Yorgos Psailas - A portrait of the British Cemetery caretaker
A short documentary, based on the theory of Observational Cinema. It is the portrait of the caretaker of the British Cemetery in the island of Corfu, Greece, Mr. Yorgos Psailas. The documentary deals with his daily life in the cemetery. Mr. Psailas also recounts the most important moments of his life as well as his thoughts about life and death.
Direction / Photography / Sound / Editing: Mixing: Andreas Vouliakis Translation from Italian: Athanasia Liatsi Ionian University Faculty of Music and Audiovisual Arts – Department of Audiovisual Arts Supervisor: Maria Chalkou
Related Works
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.
The video is a documentation of a spatial installation with a dual role, through viewing / observation and participation. The investigation of the relationship that develops between digital and real space, acting in it, as the main axis of the narrative, the human being is the framework of the research with object of study the concept of metaphor to the coexistence of experience as a narrative and of the experience of the present as a fact of performance. The real environment through recording projected into an analog painting and transferred to a digital environment (images-video- video projection) connecting the real, the digital and painting form. Respectively, the natural environment of the installation transferred to the projection surface, in a digital space, via the camera and projector.
A journalist, who has lost his identity, visits an uncanny land, in which the smile is banned by law. He feels lost in its dystopia, consisted of self-destructive people, who deplore the smile. He gains many personal experiences that make him unaware of his aim and his human state as well. Will he eventually be able to find a way out?
Α creative dynamic dialogue with artificial intelligence (ai). The cursor is about to press "generate". Analyzing.
In the realm of acoustic hyper-reality we meet aural simulacra of the order of maleficence. These are signals that mask and denature a profound acoustic reality. They are referential and representational, but in a way that they dissimulate reality and become its twisted Doppelgängers. Simulacra of the order of maleficence are perversions of reality. With the sound artwork ‘Natural Perversion’ Through a set of sonic processes the artist delves into autogenerative, autopoietic, responsive and biomimetic modes of creation exploring how the original naturally produced audio signal can be transformed into a sonic caricature and depending on the way it balances between its signifier and its signified aspect, it may re-interpret naturally produced concrete audible events into a musical language which serves both the acousmatic and the non-cochlear approaches to contemporary sound art.
BRAINRINTH is a multi-channel video installation. The work attempts – through technology – to approach brain-related functions of memory, drawing on material from personal experience of the body in crisis. The title BRAINRINTH –from the words Brain and Labyrinth – is a play on the intractable riddle of an archetypal Greek structure (the labyrinth) and the labyrinthine processes of the human brain. The BRAINRINTH installation seeks a poetic mapping of the human brain.
Due to the shock of trauma, our understanding of the functioning of the body, and of nature itself –which we are trying to dominate – seems desperate and full of anxiety. Taking this into account, if we adopt a position in which we keep a distance of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps this reality begins to look less frightening.
Creation of a group installation entitled Intersecting Worlds. The installation raises questions about the diversity and dynamics of the digital world, the limits and possibilities of technology and how it interacts and transforms contemporary life, creating new stimuli and a new way of looking at everyday life.
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).
