Contents
Each line resolves to where the work actually lives.
Books
novels & collections-
VERA / ВІРАNovel
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
Не я — not I
A novel. A young woman runs through Manhattan at first light, a key in her hand she doesn’t remember picking up — and inherits the itinerary her grandmother charted decades before her birth: six cities, two alphabets, a famine the body still keeps account of.
Also in Turkish, an equal edition: VERA — Turkish edition (opens in a new tab).
-
Forty-Nine Ways to LeaveStory collection
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
A story collection, written across the Four Masters method. Forty-nine ways a person can leave — and forty-nine ways the leaving registers in the body.
Also in Turkish, an equal edition: Ayrılmanın Kırk Dokuz Yolu — Turkish edition (opens in a new tab).
-
Letters of ArrivalStory collection
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The companion to Forty-Nine Ways: where that collection is about leaving, this one is about coming to. Forty-five letters from the moment of arrival — before the place becomes familiar, when the eyes are still calibrating.
Also in Turkish, an equal edition: Varış Mektupları — Turkish edition (opens in a new tab).
-
Visiting HoursStory collection
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
Sixty linked stories unfold in a city where the dead remain available by licence and care is measured in paid words. Across homes, clinics, ferries and a hill beyond the offices, love and grief persist inside the systems meant to manage them.
Turkish edition: Ziyaret Saatleri — Turkish edition (opens in a new tab).
-
City Guide to Visiting HoursVisual companion
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
A visual companion to Visiting Hours. One hundred and eighty diagrams trace the city’s relationships, exchanges and contradictions, to be read alongside or after the stories.
Turkish edition: Şehir Rehberi: Ziyaret Saatleri — Turkish edition (opens in a new tab).
-
Utopia Without UsNovella
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
A short novel co-authored as a thought experiment: what does utopia look like once the human is removed from the frame?
-
Olmayacak Şeyler KitabıShort stories
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
Short stories, 2015–2020 — ordinary rooms hiding the extraordinary: confused aliens, explorers chasing what won’t be found, people in the wrong rooms.
Essays & Articles
argument, not narrative-
The Unbonded AgeEssay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
An essay: a ten-layer systemic diagnosis of why pair-bonding is harder now than it was — and what each layer does to the others.
-
The Narcissistic FlameEssay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
An essay on how the attractor of contemporary narcissism distorts the gravitational field around it.
-
We ChooseEssay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
An essay. The structures don’t choose for you: the small, daily choices through which a life is, in fact, chosen.
-
The Model and the MarbleEssay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
An essay on where knowledge actually comes from when it is made with a machine — the trained model, or the prompts, evidence, and judgment built around it. Five frontier systems answer the question; two then carve the answers into rival essays.
Poetry
Çiziktirmeler-
Çiziktirmeler: Birinci KitapPoetry
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
Poetry, or writing that resembles it — the first volume, 1999–2003, with photographs by the author.
-
Çiziktirmeler: İkinci KitapPoetry
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The second volume — three years of accumulation, 2004–2006.
-
Çiziktirmeler: Üçüncü KitapPoetry
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The third volume — thirteen years of accumulation, 2007–2020.
Visual Essays
image-forward-
In the Garden: The Other Side of the FloraPhoto essay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
A photo essay. Surreal selective-focus photographs from a Büyükada garden, summer 2020 — processed for textural essence rather than botanical record.
-
Mardin 2018: Beyond the Veil of PerceptionPhoto essay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
A photo essay on Mardin — limestone, light, and the moment in looking where surface gives way.
-
Exposures: AnimaVisual essay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The first Exposures volume — sixty images that move, page by page, from gray toward color, from dead matter toward something with breath in it. Masks and carved forms give way to saturation; each carries a name from a private, syncretic mythology.
-
Exposures: CarlVisual essay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The second Exposures volume — sixty defaced faces after Ginsberg’s Howl, moving through four movements: the best minds, Moloch, Rockland, the holy. The made-ness is the subject.
-
Exposures: LandVisual essay
Google Books
(opens in a new tab)
The third Exposures volume — sixty monochrome landscapes, some of them real places, some assembled out of fog and salt and the wish for a place. The sequence moves from open land through water and root to land made flesh.
