Gökçen Erkılıç

Design Critic in UPD

Gökçen Erkılıç is a data artist, architect, urbanist, educator, and founder of Coastliner Lab (CLLab), a transdisciplinary research and design initiative exploring planetary intelligence, hydro-commons, and collective sensing through water.

Working at the intersection of embodied publics and feminist technoscience, she develops reparative technologies for water, society, and ecologies. Her work combines ancient and contemporary applications of geospatial analysis, data science, critical cartography, immersive design, sound studies, fabrication, and community-based design processes. She designed and developed Coastline Atlas, her grant-winning project, which became Istanbul’s first community-centered mapping platform for the city’s watery commons.

Gökçen has taught design studios, information design, computational fabrication, and multimedia art at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design. She was a visiting researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is currently affiliated with metaLAB at Harvard.

Her research, writing, and artistic practice have been presented internationally through exhibitions, publications, and public programs including the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Ocean Archive, Sharjah Biennial, Arts Letters & Numbers, Materia Arquitectura, SALT Research, Arter, Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts, Pera Museum, Manifold Press, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.