Video Essays & Media Projects

With works that include recordings, controversial morphological declarations and constructions we focus on the following : The interaction of Place and Subject The Departure/Conquest The territory as content and measurement of time Uprooting and desertification as central aims of the ultimate capitalist mode of organization and production To the painful sense of non-existence The high-frequency alternation of a mad joy with deep despair We are obsessed with contact with matter as a monumental process and the re-description of our experience through unorthodox assemblages. By exploring the territory of the affective world we attribute personal interpretations to the places that have defined us. With a multitude of scripts and forms that suffocatingly fill the space we project an abundance of investigative movements that, limiting as much as possible the dominant meanings, expect through their differences to be affirmed by always finding what they did not look for. The two ends of the narrative thread in our presentation delineate a common place revealed through our differences and presented in our mutual actions over the last 15 years. By playfully including our bidirectional emotional fluctuations, we seek to subvert and ultimately transform the perception of time in our daily lives to that of the duration of a warm handshake or better yet, a warm hug.

Homo camcordus is a deeply political and poetic visual essay, about the passion of recording that is central in the way we experience and interpret the contemporary world. The movie is organized around the essay as a personal associative journey through the city and its people showing how through recording we become “homo camcordus” and what the habitus of this new type of man is. The movie is seeking to depict a coherent commentary on the human potential for interpreting the world, and at the same time it is a critical investigation of the consequent dystopian realizations of the world’s change.

Video, 2009, 21 minutes, DV

[….it might seem funny to many people to say that if 6 were 9, the universe would be different but still when we speak about error we always refer to numbers. Language….words, is not subjected to errors, but numbers on the contrary are…….]

How did two flooded basements become the source of the pathogenic cycle in Metaxourgion area? Is knowledge connected to violence? What does the banner covering the deserted building of Social Security Organisation in Piraeus street really hide? What is the explanation on the increase of street vendors around Victoria square and Patision avenue? How many knew that the transmutation of the DRD4 gene would change the map of the center’s enterprise activity? Can the triangularization of Kanning’s square be the cause of social insubordination? Why is there a radiating sign in Koumoundourou square? What is causing the immigrants’ suicides in the haunted flume of Petrou Ralli street?

Could this be a well planned scheme which aims to change the destiny of a city?

The questions lead and rule.

Unisol investigates and reveals: The principles encroached, the mistakes concealed, the facts manipulated, bringing the centre of Athens to a state of imbalance and decadence, leading every attempt of salvation to failure.

7ATHENS24: These are the answers which will mark the end of all illusions

* The recent adverse economical and political developments have created an aggravating atmosphere and have pushed diverse groups of citizens to continuous acts of protesting and accusations, which often come to violent bursts of rage.

A lot of serious thinking and analysis have been brought forward in regard to the results of this social revolt, as to its contribution to the possible solution of the problems but also in regard to its identity and particular character.

The fact that contemporary Greek society is ruled by corruption which penetrates all social classes, in combination with the lack of a political plan of purification, brings people to a dead end. And this is a tragic discovery.

The prevalence of pessimism and cynicism in the whole of Greek society characterize this period of crisis. The incapability of finding solutions, and the lack of any possibility of restoring the prosperity and the means for development, generate despair and establish a sense of absurdity into everyday life.

The problems piling up in the contemporary metropolis seem to be common. They brake free of the local-architectural environment of every place and therefore its history, creating a new “not yet experienced” location, erasing any memory and changing every day life.

Based on all the above and considering this period particularly crucial, “intothepill” group has founded a research team named UNISOL to study the psychology of mass social phenomena in Greece of the present times.

Through the experimental research workshop of UNISOL we gather elements, data and concepts so as to put them in various ways of communication, in order to lay questions

and react to the problematic structures of contemporary society. We make predictions for future developments, trying to awaken, sensitize but also provoke the audience we address to.

In our recent work 7athens24 we refer to racism, economical crisis, criminality, degradation of urban areas, issues which create the dystopia of Athens today.

We try to give some possible answers for the exploding increase of these phenomena following unorthodox and audacious theories, appropriating the idiom of the “conspiracy theory” documentaries.

In this work we study the media image, the sources of information and its transmutation according to political and economical goals. Trying to experiment on known narrative

forms, we use irony and exaggeration through constructed (invented) scenarios which refer to real facts. Activating the well known mechanisms of manipulation used by the media, we manage to constantly transfer the point of interest, driving the spectator to a welter of well documented assumptions where the real becomes a vacant point.

25 videos, concept, screenplays and editing by intothepill.net
total duration 17min.

[Also presented in the Greek Pavilion during the 11th Architectural Biennale of Venice as part of the installation “Athens By Sound”]

Recording the city, we decided to employ the individual narratives as a tool for registering its character.

