SocialGR
This artwork consists of multiple videos of scrolls down found in well-known social media, which were taken by smart phone and are displayed in a horizontal layout and continuous flow. On a second reading and as the viewer moves away from the individual information, he or she realizes that the Greek flag is formed in the video. The artwork seeks to ask questions about the ever-increasing use and abuse of social media in Greek everyday life. Being sometimes means of communication and information and sometimes tools of manipulation, social media make people concern and strongly influence society in its entirety, while the posts of their multiple users are now an integral part of our modern (digital) public space.
Related Works
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.
A documentary about Lazaretto, the desert islet near the city of Corfu that functioned for centuries as a quarantine station as well as a place of execution for political prisoners during the Greek Civil War. The identity of the place is approached through fragmentary testimonies and original sources.
Where do memories go when they are lost? Are they still where we left them, if we don’t recall them? In this room, as private and irrevocable as our memory, objects animate a series of scenarios. A memory floods the room, another struggles to disclose itself, another one leaks back and forth in time. The idea of the ‘other’ hovers between what has already passed and what is reminisced every time. We never recollect events and spaces as such. We always enliven recollections in our own way. Through constant evocations that seek to perpetuate the existence of the ‘room’, memories converse with space and time, as well as with a part of ourselves. Either as past, forgetfulness or loss, they always contain something that is already gone.
This changing frame represents an allegorical image of human nature, which when it is in dialectic with the outside world - during the transition from private to public life, experiences conflicting feelings of apprehension, anticipation, reticence, curiosity and extroversion.
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.
EX-SITU[existing situations] is an interactive installation that incorporates a computer, sound, and lighting technologies in which users/ viewers take part in the destruction of the painting by stepping on it. At the same time, a motion tracking system marks visitors and a light spot tracks them.
The content of EX SITU calls for awareness of social indifference, self-promotion, and their impact on society. The structure of EX SITU is intentionally ambiguous, revealing the obsession/fascination for the protection of material in contrast with the empathy for other people.
The interactive installation underlines the responsibility of individuals in society. The theoretical part analyses the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 and The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.
Α creative dynamic dialogue with artificial intelligence (ai). The cursor is about to press "generate". Analyzing.
