Hulki Okan Tabak

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).

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).

A short novel co-authored as a thought experiment: what does utopia look like once the human is removed from the frame?

Short stories, 2015–2020 — ordinary rooms hiding the extraordinary: confused aliens, explorers chasing what won’t be found, people in the wrong rooms.

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.

An essay on how the attractor of contemporary narcissism distorts the gravitational field around it.

An essay. The structures don’t choose for you: the small, daily choices through which a life is, in fact, chosen.

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, or writing that resembles it — the first volume, 1999–2003, with photographs by the author.

The second volume — three years of accumulation, 2004–2006.

The third volume — thirteen years of accumulation, 2007–2020.

A photo essay. Surreal selective-focus photographs from a Büyükada garden, summer 2020 — processed for textural essence rather than botanical record.

A photo essay on Mardin — limestone, light, and the moment in looking where surface gives way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The companion site to the novel VERA.

The companion site to Forty-Nine Ways to Leave story collection.

The companion site to Letters of Arrival story collection.

The companion site to the futuristic novella Utopia Without Us.

The companion site to the Turkish story collection — its short stories interleaved with the author’s photographs.

The companion site to the three Çiziktirmeler volumes, 1999–2020 — writings that resemble poems, set against the author’s black-and-white photographs.

A living data essay on how economic weight shifts between nations — revised as the numbers move.

Visual essays drawn from an archive of AI and hybrid images.

A transparent, browser-only questionnaire that compares a pattern of answers with curated philosophical reference currents — an interpretive resemblance, not a verdict.

Where a place stops being a place and becomes a thing seen.

Photographer’s first website.

Free for any use.

Free for any use.

Selected and complete digital works.

Digital art he’s made since 2020, minted onchain — gen-art collaborations, photographic editions, and conceptual single drops, organized into named series.

The Çiziktirmeler volumes, read aloud by the author.

A text adventure across the ferries of İstanbul — sixteen characters, eight endings.

A one-thumb arcade game. Thread rings, place surfaces, chase your streak.

Twelve characters with memory. The game reads your tone and remembers it.

A narrative exploration set in East London. You notice what others can’t.

Contract bridge in the browser — bid the auction, then play the hand out, trick by trick.

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.

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.

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.

Essays on systems, technology, finance, life and people.

Essays on systems, technology, finance, life and people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Digital artworks collected by C34.

Digital artworks by Mad Monk.

Digital artworks by Athena Novo.