Here at The Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company, we pride ourselves in being able to provide our clients with the most cutting edge, mega super awesome experience ever.

MSA Visuals was founded in 2003 by Mehmet Akten (aka Memo / memo.tv) and has evolved from traditional 2D/3D animation, video production & post-production, rich internet applications to immersive interactive installations, computational audio-visual design and large-scale real-time adaptive experiences.

My work is motivated by an ongoing curiosity and research in creating emotional interactive experiences; and related to that: using the body to perform images and sound. The former is what really drives me: the challenge of creating an interactive experience so simple, yet joyful, with depth coming from a sense of discovery and playfulness - similar to the excitement and joy that young kids experience as they discover their environment. The joy of stomping in a puddle, or deciding to pour a bowl of spaghetti hoops over their head, or spinning round in circles for 10 minutes until they fall over. These are simple pleasures that quickly lose their charm as we get older, and I'm fascinated by creating fictional environments which can recreate these feelings in adults (and children of course!).

I design and develop custom software and environments to allow people to perform or experience things that they would not in the real world. When I'm designing the software - in the virtual world - I'm not constrained by the laws of physics, and have full control over every aspect of everything; allowing me to shape the look, sound and behaviour of every object exactly how I want them to look, sound or behave. Often this does borrow a lot from nature and the laws of physics, but through this custom software I can abstract certain realistic aspects of the physical world and present them disguised in new and unrealistic situations. This is very important for me, as it allows people to connect with these new fictional environments: since everything is not completely random, they recognize a lot from the real world and they feel at home, they immediately understand what to do; but the setting is completely new which arouses the curiosity and sets them on a journey of discovery - a feeling we have when we are young kids, and have just started understanding the world around us, but with still a lot left to learn.

Most importantly, I want to be able to control this experience in real-time, with my body, in what feels like natural gestures and motion so there is little or no learning curve to start interacting with it. I want you to feel like the directer of a film, shouting out commands to the actors and crew as they perform; or being the conductor of an orchestra, directing the musicians as they play; or being a puppeteer giving life to inanimate objects through your own acting. This enters the realm of Human Computer Interaction and Computer Vision. There has been extensive work and research in this field in the past and building on top of that I have been producing a number of full body interactive experiments, technology demos, games, musical instruments and other works.

My main focus, is not to demonstrate the capabilities of technology, but to use it create something beautiful, emotional, something that will hopefully move you, or make you smile.