Biography

Erkan Cerit was born in Istanbul on 7 August 1971 and lived in the city's Şişli district until 2012. His father, Nihat Cerit, was a film producer.

He first appeared on camera in 1975, as the boy in the boat in Zeki Ökten's Hanzo, and the same year as Erkan in Ülkü Erakalın's Bitirimler Sınıfı. These were followed by Mehmet Dinler's Perişan (1976) and Kunt Tulgar's İnsanlık Uğruna (1981). At about ten, on film sets, he learned how optical illusions are made with mirrors.

His first computer, a Commodore 64, arrived when he was twelve, a year after the machine's launch; it was a gift from an Italian business associate of his father. The manuals were in Italian, and he learned to program with a dictionary at his side.

In 1984, at thirteen, he joined Teleteknik, Commodore's representative in Turkey, where he taught programming to adults. In 1986 he worked as a freelance programmer for Goldstar Turkey. In 1988 he joined Apple Turkey, where he developed a structural engineering program, "Biro Yöntemiyle Statik Betonarme Hesabı" (static reinforced-concrete calculation by the Biro method). In the same period he trained in desktop publishing, a course that covered both the fundamentals of art and the software of the time.

From 1991 he moved into industrial computing: textile pattern design, computer-aided manufacturing, local and wide area networks, CNC programming. During this period he built a microsurgery video recording system for Uludağ University.

In 1992 he worked on the title and lower-third systems of Flash TV, which had just gone on air in Bursa. The same year, at Kanal 6, he produced 3D logos and newsroom graphics on Apple and Silicon Graphics workstations.

From 1993 to 1995 he was technology editor at the Sabah media group and prepared the computer page of the daily Yeni Yüzyıl. His articles appeared in Sabah, Yeni Yüzyıl, Gün, Bugün, Aktüel and PC Magazine. In 1994, while holding these posts, he handled press relations for Silicon Graphics for eight months.

In 1995 he was the writer and visual designer of Bilgi Çağı (The Information Age), a technology programme on Kanal 6, and made its title sequence and animations. The same year he wrote the music for the TV film Şişman ile Pişman. As the Sabah group's technology editor he joined the Deniz Kurdu summer naval exercise and spent fifteen days aboard a frigate.

In the first months of 1996 he was on the editorial staff of CHIP magazine. His article in the February issue dealt with virtual reality and the remote operation of a robot body in hazardous environments (telepresence). He prepared the CD-ROMs the magazine distributed to its readers in their first year. He also wrote for PC World and Byte.

The same year he developed software for Kanal E that turned stock market data into live on-air graphics; from 1996 to 1998 he was part of the team that built the channel's virtual studio and 3D graphics systems. At ATV he designed the title sequences and visual identity of the debate programme Siyaset Meydanı, and he wrote data automation for the election broadcasts of Kanal D, Ada TV and Kanal T.

From 1998 to 2005 he was head of corporate communications at Neotek Group, a group of companies in the trade of raw materials for synthetic leather, chemicals, textiles, furniture and nonwovens.

In the same years he handled CD-ROM projects from start to finish: authoring, visual design, multimedia design and production. They include "3 Kuşak Cumhuriyet" (Three Generations of the Republic, 1998) and "Barış Manço ile İnternet" (1999), an offline internet simulator for children.

From 2003 to 2008 he designed the software and automation architecture of Digiboard, the outdoor digital screen network Saben installed in city squares. In 2004–2005 he was co-founder, editor-in-chief and director of photography of Nish, a photo-reportage magazine; he designed the magazine and took its photographs. The first issue appeared in December 2004.

His interest in stereoscopy began during the 1995 exercise, when he looked through the stereoscopic sight of a long-range gun, and continued with the stereoscopic photographs NASA sent back from Mars.

In 2009 he worked in the visual effects team of Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death. In 2010 he was the stereoscopic 3D director of Cehennem 3D, Turkey's first 3D feature film, responsible for its stereoscopic mastering, visual effects supervision and digital cinema packaging. After the shoot he put every shot of the film through stereoscopic mastering, adapting an error-detection program he had written earlier. "The whole purpose of mastering is the viewer's comfort," he says.

