Biographies are always double-edged. They consist of the actual life one lived, and of the virtual life that one could have lived. Yet, the life of Turkish composer İlhan Mimaroğlu, depicted in the film Mimaroğlu: The Robinson of Manhattan Island, shows that not every virtual promise is fulfilled.

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Every biography tells a story about the dreams, indestructible ambitions, and failures of a lived life. What it documents in retrospect are the turning points, decisions, coincidences, and seized or missed opportunities that determine one’s fate. But what about the possibilities that we ignore, yet have an impact on our present life? What about our virtual biographies, our parallel worlds that enable us to escape from our present life, or that – like a flashback – are meaningful because their traces reach into the present?

In his book Im Wartesaal der Möglichkeiten, the German media scholar Michael Lommel calls this place «the waiting room of possibilities», where the past, become virtual, continues to have an impact on our current situation. What would have happened if life had been one way or the other? «If I hadn’t had polio, I guess I would never have gotten married», says Güngör Mimaroğlu about her first marriage, before she met her soulmate İlhan Mimaroğlu. She went with him to New York, leaving her seven-year-old son Rüstem Batum in Istanbul, so that she could live her unconditional freedom.

Writing Music History

İlhan Mimaroğlu’s life itself reads almost like a virtual biography. The opportunity to study at Columbia University took him to New York in the early 1960s because Türkiye did not have the technical resources needed for composing electronic music. He didn’t come to terms with the situation in Istanbul, but rather followed this radical possibility of emigrating to a city unknown to him in order to be able to compose. And from here he wrote music history.

The realization of his artistic ambitions did not wither in the virtual waiting room of possibilities, but found fulfillment. Mimaroğlu created his own record label, Finnadar Records. Life gave him the unique opportunity to experience, in his finite life, the fruits of his radical courage and virtual dream. Yet after closing the label, he left behind ashes of disappointment that have never cooled down.

Stockhausen or Elvis Presley

As an avant-garde artist, İlhan Mimaroğlu remained illegible to the masses. «As the years went by I wanted Guillaume de Machaut, they wanted Zarah Leander», he says in a voice over. «I wanted Stockhausen, they wanted Elvis Presley. Are you shocked to hear that I’m putting Beethoven (...) and Frankie Laine (..) in the same bag? Actually for the public ear conditioned by the demagogues and the falsifiers, they are in the same bag.» This voice-over is accompanied by black and white footage, in which one hears stormy weather and sees a stranger from afar, trying to free his car from snow.

Could this other possible, virtual life not also be inscribed with failure? Perhaps we invest too many hopes in our virtual biographies, which promise fulfillment in our daydreams. Maybe the virtual biography is ultimately just a crypt that promises more than it can actually deliver.