Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957. After receiving a B.A. Degree in Graphic Design in Istanbul, he attended The Goldsmiths' College in London, England for postgraduate studies in Visual Communications. He moved to the United States in 1982 and established a design business in Los Angeles, where he still ocasionally designs, but mostly writes and photographs.

His text-based work is comprised of nine volumes of short stories, experimental texts, and novels. His primary focus within the visual arts is photography. Since the late Eighties he has extended his photo-based approach into text enhanced interdisciplinary works. Ulay comments on the everchanging world by building a process of seeing and a process of experiencing into his photographs and turning them into propositions, a debate between equivalents, the present and the absent, the now and the memory, the concrete and the abstract.

Cultivation of Enigma | 80 Pages | 6.75" x 6.75" (17cm x 17cm) | Full Color | 2011 | A portfolio in a book format, comprising thirty-six photographs and an accompanying text. The prevailing sentiment here is silence, broken with simple questions and worries about history being erased aggresively and future is being built on the ghost of a past. Cultural geography is visualized through mute photographs of disappearing urban architecture; silence and muteness are treated like covert protestations, and simple observations of decay are transformed into a fount eternal truths.

Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat - A Graphic Design Manifesto | 404 Pages | 6.25" x 9.5" (15.5cm x 24cm) | Full Color | Published by Akin Nalca Pubishing in Turkish and English Editions | 2005 | Subtitled as a Graphic Design Manifesto, the book features french folded pages that shelter ninety-nine short paragraphs. Front sides of the pages are reserved for unbreachable walls. The writing is sarcastic and defeatist. While pretending to be a manifesto, it pokes fun at commercial design striving to please the corporate culture and proposes illusory, impractical, and ultimately utopian solutions.

Terra Infirma | 68 Pages | 5" x 8" (12.5cm x 20.5cm) | Triple Press | 2005 | Ninety nine disjointed paragraphs, absurd propositions, false syllogisms or very short, dense, irreal stories. An experiment to define a universe of radical disjunction.

Locus Novus is a literary web site, established in 2000. It presents literary texts combined with visuals, sound and motion. The website started out as an experiment in Flash-based presentations and developed into a literary venue. No new work has been added since 2010, but most of the sixty-five presentations are still valid, and the writing is timeless, so the website stays active. www.locusnovus.com