ARK (Ayshe R. Kizilçay, b. 1980, Neuchâtel, Switzerland) is a Geneva-based audiovisual and digital artist and researcher working across art, computation, psychology and the affective and cognitive sciences. At the core of her practice lies a deliberately impossible question : what are the hidden structures that hold existence together?
Her work investigates perception, cognition, affect and meaning through images, sound, language, code, psychological experiments and symbolic systems. Rather than committing to a single epistemology, she explores what different systems of knowledge reveal, conceal or distort. Absolute truth, she suspects, is inaccessible, yet she remains persistently obsessed with finding it.
Moving between empirical and experiential knowledge, rationality and irrationality, her practice draws from cryptography, analytical psychology, chaos theory and occult traditions. Error is central to this investigation : deviation, noise and imperfection are understood not simply as failures to be fixed, but as conditions through which systems transform and something genuinely new can emerge.
Having left formal schooling at 16, ARK encountered the early Internet as an extraordinary infrastructure for autonomous learning and access to knowledge outside traditional institutions. This experience shaped her commitment to open knowledge, digital freedoms, neurodiversity, DIY culture and hacktivism. Code became simultaneously a medium, a symbolic language and a mechanism of access : knowing the codes (literally AND figuratively) means acquiring agency.
She later studied Media Arts and Transmission at HEAD and Information Systems at the CUI before returning to academia to study psychology. Rather than a disciplinary rupture, this move extended questions around perception, representation and subjective experience already embedded in her artistic practice. She now conducts research in affective and cognitive science at the University of Geneva, investigating emotional appraisal in humans and large language models through experimental and computational approaches.
Her work has circulated through museums, festivals, artist-run initiatives and experimental digital-art networks across Europe and Asia. A former member of the Mac Gyver Manifesto and an early participant in the Internet Defense League, ARK has long been involved in DIY, experimental and activist forms of artistic production and knowledge transmission. Alongside her artistic and scientific research, she teaches, supervises student projects and continues to advocate for open knowledge, digital freedoms, neurodiversity and interdisciplinary research.
She likes the number 7 but loves the number 4.
✚ Blind Visions, ScreenSaverGallery, Czech Republic, 2024 ✚ Biennale.NO, Nowhere, Norway, 2024 ✚ One-Off Moving Image Festival, Valencia, Spain & Gol, Norway, 2024 ✚ Gol Days Festival, Near Field Digital Art Biennale Anniversary, Gol, Norway, 2024 ✚ Vorspiel (Transmediale), Berlin, Germany, February 2024 ✚ TIGDA, Taipei City, Taiwan, October 2021 ✚ Cartopodes, Les Topophoniques, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2021 ✚ Expo A3/A6, Espace DémArt, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2021 ✚ One-Off Moving Image Festival, Valencia, Spain & Gol, Norway, 2020 ✚ The Wrong Biennale, Circle/Triangle Gallery, Wrocław, Poland, 2019-2020 ✚ NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2018 ✚ Valencia LEG, Parque de la Cultura (MUVIM), Valencia, Spain, 2018 ✚ NFCW, Wrocław, Poland, 2018 ✚ Near enough, BrowserBased &Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2018 ✚ NFCW, Warsaw, Poland, June 2018 ✚ NFCDAB (Near Field Communication and Digital Art Biennale), Gol, Norway, May 2018 ✚ Kulturnat, Institut Français du Danemark, Copenhagen, Denmark, October 13, 2018 ✚ International Autonomous Biennale (OR Cf), The Research Pavilion, Venice, Italy, 2017 – not credited, as part of a program curated by Bjørn Magnhildøen ✚ Piksel17, Free Arts & Technology Festival (festival for elektronisk kunst og fri teknologi), SKUR 14 (PIKSEL STUDIO), Bergen, Norway, 2017 ✚ Une Vue, Ateliers Ouverts, Meisenthal, France, 2017 ✚ Hotel Europa, Concordia Centre of the Arts (Concordia Arts Center), Enschede, The Netherlands, 2016 ✚ DAF (Deviant Art Festival), La Reliure, Geneva, Switzerland, 2016 ✚ Leap Second Festival, cyberspace, Norway, 2015 ✚ LUFF, Humus Library, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014 - curation of Pornorthopedia exhibition, with the Starlope collective ✚ The else { } statement, solo exhibition part of "from sand grains to rock, and back", Kunstunion, Zürich, Switzerland, 2014 ✚ Monstre Festival, L’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013 – with the Mac Gyver Manifesto collective ✚ Salefriche Festival, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013 ✚ Emergency, Usine Kugler, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013 – hacking gutter press workshop ✚ The Heap (w/ Mac Gyver Manifesto), Live In Your Head Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 2012 ✚ Festival Tous Écrans, Geneva, Switzerland, 2012 – member of the international short film selection committee ✚ Vous êtes ici, MAMCO, Thomas Huber exhibition, Geneva, Switzerland, 2012 – conceptual design, management & actuation of a performative mediation system with Marine Froeliger & Maud Le Monnier ✚ Les Urbaines Festival, Marelle, Raphaël Julliard exhibition, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2011 – theatricalized guided tour, conceptual design, curating & Julliard-related authoring with Marine Froeliger & Maud Le Monnier ✚ Café des Rêves, work selected for the media library, Helmhaus, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011 ✚ Fenêtre sur Lac, Live Art Club, Nuit des Bains, Geneva, Switzerland, 2011 ✚ GNOK GNIK, Agent Double Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 2010 ✚ Electric Rendez-Vous, Plug In – New Media Institution, Basel, Switzerland, 2009