Excitatio Corcyrae : Player’s Guide

Related Works
The subject of Charis Myrsilidi’s thesis concerns the transfer of literary text to image. The excerpts of the selected texts are stories from the Grimm brothers' fairy tales and the connecting link is the pattern of transformation (metamorphosis). The presentation of the practical part of the thesis concerns an installation with clay sculptures, sound track and lighting. The sculptural space is formed by Charis Myrsilidi, a student of the Department of Audio Visual Arts and the sound by the composer Ioannis Konsolakis.
Aynadamar: An important place as far back as when the Arabs were in the area. The whole region of Andalusia was supplied with water through that spring, reaching as far as Madrid. Several years later, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is taken there to be executed. His work in turn supplied the whole Spain and spread to the rest of the world. The documentary intertwines significant events of his life with dramatised excerpts from his work, aiming at achieving Duende (as Lorca used to say), the quintessence of all things.
The project is the animation of the fairy tale "The chained elephant". "The Chained Elephant" is one of the stories of psychiatrist Jorge Bukay from his book "Let me tell you a story" which he tells to his client. It refers to a child' s question who notices that a huge circus elephant remains tied to a small stick without trying to free itself and without protesting. The circus elephant remained tied to his tiny stick because "the memory of the weakness he felt shortly after his birth is etched in his memory."
The present postgraduate thesis was prepared in the context of the completion of the postgraduate program of the Department of Sound and Visual Arts of the Ionian University.
The study of the subject will be the facts and data on the occasion of the completion of 200 years since the Greek Revolution.
The present work aims to enrich the theoretical framework of study. Its structure is based on data that I have collected (rare photographic material, letters, etc.), from the Public Archives of the State, the Kapodistrias Museum and the Reading Company.
An experimental workshop was realized at the Corfu Archaeological Museum, on May 2019. The workshop was designed within the frames of interdisciplinary learning and participatory art, based on Maker culture and STEAM education, willing to highlight the importance of arts and technology in learning. The participants, children and adolescents 11 to 15 years old, were initially guided to an important archaic find at the Archaeological museum of Corfu, a pediment depicting ancient Greek goddess Artemis-Gorgo, and got acquainted with the myth surrounding it. In two groups the participants made
1. electronic circuits which produced sounds via photo resistor and conductive paint and
2. conductive drawings inspired by the archaic pediment imagery.
The two groups combined their work to create interactive installations were circuits and sensors were used to “read” the tonal variations and line elements of the pencil drawings. Documentation indicates the childrens’ immersion into the experience.
Multiple distance sensors trigger sound events ας people move around and get close to the grid with the srceens.
While we dream, much of the information that the brain involuntarily collects during the day, is intersected and integrated with previous experience and can be used in future behaviors.
The quarantine's experience time has functioned as a humanized time. Its previous social barbarity was imprisoned in the familiar cage of my soul and became my creation time. Each day was my friend, an eternal circular and dynamic present, a consciousness without conflicts. It was like an eternity that is experienced differently every moment. An unprecedented form of stillness gripped me and perpetuated in many abstract fragments which finally formed the new texture of my existence, in this peculiar isolation. I became from the carcass of time I was before, its qualitative disintegration… Reality was distorted and experienced illusively. The time from the alienation that was before, was transformed and became the cover for the scratched truth of myself. This kind of time my conscience had dreamed to live.
Myths are living stories that grow with time, change, adapt, but continue being a source for research, inspiration and creativity. The interactive audiovisual theatrical performance INRIRI questions the adaptation of an archetypal myth at a time of many dimensions and levels with elements from physical theater and embedded interactive technology in the performing space. Parts of the story are a Caribbean myth which transforms the body, a woodpecker and some new experimental technologies. On stage two bodies try to communicate with themselves and the environment around them and to discover anew what a body can be, what the relation and connection with the other body and which are the influences of the surrounding space on them.