Websites
living on the web-
Visiting HoursCompanion website to the story collection
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to VISITING HOURS — sixty linked stories in one unnamed city, in English and Turkish, with the City Guide of a hundred and eighty diagrams.
-
VERACompanion website to the novel
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to the novel VERA.
-
Forty-Nine Ways to LeaveCompanion website to the book
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to Forty-Nine Ways to Leave story collection.
-
Letters of ArrivalCompanion website to the book
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to Letters of Arrival story collection.
-
Utopia Without UsCompanion website to the novella
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to the futuristic novella Utopia Without Us.
-
Olmayacak Şeyler KitabıCompanion website to the story collection
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to the Turkish story collection — its short stories interleaved with the author’s photographs.
-
ÇiziktirmelerCompanion website to the poetry trilogy
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
The companion site to the three Çiziktirmeler volumes, 1999–2020 — writings that resemble poems, set against the author’s black-and-white photographs.
-
The Shifting Weight of NationsLiving data essay
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A living data essay on how economic weight shifts between nations — revised as the numbers move.
-
ExposuresVisual essays from AI art
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Visual essays drawn from an archive of AI and hybrid images.
-
ContoursPhilosophical questionnaire
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A transparent, browser-only questionnaire that compares a pattern of answers with curated philosophical reference currents — an interpretive resemblance, not a verdict.
-
Meridian EnglishDaily news desk
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A daily desk of world wires, Turkish wires, and X.
Photographs & Digital Art
made on screen & on chain-
Saatchi Art
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Where a place stops being a place and becomes a thing seen.
-
hulkiokantabak.com
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Photographer’s first website.
-
Pixabay
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Free for any use.
-
Unsplash
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Free for any use.
-
NO FIXED WALL
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Selected and complete digital works.
-
OpenSea
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Digital art he’s made since 2020, minted onchain — gen-art collaborations, photographic editions, and conceptual single drops, organized into named series.
The series — each opens its own collection
- PSYCHOSIS and DELUSIONS
- Lonely Hearts of the City
- Memorial for Death
- Propaganda by HoT
- Delusional Photographs
- Infinite Lines
- Async Art Works
- Vojago (Journey)
- KnownOrigin Works
- MakersPlace Works
Earlier pieces were minted on KnownOrigin, Foundation, Async Art, and MakersPlace — platforms since wound down. The works remain on-chain; OpenSea is the surviving display layer.
Songs & Voice
lyric & spoken- Bugün Spotify (opens in a new tab)
- Today Spotify (opens in a new tab)
- Sen Yoksun Suno (opens in a new tab)
- Sessizsin ama Gözlerin Konuşuyor Suno (opens in a new tab)
- On The Balcony Suno (opens in a new tab)
- What I Love the Most Suno (opens in a new tab)
-
Çiziktirmeler — podcast
Spotify
(opens in a new tab)
The Çiziktirmeler volumes, read aloud by the author.
Games
playable in a browser-
Bosphorus Ferry
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A text adventure across the ferries of İstanbul — sixteen characters, eight endings.
-
Bounce
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A one-thumb arcade game. Thread rings, place surfaces, chase your streak.
-
Heart Quest
Play
(opens in a new tab)
Twelve characters with memory. The game reads your tone and remembers it.
-
Trace
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A narrative exploration set in East London. You notice what others can’t.
-
The Bridge Game
Play
(opens in a new tab)
Contract bridge in the browser — bid the auction, then play the hand out, trick by trick.
-
Crazy
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A character-driven browser game that builds a new figure each time you open it — one that says hello, then listens a little too well. A calmer mode is always within reach.
-
Wit
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A kind, bilingual quiz you make and share — write your own set of questions, hand someone the exact challenge, or start together on a single shared countdown. Questions worth sharing.
-
Agora
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A kind bilingual quiz for two — design a game, share one link, and you both play the exact same questions, each in your own language. Score gold by difficulty, climb the craft-titles: a pocket agora where two friends meet over the same questions.
-
Lego the Dog
Play
(opens in a new tab)
A sixty-second game of fetch in a sunny park — a curly-haired girl throws, Lego leaps, and every catch stacks on his nose. One thumb, nothing to read, and every round ends happily.
Ongoing Writing
the running column-
Substack
Read
(opens in a new tab)
Essays on systems, technology, finance, life and people.