The same year he prepared the stereoscopic subtitles of the German production Iron Doors 3D, and in 2010–2011 he did digital cinema mastering for Dolby Turkey. In 2010–2011 he also led the graphic design and visual effects of Kanal D's game show Kazanmak İçin 1 Dakika (Minute to Win It). In 2011 he spoke about stereoscopy on Ada TV in Cyprus.

Since 2011 he has created visual effects for film, television and commercials. His credits include Mühürlü Köşk (2011), Benim Babam Bir Melek and Niyazi Bey (2017), Babamın Günahları (2018), Çember, Behzat Ç., Söz Vermiştin and Geniş Aile: Komşu Kızı (2019), 9 Kere Leyla, Saygı and Ramo (2020), Çıplak and Kırık Hayatlar (2021), Osman Sekiz, Barış Akarsu: Merhaba and Antagonist (2022), Ölümlü Dünya 2 (2023), and Sayara and Adresi Olmayan Ev (2024).

From 2017 to 2019 he designed digital stagecraft for the Turkish State Theatres: Alyoşa (2017) and Kaçış 3: Kıyamete Çağrı (2019) for the Istanbul State Theatre, and Zümrüdüanka (2018) for the Antalya State Theatre. In Alyoşa he divided the stage with tulle screens and layered projection to create depth without glasses. In 2019 he built the set of Ezel Akay's stage production Aldırma Gönül entirely from projection.

He kept writing. In 2010 he described the making of Cehennem 3D in Broadcaster Info; in 2011 he contributed to Aktüel's feature "What Will Life Be Like in 30 Years?" and published "What Will Cinema Be Like in 30 Years?" on kameraarkasi.org. In 2019 he spoke on ST Endüstri Radyo about mechatronics and modern farming, and in 2025 about artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic and visual effects. He describes artificial intelligence as "a continuation of tools like Photoshop".

In 2012 he left Istanbul and lived in Assos (2012–2013), Kaş (2013–2015), Istanbul again (2015–2016), Lüleburgaz (2016–2017) and Çubuk near Ankara (2017–2018), returning to Şişli from 2018 to 2020. In 2020 he moved to Konak, in İzmir.

The same year he began sharing his digital paintings and photographs on Instagram (@ecerit.art). From 2022 he produced his works as prints on canvas; they have been sold to collectors through Saatchi Art and shown on ArtMajeur, The Artling and Colorbox.

After the earthquakes of February 2023 he made the Earthquake Collection, and in May and June 2023 a photographic series on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; in August 2023 he published the book "Improved Atatürk Photographs & Quotes". In 2024 he made "The Old Man and the Sea", a relief on wood. In January 2025 "Horses in Motion N.3" was printed in Dubai on a 7 × 3 metre canvas.

He composes the music for his own videos and has played the darbuka and the bendir since childhood. In 2021 he made "Brain Massage: Old Like New", a remake experiment that reinterpreted familiar melodies. In 2025 he set Can Yücel's poem "Sardunyaya Ağıt" to music and wrote the words and music of "Yine Ben", a free adaptation of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself". In 2026 he released "Karanlık", based on Lord Byron's "Darkness", and songs in Esperanto.

He uses Esperanto in pieces that need a human voice but where he wants to limit what the song says to its melody. "Esperanto sounds to me like a melodic version of Latin," he says.

He has been writing poetry in Turkish since December 2024. "For me, poetry is an effort to simplify my words through melody," he says.

Since 2012 he has been developing what he calls multiponics, a closed-loop farming system in which the waste of one organism becomes another's input. He made his first trials between 2012 and 2014. In 2015 he wrote the text "Multiponics" and BostanKent, a project proposal for cities that grow their own food.

He traces the idea to an article about a crewed journey to Mars that he read in his youth: "You cannot carry all the food for people who will travel very far, for a very long time."

He is developing a philosophical framework he calls the Epistemic Honesty Model, which he describes as a method for freeing oneself from inventions and suppositions that can be neither falsified nor verified.