Bouquets: Artifact Conglomerations

The project composes a series of random artifacts relating to art and design history, used either ας decorative or utilitarian artifacts, turning them into a non-definitive object [bouquet] floating in space. The raw-model aesthetic of the image deliberately welcomes the non Iifelike, error-embracing languages that stem from art, technology and their contemporary intersections.
Related Works
The current project is a digital, interactive, audiovisual application that can be used either as a virtual installation accompanied by a simultaneous projection of its content in the physical space or be distributed as an executable digital medium on any computer, compatible with its technical specifications. It examines the flow of information, its creation, collection, storage, interpretation and utilization through perceptual mechanisms that mutate -enhance or degrade- with the available tools of digital reality and its transformation from a sequence of serial, adjacent and referential values to one unified context, what is usually interpreted as meaning or significance. The participants of this reality are called upon to engage at the degree of signification that expresses them better, ranging from a purely perceptual and empirical viewing to a frantic clarification of everything included.
It’s Monday, the 13th of December 1943, the small town of Kalavryta is set on fire by the occupation army of Nazi Germany while the entire male population is being gathered on a nearby hill and shot dead. This war crime will go down in history, along with the massacre of Acqui Division, as the largest mass killing in Greece during WWII. Three men who witnessed these events as kids, locked up with the rest women, children and elderly people in Kalavryta’s primary school, recall this traumatic experience.
Moments that meet and compose new ones through clips of a few seconds. Their common point is the associative thinking during their creation and the sense of the surrealistic-dreamlike mood.
Zoe is a 25 year-old student, living in Corfu island, Greece with her only friend and roommate Anne. Waking up late an afternoon Zoe realises that her friend is missing and she goes out at night alone in search of her. The strangely empty and quiet town, a series of bizzare events and the sense that she's been followed gives her the realization that something strange is going on and her eager to find her friend grows stronger.
At that time she comes across a dark human figure that wants to capture her. Trying to escape, Zoe ends up in a white room with nothing but a mirror inside.
As she walks closer to the mirror she sees that someone is trapped inside a room. Thinking that it's her friend Anne she reaches and goes through the mirror into that other room.
As she sits down next to the other person, thinking that she is Anne, she realizes it's her own self. In a desperate and decisive moment she tries to save her double, only to realize that her double can not cross to the other side of the mirror. Realizing that there's no way out the double lets go of Zoes hand.
Zoe wakes up in her room in the morning, gets dressed and goes for a walk by the sea in the now fully alive and noisy town. As she stands and stares at the waves she meets a girl named Anne sitting nearby. After the two girls meet they sit by the sea talking.
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.