-
The Medium
Read
(opens in a new tab)
Essays on systems, technology, finance, life and people.
Experimental Concepts
ideas made playable-
KALÓNInteractive exhibit
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Five playable instruments of beauty — proportion, harmony, symmetry, light, and the grace of imperfection — that gather into a bloom of your own. An experiment built from a single brief: beauty is not one thing.
-
ROLLOInteractive game
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A small game about courage that never says the word — no score, no death, no ending, only crossings, each a little deeper than the last. Step from stone to stone through doubt and fog, or hold to stay on purpose. After the psychologist Rollo May.
-
LEXISInteractive language
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
An invented language of four marks — dot, bar, ring, wave — and three ways to join them; arrange a line and a small field answers at once with the state it means. No goal, no score, nothing hidden to unlock — only a grammar to find by curiosity. After Humboldt’s infinite use of finite means.
-
POTHOSInteractive garden
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A garden of appointments. Sow a seed with one held gesture and it tells you, precisely, when it will open — tomorrow, in a week, in a season — and nothing you do can hurry it; the garden only notes whether you were there when it did. No streaks, no scores, nothing to rush. Built from a single word: desire — pothos, the longing for what is absent.
Projects
long-running inquiries-
A Systems Theory for TodayLiving, forkable theory
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A living, forkable attempt to build a systems theory adequate to the present — by designed disagreement rather than a single mind: a standing panel of thinkers, three provisional theories, and seven pressure-tests, open for others to extend or contradict.
-
Uncommon RealityLiving systems-theory project
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
In the absence of a common one — a public systems-theory project built on Repair-Lag Systems Theory: the diagnosis that modern systems undo the conditions they depend on faster than they repair them, across climate, shared reality, care, and institutions. A living work, pressure-tested by adversarial standpoint panels and falsifier guides, offered for revision rather than doctrine.
-
Ulysses ProjectAnalytic research project
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A research project built out of one first cover-to-cover reading of Joyce’s Ulysses — one day, Thursday 16 June 1904, in Dublin. The reading record, three reference documents, an interactive ring of fifty-one characters across the eighteen hours, and a map of Dublin routes and time. Sixteen analytic dimensions are planned in seven kinds; it grows, and most of it is not built yet.
-
Ulysses: First Reader’s CompanionReading companion
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A companion for a first encounter with Joyce’s Ulysses — one difficult book, made navigable. Six routes into the novel: Start, Read (the eighteen episodes), Context (Dublin, 16 June 1904), Explore, Synthesis, and a Library & Method. It marks what is and isn’t finished and grades its evidence, refusing to pretend the uncertainty away.
-
The All-In Cost of an Ounce of GoldInteractive data dashboard
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
An interactive data project on what it actually costs to produce an ounce of gold — the full cost stack from mine to market, a global map of production costs, a 56-year analysis of the gap between price and cost across three cost lenses, and a look at who holds the world’s gold.
-
Gold Cost & Ownership AtlasInteractive data atlas
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
An evidence-graded investor atlas of gold — production costs (all-in sustaining cost), a 55-year history of the gap between price and cost, and the composition of above-ground ownership. Its discipline is that no two data series masquerade as one: annual, quarterly, company-sample and modelled figures are kept distinct. Seven sections, a geographic cost explorer, and a methodology that documents every source.
Third Party Links
-
Collected Works
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Digital artworks collected by C34.
-
Normal Is Elsewhere
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Digital artworks by Mad Monk.
-
Every Body Else
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
Digital artworks by Athena Novo.
-
Digital Art Preservation Archive
Visit
(opens in a new tab)
A preservation archive with viewers for the changing states and layers of Async Art works by three creators.
About Hulki Okan Tabak
Hulki Okan Tabak is based in İstanbul, which is also where he spent years working in finance and strategy — a useful reminder that books and balance sheets are both, in the end, ways of accounting for things. He writes novels, essays, and short fiction; he takes photographs; and he makes the smaller digital things that interest him — short games, art minted onchain, songs, web-essays that keep changing after they are published — with a particular attention to the capabilities, applications and implications of artificial intelligence. He writes to find out what he thinks, and would rather a sentence be a little wrong than a little false, rather a book end honestly than land cleanly.