Demetris: A Visual Artist
The cinematic portrait of a visual artist, Demetris Papazachos, a senior student of the Fine Arts School in Thessaloniki, is about featuring an artist without just showing his artwork but emphasizing at his personality and his artistic thinking instead. Through his internal journey, gay culture elements are projected while an interesting question is raised: Who is "A Visual Artist" at last?
Related Works
The AVARTS team's project "Filter Bubbles" aims to raise critical reflection on the extent of the responsibility attributed to algorithms and technology for the formation of these "isolation bubbles". Furthermore, through the artistic process, it aims to weaken the positive feedback loops that gigantize imperfect information, foster fear and undermine creativity.
The title of this artwork is "Where Do I Exist?". This is a virtual space that explores the relationship between reality and virtual reality. Moreover, it the result of a pandemic society that tends to communicate through social media. It is the impression of our lifes into a virtual world, free from our body and the stereotypes it might follows it. Could we be free from our body and ideas such as gender identity and death? What is the meaning of touch into an immaterial world? Anyone can be part of this artwork with a twitter hashtag of the word #immaterial.
The research documentary A Quest for Eternity (2020) focuses in four different elements of Angelopoulos’s style and provides new information using and analysing the data from semi-structured interviews. This research documentary is part of Dr. Iakovos Panagopoulos practice based Phd research in the University of Central Lancashire with the title: “Reshaping Contemporary Greek Cinema Through a Re-evaluation of the Historical and Political Perspective of Theo Angelopoulos's Work”(Panagopoulos, 2019).
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.
Paraphrase, reference of the title to the depression caused by the shocking images of drowned children in the Mediterranean, the watery grave of persecuted refuges.
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.
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.
