Emrah Gonulkirmaz

I was born in Istanbul, grew up in Toronto, and now call Los Angeles home. Moving between places and cultures shaped how I approach creative work, less as a fixed outcome and more as a process of navigation.

I come from a background in classical animation and traditional art, gradually moving into animation and design. Over the years, I've worked across film, animation, games, and boutique design studios, often in environments that lived at the edge of convention. These spaces encouraged experimentation, using tools in unintended ways, bending systems, and sometimes reverse-engineering them entirely to discover new visual languages. The people I've collaborated with along the way continue to influence how I think about creativity, collaboration, and craft.

I currently work at Monks as VP of Computational Creativity and Innovation, operating at the intersection of design, technology, and emerging AI systems. My role often sits between vision and execution, shaping ideas through research, prototyping, and the development of systems that make experimentation tangible.

I started artsci.tech as an initiative to collaborate with people who share a similar mindset, curiosity over control and experimentation over certainty. What began as a personal exploration has since become part of Monks, continuing as a space for research, collaboration, and computational approaches to visual storytelling.

I'm also developing Fragments, an independent game where story, atmosphere, and interaction shape one another organically.

Rather than treating computational creativity as a system of control or optimization, I approach it as an environment for exploration. I'm interested in how systems can produce artifacts that feel unfamiliar yet meaningful, and how preserving ambiguity, tradition, and human intuition within technological processes often leads to more honest and enduring work.