Architect of Escape: Idil Dursun's Megapolis of Elsewhere

By @JustinWetch

Idil Dursun has been manifesting impossible worlds since she could hold a crayon.

The Turkish artist was digging through old papers when she discovered the evidence: a picture she'd made at age six showing a house, a dog, herself standing in a natural, foresty environment. "It's literally where I'm living right now," she tells me with genuine bewilderment. "And the dog is just my dog, like my current dog. Literally, I drew her somehow." When she found it, her reaction was immediate: "What the fuck?"

The drawing was prophecy disguised as child's play. But for Dursun, it's just the earliest evidence of her life's work: building emotional escape hatches from reality.

Art wasn't a career choice for Dursun. It was atmospheric pressure.

"There isn't really anything before I'm an artist because I started doing art when I was like four," she explains. While other kids graduated from crayons to homework, she graduated from crayons to charcoals to acrylics, each medium a new door into world-building.

Even then, environments called to her. "I was always doing environments, like sketches and some paintings on my own." The childhood drawing of her future life wasn't anomaly but pattern: Dursun imagining places so completely they reached across time.

Those early environments evolved through middle school auroras and mountain sceneries, always reaching beyond the boundaries of what existed. The real magnetic pull was always toward building worlds that felt more real than reality.

Architecture seemed perfect for someone obsessed with building environments. The disillusionment came swiftly.

"I realized that I didn't really like being bounded by physics," Dursun says. Her architecture program was conceptual and she "went crazy" with projects, but the magic happened during post-production: "when I was creating my boards, rendering things and deciding on the material and the color and just the fun part at the end."

Digital rendering became her revelation. "That's how I realized how I love working with Photoshop and the post-production of everything." By third year, she'd chosen pixels over physics, concept art over architecture.

3D software training sealed the deal. Her first encounter was "horrible" and "scary," but it offered something architecture never could: worlds unbound by gravity, budgets, or the stubborn laws of what's actually possible.

Architecture school taught Dursun technique. Azeroth taught her purpose.

"I was super inspired by World of Warcraft, which is so weird because it's not the kind of art that I do. But it was more like the world building aspect."

The game became her real education in emotional architecture. Not how to build spaces, but how to build experiences that devour time. "When you're watching the cinematics, you are consuming this product, you're playing this game or watching that movie and then you're kinda being super disconnected from reality. And I love that."

This disconnect became her mission. Hours vanished in Azeroth not because the graphics were pretty, but because the world felt more compelling than the one outside her window.

The revelation crystallized: "I want to create my own world. I wanna make people feel how I'm feeling right now. My goal would be to make people feel the same way that I feel. This is another reality and it takes you away from your current problems."

When I ask if this is escapism, her response cuts through academic pretense: "Exactly, yeah. It's literally that."

Dursun's art reveals a beautiful contradiction: dystopian concepts that spark joy.

"I have so many people message me or write comments on my work like, 'Oh, I wish I lived here,'" she says. "And the picture's literally this super dense urban concrete cyberpunk place, but it gives people, like me as well, a feeling of like being a resident there."

The paradox fascinates her: "It's so interesting, it's so huge, it's so like this overwhelming effect of alive-ful liveliness." She takes humanity's darkest urban dystopias– overpopulation and vertical sprawl– and renders them beautiful.

"I try to find a balance between utopia and dystopia," she explains. The concepts behind her work explore "fundamentals of a dysfunctional society" like crushing density and vanishing nature, but the emotional experience operates in reverse. "I'm not a melancholic person. I like looking at stuff that makes me feel good."

Her art functions like stargazing: "When I look at the art that is similar to mine, I get the same feeling" as looking up at the night sky and thinking "Oh, I'm so small. My worries don't really matter. I'm just such a small part of this universe. And then it finally gives you this five seconds of relief."

This is Dursun's core magic: conceptually dystopian worlds that function as emotional sanctuaries.

Dursun's technique evolved from constraint to liberation. After years in architectural visualization where "we were using real lenses and trying to make the pictures as realistic and pretty as possible," she discovered the power of hybrid rebellion.

Pure 3D renders, no matter how technically perfect, felt hollow: "Just 3D renders, I feel like they kind of lack some emotion. Not emotion, but some uniqueness. Yeah, soul."

Her solution became her signature: "I enjoy a lot working on half-finished 3D renders on Photoshop. I want to make it 50/50 because I feel more free on Photoshop because I can paint and I can change lighting and I can do anything."

The Photoshop stage transforms technical exercise into personal expression: "Working on them in 2D kinda makes them mine on a more personal level. I feel like I add my signature style like that."

This hybrid approach extends to her source material: "I photograph building facades and then I paint over them, and then that building facade was like actually 50 different buildings. And then I just change the materials and the color and whatever everything is."

Music weaves through everything: "What I'm listening to as music when I'm making art just affects everything. My mood, what kind of music I'm listening to. I think that has a direct influence on artists."

Movie and video game soundtracks particularly fuel her work: "I listen to so many movie and video game soundtracks. It's the most nerd feature of mine." Currently she's obsessed with Baldur's Gate III: "I don't know how many times I finished listening to its soundtrack album when I'm working. It's insane."

Her inspiration spans across mediums. She maintains categorized mood boards: Dune cinematography, Star Wars compositions, Blade Runner lighting. "I think it's so important for an artist to feed themselves from all of these different mediums and try to find something that connects with you in a personal level. And then that makes your art unique."

Dursun's optimism about humanity's future radiates through art that looks dystopian on paper. "I think my art would even give that message because you see it in a way that it survives, right? Humanity survives, and nature sort of survives. It gets elevated with the humans. It goes more vertical, but everyone somehow survives. And they're living life."

This hope coexists with complex anxieties: "I think future with AI is fucking scary. Not in a way that it's gonna take our jobs, but in a way that it's gonna make humans stupid over the years." Yet even worry transforms into wonder: "I would like to see the world 1,000 years from now. Those episodes we watched in Black Mirror, they're gonna be so real."

The NFT space found her at exactly the right moment. Discovering CryptoPunks in February 2021 with "no idea what Ethereum was," she entered during peak possibility when "it was just 3D dominating universe." Early collectors like @GuyNorcal believed in her vision while she was still learning what crypto was.

Through the space, she met lifelong heroes: @annibale_sic ("my biggest inspiration from the space"), @PaulC04 ("he's insane. I studied his work for so long"), @artofae. "I was super starstruck to meet these people because I've been following their work for so many years."

Dursun returns to where it all began: manifestation through imagination. "Sometimes I get messages from people that I'm an inspiration to them and then sometimes they try to recreate one of my works in their own style and then they send it to me. And then I'm just the happiest person on Earth."

The loop reveals her deeper architecture: not just digital worlds, but inspiration cycles that help others construct their own elsewhere. "That's basically what I'm trying to do. Create this environment for myself to dive into another world and explore different environments."

Her six-year-old self drew a prophecy that came true. Now she draws futures for thousands of others to discover— futures where humanity adapts and survives, where density creates beauty, where escape routes lead not away from reality but toward better versions of it.

"I don't want people to just box my art into a dystopian genre," she says. The worlds she builds may be conceptually dark, but they function as emotional architecture: megacities of elsewhere where anyone can take refuge, if only for five seconds of relief, in the overwhelming aliveness of possibility.

@jarvinart suggests these artists for future Weekly Dose of ART features: @m0dest___,@ALIENQUEENNFT, and @killianmoore_.