Hello fellow Steemians!

My name is Pinar. I’m a sound designer, an installations artist & occasionally a musician. 

I'm also one of those people who have a few too many interests, passions and too little energy-time. I know I'm not alone on this. =) I do not intend to create a separate persona here, so my steemit profile and activities will be consistent with my other social media outposts. It might even be an amalgamation of all my online profiles. For verification purposes let's start with some images. ( photos before edit are here below still.)

EDIT:  Thanks to @kevinwong 's warning here is a proper verification photo taken 2 mins ago.

This is my, uhm... my face.  Or at least what it looks like in most social media profiles. Credits go to my friend Loes Bogers. She thought wearing each other's faces during our first meeting was a good  idea. It kinda got stuck since then.


But for the purposes of this introduction here is a less processes one.  


a last one, me trying to appeal to an audience, again. =)


Ok, let's continue with the introduction.

A Brief Backstory

I am currently based in the Netherlands but I ‘originated’ from Turkey 31 years ago or so. Spent two-thirds of my life in Istanbul, trying to live in tandem with her chaos and feeling a little less at home than I'd like to, in retrospect. A love & hate relationship, most of her longterm partners find themselves in.

Started academic life with mechanical engineering, not really by choice to be honest, and dropped out midway to follow my gut. It was the best decision I made that far in my life, if not the easiest. It gave me a new breath. 

So I did what wanted to do all along and applied for music school, studied composition & music technology at Bilgi University. Surrounded myself with music and live performance. Made great friends, who became great musicians, great artists with strong voices and gentle-hearts, some still fighting the good fight back in Turkey.

As for me, halfway during my studies, life took yet another turn and I found myself an exchange student in Utrecht School of the Arts, aka HKU, in the Netherlands. That was eight years ago. During my years at HKU my focus shifted towards sound art and interactive sound design. 'Experimental anything' came to foreground. I was in a candy shop! The longer I got exposed to the creative scene, in and out of school, the more infatuated I became with expressive possibilities where technology & design & arts & sciences met. 

So instead of going back to where my roots once were, I stayed below water level, finished my studies, collected a few degrees, worked on various projects, some artistic, some commercial, got involved with various cultural organisations such as Steim: Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, V2_ Institute for Unstable Media, the Patchingzone. I met some amazing people along the way as well, as mentors or as friends. It wasn’t always a smooth ride, building a new life for myself in NL. In fact it was very humbling & lonely at times, but I did manage to find my tribe eventually.

These days, aside from working as a sound designer at a major game development company, I strive to stay active as part of Soundlings. A collective/platform I started few years ago together with other creative friends, who use ‘sound/ear’ in their work as main ingredient. It essentially aims to function as an international network focused on collaboration.

Our activities as Soundlings, along with my own projects & interests, will generate most of what I’ll be sharing here with you in the days ahead. I might squeeze in a few very personal posts here and there too, depending on my comfort level later on. I do hope you'll stay with me as I learn the ropes and become part of this newborn community.

Which brings me to…

Why am I here now?

My motivation to be part of this socio-economic experiment (steemit), and my wish for it to succeed, lies mostly in the possibility of it helping us find or concept an alternative means of financial support system that can boost individual/collective activities in arts & creative sector.

As you probably know, to realize projects, individuals or legal entities need to apply for funding, government or crowd. That's still the expected route to take, followed by finding sponsors.

However government funding for arts has been declining in the last years, with budget cuts being the new normal. At least for NL. Even established organisations are struggling to sustain their decades old working models, let alone new sprouts getting a chance to blossom.

Soundlings, initially did not plan to have a 'center'. It is not a place, but a 'people'. Its team structure is also not 'hierarchical'. It's meant to be a modular system, where collaboration and delegation is an emergent behaviour. But it does have parts that I alone maintain & finance (by choice), such as it's public face; our website. Which in itself is not that costly but considering the fact that years are passing, it is adding a dent to my personal expenses.

To keep things focused and simple, I've set two goals, that I'd like to see myself reaching.
I consider them reasonable. Hopefully this post won't prove me wrong. =D

1. I'm going see if I can steem the costs of Soundlings online presence.
   (Website/hosting services or self hosting.)
2. For my personal growth; I'm going to push myself to be more active with the sharing 'a progress' and engaging in conversations / collaborations as an exercise in trust & confidence. 

In no particular order, the things I hope to bring to this community atm;

As an extension of Soundlings:

• Live Streaming our ongoing thinktank meet-ups.
• Organising live networked performances. (Possibly also with people from this community, assuming I'll meet other artists/musicians.)
• Writing articles covering project progress (when there is an ongoing project) 
• Knowledge exchanges on instrument making, creative coding, rapid prototyping, etc etc…

As and individual:

• Share original music / sound works in progress, excerpts from field recordings.
• Progress blog of personal art/research projects.
• Posts touching topics such as VR, AR, bio-art, art&science, acoustic ecology, soundscapes, architecture and sound, art in public space, sound design, game audio, procedural audio, politics, literature...
• Occasionally a random rant, a cheesy comment or a hobby post; two strong cadidates being scuba-diving & bouldering.

All this being said, I’m quite new to the blockchain, and I'm still trying to figure out the underlying mechanics here at Steemit. First I've heard of it, I started reading frantically and with that rush, came out my initial reaction as skepticism, confusion and quite a bit of frustration which I was rather vocal about. And for better or worse it did get me some ‘attention’. :ouch:

In time, I came to realize, Steemit community is essentially very welcoming, supportive and incredibly adapt at regulating itself. I began to enjoy witnessing how it moves without having to let go of my critical lookout. Not only here at Steemit website but also at slack channels, people I met so far are very responsive, ready to help and easy to connect to. And after spending my first week ‘feeling the waters’, I finally began to feel confident enough to contribute with self-made content, starting with this post.

So 'Thank you!' to each Steemian for doing their best to create a welcoming & open culture here! 

If you have any ideas brewing regarding the topic "arts & funding" I'd love to chat!

You can find me & if you like follow/add me on:
Facebook
Soundcloud
Twitter
Personal Website