaces. Viewers are invited to navigate these constructed systems, encountering partial truths, instability, and emergent behavior. Rather than offering conclusions, the work cultivates attention and curiosity, allowing understanding to develop through interaction over time.
Though still early in his career, Calin has developed a series of landmark works that articulate his approach, including Digital Mental Transposition for Nuit Blanche Paris (2018), Path to Heaven at the Enric Miralles Foundation (2019), Planet LEV for the LEV Festival in Matadero (2020), Binary Deconstruction at Geneva Mapping Festival (2022), Tales from the Receding Edge at the G7 Forum in Bologna (2023), and Whispers at Ars Electronica (2025).
He has also been invited to prestigious international research residencies, among them V2_ in Rotterdam, S+T+ARTS VOJEXT, CYENS Centre of Excellence in Cyprus, S+T+ARTS GRIN at CINECA in Italy, European Digital Deal at Zaragoza City of Knowledge, Diriyah Art Futures in Saudi Arabia, and Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Medialab-Matadero Madrid, JRC SciArt residency 2026.
Why P61, why now.
P61 Gallery and What Time Is [Your] Color? meet at a rare junction where a museum-quality digital environment and a conceptually rooted experimentalart practice converge into an interactive and generative form of revelatory encounter. The gallery's identity as a Berlin space dedicated to digital and time-based art, its 50+ 4K displays and HD LED architecture, and its location on thePotsdamer Straße - once at the dividing line of two systems now unites Berlin audience for an emancipatory experiece in enconter with art. P61 enables theecology of a synthetic future in time and space, building upon the experienceof the Bosphorus to unfold into a living and continuously transformingencounter with Berlin’s contemporary art audience.
Faruk Bil and Calin Segal approach technology not as spectacle, but as a medium of emancipation - a detachment from preordained forms of viewing, where encounter itself becomes a living field of becoming.
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