Research Catalogue

"New ideas might be conceived and developed more rapidly in disciplines that are more abstract. The inductive methods of experimental innovators in painting makes their enterprise resemble the more empirical disciplines considered by psychologists, while the deductive approach of the conceptual innovators makes theirs resemble the more abstract disciplines." David W. Galenson, "The Life Cycles of Modern Artists", NBER Working Paper Series, 2003. Artists and architects have been at times captivated by visionary ideological viewpoints, which they used as inspiration and to make suggestions for applications with their artworks and designs. My use of the diagram and the image aims to convey the simple message that art strives for evolution; meaning to strengthen the mind, to research capabilities, to communicate a disinterested, though not necessarily apolitical, view of social changes, to overcome banality and offer an alternative way of looking at the world. For many artists, this motivation has traditionally often gone hand in hand with political goals and motivations. The decline of the commercial art market in the 1980s gave rise to artists working mainly, but not solely, with ephemeral installations, including the ubiquitous video art, performance, and the broader range of conceptual art. Painting remained as an established fine art practice, with a renewed interest to conceptualism. The portrait is of the artist, myself, at a young age, dated 1993, when I was a student at the NTUA. Betty Nigianni is my name known as (aka), which I also used as my artistic pseudonym.

2024-2025 Manuel Rodriguez

Exploring the affordances of Larping in virtual reality.

During the early weeks of the Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, the Turkish government banned gatherings in Taksim Square. One man, however, stood alone in front of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), one of the symptoms around the never-ending events and culture wars, with the police around, obviously "obeying" the ban on gatherings. He instantly went viral on the internet: The Standing Man (Duran Adam), reminiscent of an unknown 1950s Hollywood melodrama The Man Who Stood There, while others began to stand "alone" nearby, but not exactly in the legally described form of an assembly or public gathering. As such, only the man's name was mythified and not the other participants'.

Meet the Yunani is my mix-up audio-visual-inscriptive artwork for the Unani or Yunani systems of medicine that are deployed in medical fraud. I deploy cognitive philosophy, art and science in this webart for the real settings of scientific hoaxes, the illusions concealed through prescribed fictions, and represented as the real. A mix-up audio-visual-inscriptive artwork for the Yunani, often touted as a "traditional" and "holistic" approach to health and well-being. In truth, the various versions of deploying Unani in medicine is inothing more than a parascientific hoax perpetrated by those aiming to capitalize on the growing demand for "alternative" and “natural” remedies. Unani (یونانی) is simply a rebranding of the Perso-Arabic medical traditions, which in turn were heavily influenced by the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who, while pioneering advances in the human anatomy and physiology, also promoted a flawed model of the human body and health based on the concept of the four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Unani practitioners of the Perso-Arabic medical traditional medicine, accompanied by Judeo-Hellenic adaptations represented with the neoplatonistic tree of life sefirot (סְפִירוֹת / σφαίρα), Greek humours or "doṣas" (दोष) from the Ayurvedic medicine claim to have inherited this ancient Greek wisdom. In truth they have merely taken these outdated and disproven theories, given them an exotic-sounding name, and presented them as traditional wisdom. Unani's diagnostic methods and treatment approaches, from bloodletting to the use of arcane herbal concoctions, lack scientific bases and were thoroughly debunked by modern medical research. The allure of this “ancient wisdom”, however, continues to draw those in need of alternative healthcare, without knowing that they are falling victim to a sophisticated marketing ploy masquerading as traditional medicine. The Unani's mystical trappings are nothing more than a pseudoscientific hoax rooted in long-refuted Greek four humour theory.

Data Ocean Theatre (D.O.T.) is a four-year artistic research project that explores the intersection of myths, Western theatre memory, new media, digital animism, climate emergency, sea and ocean transformations, queer subcultures, and technological mutations in relation to aspects of “submersion” as a contemporary living condition. Expanding on the claimed unsustainability of Western theatre’s anthropocentric foundations, D.O.T. examines how the notion and practice of the stage transform amidst climate urgency, technological hypergrowth, and discipline-fluid hybridization. It seeks to generate experiments on a new temporal ecology of the stage, examining how theatre-making infrastructures might transition within a multi-agential dynamic of emergence. D.O.T. appears, disappears, and reappears through a series of polymorphic artworks and research affordances based on the ecodramaturgical consideration of the simultaneous phenomenon of 1. the rising sea and ocean levels, 2. the exponential growth of big data in our informational age, and 3. the emotional overload caused by the latter two happening, projection, and prophecy. D.O.T. explores inherited sea-and-ocean-oriented myths and revisits theatre plays with a marine backdrop, looking simultaneously into contemporary nautical vocabulary and sea imagery used as metaphors for computational realities. D.O.T. proposes to re-mythologise Western theatre foundations by forming an alternative pantheon for a queer, hydrofeminist, and technoanimist reset of the “tragic,” at the interplay between a syncretic marine mythology and the ambiguities of “technology-as-monster” narratives. In D.O.T. project, the forces and fragilities of transforming marine ecosystems intersect with algorithmic-conditioned life and crossbreeding of diverse art disciplines and research fields based on collaborations, generating imaginary prototypes for future societal constructions in the floods. D.O.T. is structured around several key components: the prologue Simultaneous Environments, featuring a series of experimental works; the central project Tragedy and the Goddexxes, which culminates in three public exhibitions; and a series of workshops, residencies, and a final publication in the form of an exposition on the Research Catalogue. This final publication of the DATA OCEAN THEATRE postdoctoral artistic research project (2021–2024) titled 'DATA OCEAN THEATRE (OUT OF THE BLUE); A Discipline-Fluid Postdoctoral Artistic Research Project Exposition' performs on the Research Catalogue as both an aesthetico-epistemic object in its own right and as an a posteriori account, or catalogue raisonné, of the project. It also acts as a supplement to the author's doctoral publication, Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses), completing the latter to form a diptych on the Research Catalogue. Similar to the doctoral publication, the non-linear, non-hierarchical, and non-chronological reading, or hyper-reading, of Data Ocean Theatre (Out of the Blue) invites its visitors to navigate freely and compose their own fluid, archipelagic, and tidal experience to make sense of the project as a whole.