Research Catalogue

The exposition includes reworked video excerpt from the 'Glass Cities' two hour-long video art installation, with film footage and photography from three different cities, London, Athens and Venice. The original work was created for Elica's live music performance, shown at the Small Music Theatre, Athens, Greece, in 2007. The aim of the process of making the video art was to remain and explore the surface of things when addressing historical changes. I used banal and seemingly unconnected photographic and digital film footage for this purpose and effect. The 'lure' is the film still: neither photograph, nor film, a notion that has been inadequately theorised in visual art history and theory. Following a historical materialist approach, I employ the artistic theme of dead cities. Venice is a dead city in the visual arts modernist tradition. A dead city is a city that fails to change. Venice is actually slowly sinking, because it can't manage the rising water levels. In this context, I briefly trace Venice's economic history of the flourishing academic arts in the Baroque period, its Murano glass industry evocative of the ancient arts and crafts, and its inevitable re-invigoration by virtue of the Venice Biennale, the well-known international art and architectural exhibition. I named the original video art after John Smith's experimental documentary about London 'Slow Glass' (1988-91). In the film, one of the narrators describes the liquid composition of glass - "even when it's hard, it's still a liquid" - which is a metaphor for the process of change. Since I made the video installation, but also this exposition, I found out that my ancestor, a great grandfather, who was originally from Italy, might have been an Italian Jew and that this might have been the reason he left Italy in the nineteenth century to travel to and settle in my native Greece. Because the exposition is about collective history and collective consciousness, the research video could be taken as a reminder of the factual, global rise of antisemitism in the twenty-first century; in Italy represented by the extreme right-wing, neofascist political group Forza Nuova. The country that has seen the most prominent rise in antisemitic ideology is the United States of America.

Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material. The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the mini-essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system. Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019). I use visual art and figurative examples as illustrations, adapting from methods, such as the example, used in analytic philosophy. I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive: "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued. Artworks and archival artistic material are offered for aesthetic contemplation; they don't possess any "magical" qualities, they don't cause any phenomena or events in the world. In this view, I ordered this exposition as a design proposal for two independent, yet interconnected exhibitions: one for the final artistic exhibition show; and one as a general overview for the artist's studio, set up as a stand alone, if parallel, exhibition. The conception of two parallel expositions as mocks of two parallel exhibitions is inspired by Jean Baudrillard's concept of "hyperreality", which refers to the blurring between reality and simulated representations, when sometimes, influenced by media, film, television, advertising, people tend to accept images or perceptions not corresponding to actual reality. The exposition hints at artists and others, who use different modes of communication, as skillfully exploiting the Baudrillardian concept of "hyperreality", with its accompanied "simulacra" and "simulations", for making indirect references on a sociological level; as well as for putting forward a critical commentary on the artistic and conceptual level.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. Otherwise, it is loosely structured in a manner inspired by television series. I used heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition displays loosely and in lay terms vocabulary as rhetorical devices from analytic metaphysics, as well as gender and romance studies; for instance, I use the word "unactualised" to refer to individuals, who are real and concrete, who exist independently of my mind, however they were not "actualised" in my so-called personal life and dating practices: for that, I would have to select them, in order for them to be "instantiated" in my dating. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying neo-Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For "Panos" ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') (and Nick) - August, September, and October 2024 (March 1996). For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Sharon''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan'; Black 'Humbert Humbert' meme (and friend), 'Miloud'; Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', 'Nesseem' and 'Didi' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, July, August, September, as well as November to December 2025; again January 2026, with 'Prudence' in Paris. Seven men of colour and seven white men, who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. All my drawings were stolen in Paris and Brussels, in 2025. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

Vanessa Theme Ament’s "The Foley Grail" was, for a long time, the only publication to discuss in detail the art of film sound effects (foley). In this issue, we review the third edition of the book while in dialogue with the author herself.

Norths: Navigating Instability By Ear exposes a diversity of transdisciplinary artistic research threads within Norths, a growing body of environmental sound art practice at an intersection of data and listening experience. By rendering intangible data representations physically perceptible, ‘northness’ - understood as location, place, idea, and fiction - becomes a site for material interrogation of ‘standards’ applied to measurement, perception, being, knowing, and acting. Critical phenomenological and ecological issues emerge from the noise encountered when sonifying (near) real-time seismic and geomagnetic data, as well as data from communication systems. In the present exposition conceptual corollaries from my experience making, reflecting on, and exhibiting these works are diffracted through language in a project to expose the material propositions of these works themselves. Cross-modulation (feedback) loops established within this exposition connect artistic practice to philosophical-linguistic expression, providing both an explication and an exploratory continuation of my ongoing research practice.

Pětice skladatelů – pedagog, tři studenti a jedna studentka se vydali naslouchat zvukové krajině polského předhůří Krkonoš, aby zkoumali vliv subjektivní percepce na výslednou podobu skladby. Nejdříve zaznamenávali své zvukoprostorové poslechové zkušenosti graficky do skicáků. Vzápětí formulovali tvůrčí záměry skladeb pro komorní ansámbl, které z těchto zkušeností vycházejí. V následujících čtyřech měsících zkomponovali studie s vědomím, že jsou určeny ke studiové realizaci. Kompoziční studie poté sami nahráli a celý proces společně reflektovali. Předložený text vstupuje do kontextu akustické ekologie, instrumentální syntézy a počítačem podporované skladby. Navazuje na kontinuální umělecký výzkum na katedře skladby HAMU v oblasti zvuku a prostoru a tvůrčích aplikací výsledků. Jeho cílem je prozkoumávat vztahy mezi subjektivní zvukoprostorovou zkušeností, volbou kompozičních strategií a výslednou podobou skladby. Five composers – one teacher and four students – set out to listen to the soundscape of the Polish foothills of the Giant Mountains in order to explore the influence of subjective perception on the final shape of a composition. First, they noted down their sound-spatial listening experiences graphically in sketchbooks. They then formulated creative ideas for chamber ensemble compositions based on these experiences. Over the next four months, they wrote compositional studies with the intention of recording them in the studio. They then recorded the studies themselves and reflected on the entire process together. The presented text enters the context of acoustic ecology, instrumental synthesis, and computer-assisted composition. It builds on continuous artistic research at the Department of Composition at HAMU in the field of sound and space and the creative application of the results. Its goal is to explore the relationships between subjective sound-spatial experience, the choice of compositional strategies, and the resulting shape of the composition.