Kitap Hakkında

This book began in a room full of screens. In 2025, curating an exhibition, which had countless instances of AI-generated imagery, for a digital art festival in Istanbul, I found myself surrounded by the outputs of systems I had spent years theorising as visual phenomena, and unable to answer a simple question: What are these things made of? Not computationally, but physically. What was mined, refined, assembled, powered, cooled, and eventually discarded so that these images could exist? The question did not come from engineering. It came from standing in a city where the water table is falling, where data centers are being built on contested agricultural land, and where the semiconductors inside every device arrive through supply chains that no local institution controls.

That question became The Material Loop. The book traces artificial intelligence through seven stages of extraction, manufacturing, infrastructure, operation, application, governance, and the return to extraction, not as a metaphor but as a material circuit whose structure, I argue, determines much of what governance can and cannot achieve. Each chapter follows a node in that circuit. The final chapter asks what happens when the circuit closes.

The project has a companion, The Infrastructural Image (2025), which examines how images operate as sites of power in computational systems. This book asks what sustains that power physically: the rocks, the water, the labor, the waste. The two works approach the same problem from different registers; each is designed to stand alone.

Several debts require acknowledgement. The intellectual foundation of this work draws on Kate Crawford, James Bridle, Tung-Hui Hu, and Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, whose writing demonstrated that infrastructure is never merely technical. The methodological commitment to a mixed evidentiary archive, moving between peerreviewed scholarship, policy documents, technical reports, and investigative journalism reflects the object of study: an infrastructure that does not sit neatly within any single disciplinary frame. I am grateful to my colleagues at Yıldız Technical University's Faculty of Art and Design for the institutional conditions that made sustained research possible, and to the students and collaborators whose questions sharpened the argument at every stage. 

A final note on position. This book describes a global system from a specific location. Istanbul sits between the supply chains it maps. It is dependent on minerals it does not extract, chips it does not fabricate, and platforms it does not govern. That position is not neutral, and I do not claim it as such. It is, however, a position from which certain asymmetries become difficult to ignore. The reader will judge whether seeing the loop from its middle proves analytically productive.