My work, situated at the intersection of art and architecture, addresses the increasing disconnection of people from nature and from each other and suggests alternatives to restore lost connections. Using digital and organic media, I create art to propose innovative architectures that promote inclusion of, and interaction with human participants. My work asks how installations, typically conceived as short-lived interventions, affect established traditions and norms, and how proposed paradigms trigger new and unexpected activities. My creative research process is based upon the theoretical work I developed at Harvard GSD, embedded in my doctoral dissertation under the title: On Architectural Taste and Identity: Experimenting with PICANICO Game. I developed a ‘language’ for aesthetics that was built based upon the personal preferences of human participants and upon evaluations by architects and critics. Visualizations of my work yielded elements of collective taste and form as a ‘social language.’ The correlation between words and concepts, and their association with human participants became an integral part of my artistic endeavor. My installations and models become an instrument to focus upon certain themes, concepts, and properties of space, and to also explore them through the ‘eye of the spectator.’ In summary, my work evolves around three axes: The first is a theory and an exhibition-based methodology (metamaquette), built around installations that explore cognition/perception, scale, (im)materiality of light, subjectivity, and sensory experience. The second is a visual framework for futuristic designs that evaluate and reinvent the connection between people and nature (technoecologies). My installations suggest structures that people could allegorically and practically inhabit. By means of ‘futuristic’ designs, I explore tangible approaches to bio-architecture and bio-art, envisioning more humane environments. Such will rely not only on technology, but also on community rituals, and vernacular elements of human culture. The third is a visual vocabulary which examines the involvement of architecture in physical environments to inspire civic ‘identity’ (technoutopias). By connecting formal elements and aesthetics with social purpose, my work makes public space better fit, for the public.
SHOWCASING A VISION
Whereas most of my public space work has been small-scale art-installations, I also applied large-scale tactics to engage community participation in subjects relating to public space. This led to Silo(e)scapes, one of my recent works. Silo(e)scapes depicts in parallel a hybrid of a seed bank, a sharing economy, and a museum exhibiting plant species from the Mediterranean region that risk to become extinct in the not-so-distant future. Visitors are faced with a doll-house metaphor of a futuristic microcosm. In this project I explored a new architectural typology emerging from the collective traditions of agricultural lifestyles. The accompanying track with sounds and music relates to songs and rituals of Mediterranean agricultural lifestyles, and by the folk music of my own homeland in Thrace, Greece, with millennia long music tradition. Silo(e)scapes partly emerged from my previous work, but instead of only using plants and seeds at installation scale, I also showcased how these might affect actual buildings, using cylindrical silo tubes filled with seeds. The infinitely many silos are somehow experienced as architectural elements of the Athenian Agora. Their assortment appears to depict a social space and its architecture. In a way, Silo(e)scapes visitors experience a fictional, and at the same time probably feasible utopia.
TECHNOUTOPIAS
I have been influenced and inspired by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, whose writings criticized our disentanglement from history and the past, one of the main reasons behind current social tragedies in the Western World. Castoriadis’ observations on lack of identification with a social ‘self,’ drove me into seeking utopia not just for a single (and probably privileged) individual, but for all. Unlike Techno-ecologies, merely focusing on ecological subject matter, Techno-utopias expands to other predicaments further emphasizing the utopian approach. The lemma techno explores the duality between reality and fantasy. Techno originates from Greek Τέχνη, meaning ‘art,’ and ‘craftmanship.’ Besides etymology, I also drew inspiration from the Japanese Metabolists’ approach to the future as something tangible. Technoutopias points to an innovative civic vocabulary and offers new opportunities in establishing rituals that emphasize empathy, courage, and interpersonal connectivity. It helps us rediscover our public identity and activate our public-centric personality.
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