The knowledge, the experience, a general and consistent recording/ mapping of the sonic and visual indications of the city, does not provide a solid plan that reveals and decodes the urban condition. It only provides information for the construction of a replica.

In contrast, the moment, the detail, the ‘poetic’ event, this unique happening that emerges, or – if you like – that we bring, ourselves, forth as unique, can become revealing, reversing the overall plan, the overall ‘objective’ presentation, which is counterfeiting since we live within a constantly changing field of experience, potential and interpretation.

A narrow weeded building plot and the sound the footsteps of an invisible intruder make, the flags of Mercedes waving accompanied by the sound of a demonstration claiming the rights of   the workers, the crowd of travellers on the escalator, moving multiplied by its reflections, confronting the echo of the station.
Each recording presupposes an intrusion to the hard-core of the urban structure, it presupposes the participation and the entanglement with the incident described.This instantaneous intrusion reveals the range of the event of the city.

It brings forth the memory of coexistence, of exchange and of the adventure that constituted the city.

It is basically about a constantly renewed attempt of composing images with sounds, out of which the ‘conundrum of reality’ emerges.

The potentiality that characterises them is a conscious decision. It leaves open a field of hope, of leap away from the imposed readings that we are forced to reproduce.

Each object becomes the conjunctive ring in a chain of invisible connections.

Within each narrative, the object is a magic object. The narrating time can even be immobile, since each piece of work is an act of interference to the duration, an act of ‘charm’ and imposition, which is enacting on the flow of time; constricting and expanding it.

In this framework of a creative process, the ‘knowledge’ means that I have been conscious of the city, I have observed the incident, I have approached its sounds, smells and light, I have got lost and I have been found again within its streets, I devise its boundaries and I redefine them as desired. It also means that I can contemplate its possibilities, I can constantly activate – through my observation – my imagination, so as to wander and understand the city beyond its place and time.

The camera, adapted to the infinite variety of things, becomes the tool for their quest. The ephemeral, the ‘value-less’ element of sounds and images, their lightness and mutation captures the inwardness of the city without forcing it.

If we suppose that all the objective parameters concerning the contemporary city such as: its geographical position, its large-scale interpretation, the palimpsest of its boundaries and foundations, its population and its distribution into social groups, and its multi-culturality, can define the measurable/objective space, then,   the wandering in the city defines the subjective/ emotional space. Within this context, architecture is required to re-read not in the sense of an attitude towards space, but as a kind of thinking space – as a plural experience which constitutes another point of criticism towards the individualistic philosophic subject, and it leads to a politics that emerges out of the discourse of the space itself.

If thus, the materiality of a city is being approached through a process of wandering, in Athens due to the lack of urban planning and to the architectonic arbitrariness of the 19 th and 20 th century, the routes are complex and unanticipated, while the materiality is more tangible than the one of the European metropolis. We could end up to a non-typical way of determining materiality, whose value would be reversely proportional to the range of the metro network, to the high-speed motorways, to the built and spatial characteristics of the developed Western city.

Kidwalkin miniDv 30min. double projection /Athens 2006

“And then one day, very rarely, you wake up having, for no reason at all, climbed through to the apex of your senses and suddenly the wings of birds are knifeblades tearing up the air, the grass is speaking with its thousand tongues, the sliding bus doors are roaring, the crowd is shifting in the manner of a gigantic beast, your ears are humming and you are thinking this is it, this is it, you can feel it between your teeth you want to brake it, this crystalline thing.”

Katerina Iliopoulou, (happyfew.gr/poetrybox)

I have a habit of recording my routes in the city using my camera in real time. Sometimes I do this full of intent and others almost mechanically. Sometimes I am on foot and other times I do it from the trolley or a moving car.

One day I wandered how might this constantly enraged and bleating and overwhelming city universe, look from the height of a child. I lowered the camera to my waist and I walked on. Watching those recordings later, I had the feeling of experiencing a nonexistent world, a made up universe or the memory of a dream. A slight shift is often enough to activate poetry within things, a false step, the abruption of continuity, a blind look. I kept on shifting other things- the speed, the color, the sound.

The parrallel projection where the movement of the camera is in two different axes, is interesting for me, as a device of visual orchestration and also because it creates the illusion of a three-dimentional enviroment.

Noise, visual clatter, the worn out, trivial human figures are all elements of this work, but I would wish to go a step forward. Under the surface, the concern for life is moving, for the next step, the next door which will open and close. Not the concern for survival as such, but the concern for the fleeting thing, which only the observer retrieves. The observer is interpreting the world, the gaze is the inventor of reality. Reality as mere succesion of facts is a neutral formless space, inside which the gaze establishes its domain.

Yiannis Isidorou

“Where is Pablo Frank?” miniDV 2min. 2005

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.

Who owns all of space? Death.

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

[Ted Hughes “examination at the womb door”]

Photography :: montage :: sound :: Yiannis Isidorou