Irem Bugdayci

Irem is a London-based artist whose interactive installations and moving image works explore intelligence across biological and artificial systems. By creating encounters with machines and drawing on multi-species evolutionary history, her work opens up new ways of being with the non-human minds that have always surrounded us, and those now rapidly emerging.

This inquiry began with Luna, a robotic installation that uses eye tracking to follow the viewer's gaze. When audiences anthropomorphised the machine, forming intimate bonds with what they knew to be artificial, the work exposed the deep frameworks that shape how we perceive, relate, and make meaning, patterns that become visible when reflected back through machines.

Recent work continues this investigation across different cognitive processes and timescales. Priors explores what happens when humans and machines co-perceive, co-sensing and making meaning together in real time. Inference lets people interact with a machine's memory, making visible the processes of recall and association that shape both artificial and biological thought. Cambrian Stream traces intelligence back to its evolutionary origins, creating a simulation that celebrates the diverse manifestations of mind across millions of years and the co-evolutionary processes that shaped them.

Her work has been exhibited at the Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, Istanbul Airport, Scorpios Mykonos (with HOFA Gallery), and Phillips London, among others. She holds an MA specialising in Robotics and Human-Computer Interaction from UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture, where she received the Best Thesis Prize, and a BA with honours in Art History and Architecture from Tufts University. Her research has been published with SIGGRAPH and IEEE ICRA.