“This is both a visual and ontological inquiry into how forms and meanings metamorphose across media, materials, and systems of thought, while simultaneously addressing a core question:
How can we preserve originality when incorporating AI into creative design processes? “

Duygu Atalay Onur

This project explores how forms, meanings, and materials metamorphose across different strata; craft, code, and cloth, drawing from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari unfolding across nine AI-assisted visuals works. Inspired by their concept of strata as layered systems of matter and meaning, the work investigates how traditional hand-made techniques can engage with machine intelligence to produce new creative possibilities.

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ACROSS STRATA

_______________________________ ARTWORKS_______________________________

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Strata 1 – Aqua Fold

Strata 6 – Aerial Fold

Strata 5 – Wrapped in Becoming

Strata 7– Sediment Bloom

Strata 8 – Spinal Bloom

Strata 4 – Whirl of Becoming

Strata 9 – Where Layers Meet

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_______________________________ PROCESS_______________________________

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By merging the embodied, tactile nature of ebru with the algorithmic processes of AI image generation, this project performs a recursive loop of becoming: from hand to code, from code to cloth, from cloth back to image. Each phase represents not only a shift in medium but also a shift in being, what Deleuze describes as metamorphosis, a continual process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

The practical method unfolds through several structured steps:

Emerging From Water’s Surface, Ebru, 50 x 70 cm

First, the artist created an original artwork using “ebru”, the traditional Turkish art of paper marbling, in which coloured pigments are delicately floated on the surface of water thickened with a natural gum and then shaped into patterns and transferred onto paper by gently laying it on the water’s surface, creating a unique, unrepeatable print. This artwork was scanned and uploaded into the Leonardo AI Image Generator, accompanied by carefully constructed text prompts focused on form, texture, and cultural references.

Duygu Atalay Onur, Creating ebru patterns

The artist compared two approaches: generating fashion visuals with and without uploading the ebru image. The results showed that incorporating the ebru artwork produced far richer, more experimental, and avant-garde fashion designs. Inspired by these AI-generated visuals, the artist created six unique garments using draping techniques on mannequins. The materials included ebru-printed silk, muaré fabric, and regionally sourced Ödemiş silk and linen.

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After completing the garments, the artist digitally recombined them with AI-generated images once again, creating a final visual layer where the physical and the algorithmic merge into a single composition. Through this layered process, the project proposes a dynamic ecology of becoming, not fixed identities, but shifting thresholds of potential between human craft and machine logic.

Duygu Atalay Onur

Through her work, she aims to highlight the value of local textile traditions while exploring new methods of production that empower women and support sustainable systems. She is especially interested in the layered relationship between hand-made techniques and machine-generated processes, viewing fashion as a dynamic ecosystem where tradition and innovation can coexist.

At the core of her practice is a fascination with metamorphosis: the transformation of forms, meanings, and materials across different contexts: craft becoming code, fabric becoming form, tradition becoming future.

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CURATORIAL

Transducing Strata

This is a solo exhibition, but not in the conventional sense. The artist does not claim ownership over the work as object, but over her own emergent agency — a force that intends, influences, interacts. A subject who becomes with, and through, the strata she traverses.

Strata are modes of articulation — of matter, of gesture, of structure, of organism, of meaning. Each stratum repeats, folds, alters — living, perhaps, as marble veins grow like rhizomes under imperceptible forces, or as viruses dream, mutating across thresholds of sense and form.
This work traverses these strata — not by inscribing each new surface with the memory of the last, but by allowing each to emerge as a transduction of the previous: a shift in logic, a mutation of relation, a becoming.

It begins with the aqueous practice of ebru, where the artist’s hand joins with the fluid surface. Ebru’s logic is not expressive but compositional of flow, timing, process. The hand moves through the medium. The hand’s movement, the gesture, is transduced into the ink’s behaviour: ink, carrying the imminence of the gesture, falls and floats on water, remembering, responding, resisting… The water mediates delaying, diffusing, disrupting. The ink’s movement on the surface of water is neither fully controllable nor wholly aleatory. Intention is transduced into fluid behaviour.

The floating composition is then inscribed onto paper. This is no reproduction; it is a phase-shift from one material logic to another. A transduction of movement into fixity, of flow into trace — a subtle transubstantiation, where gesture becomes form, and time becomes surface.

The trace on paper is scanned and enters the machine as residue, pigment pixelated into code. The gesture does not disappear; it is subsumed, encoded, dispersed into a new substrate. The machine does not interpret, it maps. The digital surface becomes a carrier of latent relations — frequency, contrast, edge — a synaesthetic field ready to be re-composed. The ink’s behaviour is transduced this time into the mathematical logic of pixels. The machine does not translate, it does not interpret. It maps, parses, encodes. The hand’s gesture, now digitised, becomes compositional pattern. The movement of ink across water becomes a field of spatial statistics, felt now as contrast, rhythm, signal sensorially shifting across strata.

From here, the Code constructs new surfaces. It does not mimic ebru, nor illustrate it. It composes from latent relations: resonance, distortion, affinity. A mutation emerges — shaped by the trace of ebru, the prompt of the artist, and the architecture of the AI model. This mutation is not unlike the ink’s behaviour: a becoming shaped by resistance and response, conditioned but never fixed. The AI’s outputs are neither predictable nor random, but situated in the emergent play of material trace and computational latency.

The artist does not relinquish authorship, but repositions it. Her prompt conditions the machine, shaping a field of potential forms. She selects, resists, folds. She transduces the AI’s outputs into cloth — translating digital surfaces back into the organic logic of weight, drape, cut, wear. Garments emerge, not as representations, but as material strata with their own internal structure.

These garments are photographed, remixed, and re-enter the machine. Pixel becomes code, becomes mutation again. The process spirals — not a loop of repetition, but a differential movement of strata unfolding one another. Form begets form. Each phase enacts a transduction — gestural, structural, material. Gesture becomes behaviour, behaviour becomes image, image becomes mutation, mutation becomes cloth, cloth becomes image.

Authorship here is transversal. The Ebru artist, the fashion designer, prompt artist, the code’s developer, the water, the glitch, the weather — all contribute to a field of emergence. No gesture stands alone. The artist is not a sovereign will but a node in an ecology of practice.

Isil Ezgi Celik, Co-founder capitArtX