ELECTROS

EXCERPTS FROM CATALOG

GUESTARTIST FOR THE BIENNALE 2

“TECHNO RITUALS”

June 18 - August 30, 2009

STATE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

THESSALONIKI

Pensively on the embers the old world order
By George Zarkadakis, novelist

While Lehman Brothers collapsed and young starry-eyed hopefuls, still drugged with the nectar of easy money, carried their stationary boxes to the local pubs of London, a real drama unfolded in the deepest possible place of our collective human psyche. All of a sudden we had run out of things to say. The old discourse between individuals and social institutions had come to an end. Capitalism has failed us. Citizens in western societies fled the political system, by abstaining from voting, by not participating in their democracies. The heart of the modern western state has been arrested. What stands, in the shape of state hospitals, or state schools, or governments are ghosts. Free marketeering ate into the fabric of social institutions, creating enormous, but virtual, wealth for a small number of individuals. To the rest it sold false dreams. But those dreams are no more. They were taken away, like the repossession of cars and homes bought on cheap credit.

In the heart of the old order was a longing for science and technology. However, science and technology failed us too. Like the banks, and the media and the parliaments, little trust is invested in them. Science has failed us because of its inability to solve any of the real problems that face humanity. Whether it is AIDS, or climate change, or overcrowded cities, science has offered promises but delivered nil. cientists joined the fray of easy-come-easy-go celebrities and sold to the public untested ideas, like pin up girls used to sell unrealizable copulations. Technology, in the form of gadgets, transformed rich-country consumers into wealthy zombies and ate up whatever free time they had left, further subjugating them. Cars, medicine, you name it, simply added to the bill of expenses with almost zero benefit. I should like to stress my point about modern medicine because there are many deluding to its real value. People in ancient Greece lived to an old age and were as healthy as we are today, and yet they had none of modern medicine. If anything, antibiotics and our reliance on them, have been pushing humanity to a dangerous precipice, should a mutated microorganism attack us. The old order is finished, not because it did not have the potential to lead humanity to a better future, but because it gave in too easily to dehumanization. By regarding people as consuming units, the old order created a bubble of self-destruction. To escape the confines of digital idiocy and genetically-engineered cruelty we must now begin the search for a new discourse. To rediscover humanness we must develop new institutions. The only way to do so is via art. We must return to a primitive, bottom-up, dialogue with our mute inner worlds.

However, following the monetization of humanity over the past fifty years, most art became a commodity in the same way as tin or silicon or sugar or coffee; to be traded on the basis of supply and demand rather than its subjective value. During its transformation, art became drunk with glorified pretention. It is no wonder then that society-at-large instinctively considers contemporary art at most times as irrelevant, and quite often as fake. In our search for the seeds to reconstruct of a new vision for the future, we must seek those artists who managed to keep themselves, and their art, relevant. Electros is certainly one of them. He is also much more than just that.

Because Electros saw the end of the old order before it came. His art is a narrative from the future, a story that engages humanness in redefining our relationship with technology: not as ironic products of consumerist interaction, but as integral parts of tech-no-creation. In this sense, Electros provides us with the substrateto dream as we pensively stand on the embers of the old order.

TECHNO RITUALS
Humanizing Technology

by Donald Kuspit

Technique is of necessity, and as compensation, our universal language. It is the fruit of specialization. But this very specialization prevents mutual understanding. Everyone today has his own professional jargon, modes of thought and peculiar perception of the world... Today the sharp knife of specialization has passed like a razor into the living flesh. It has cut the umbilical cord which linked men with each other and with nature. The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe... Yet technique, having ruptured the relations between man and man, proceeds to rebuild the bridge which links them. It bridges the specialization because it produces a new type of man always and everywhere like his duplicate, who develops along technical lines. He listens to himself and speaks to himself, but he obeys the slightest indications of the apparatus, confident that his neighbor will do the same. Technique has become the bond between men. By its agency they communicate, whatever their languages, beliefs, or race. It has become, for life or death, the universal language which compensates for all the deficiencies and separations it has itself produced. This is the major reason for the great impetus of technique toward the universal. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society1 The products of this art shift from object to process, from information and presentation to interaction and communication… This, however, should not necessarily be equated with a process of vanishing into virtuality. Aesthetics as a qualitative category of sensory perception remains relevant in cyberart as well. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf, “Preface,” Ars Electronica2 The idea of an electrifying aesthetics, or, if one wants, an aesthetics of electricity, was already on the art table in 1912 -almost at the very beginning of modernism -when Kandinsky, identifying with the “keen proponents” of “the theory of moving electricity, which is supposed completely to replace matter,”3 suggested that such an aesthetics was the core of a modern spiritual art, that is, an art of pure consciousness. He wanted his abstract expressionist paintings to emulate moving electricity -to be as exciting as electricity- emotionally as well as visually “electrifying.” For Kandinsky, moving electricity stood to “internal necessity” as matter stood to “external necessity.” Traditional art was a compound of “the purely abstract,” which conveyed dynamic, electrifying feeling, and “the objective,” which conveyed static material facts. But in modern art spiritual abstraction and materialistic realism went their separate ways, as he unhappily noted, even as he celebrated the liberation of the inner world and the unconditionally abstract from the outer world and the materially real.4 The split in art was unfortunate, but
it allowed its purification, and with that its autonomy -a declaration of independence from everyday appearances and ordinary reality that allowed it to unfold its abstract wings and fly to the aesthetic heights of pure perception. Kandinsky’s painting has been understood as the two-dimensional beginning of kinetic art, which was first realized in three dimensions-in sculpture (as a dramatic clash of planes)-in 1930 by oholy-Nagy’s light-space modulators. What begins as a fascination with the abstractions of science in Kandinsky, becomes an obsession with technology in Moholy-Nagy. He is perhaps the first artist to realize that to be truly modern art must be grounded in-even submissive to-scientific technology. The reconciliation of art and scientific technology is essential in modernity, for science and technology are its dominant modes of theory and practice, and as such responsible for the modern sense of reality (in contrast to religion, the traditional theoretical source of the sense of reality, and thus a guide to the experience, practice, and consciousness of life and art).

For Moholy-Nagy technological and artistic know-how converged, and the work of art became an experimental engineering feat meant to “prove”-or at least “demonstrate” (not simply illustrate, but display)-a scientific thesis. (In his case, about light and movement.) Art was thus indebted to science, and even in pursuit of scientific knowledge. Technology was understood to be implicitly aesthetic—machines were understood to have their own peculiar aesthetics--which the techno-artist made explicit, abstracted, and emulated, that is, epitomized in his own “high” tech work. (Moholy-Nagy was the first practicing techno-artist; the Russian Constructivists were theorists of techno-art rather than convincing practitioners. They glorified modern technology -the machine-but did not fully understand that it was a revolution in aesthetics, that is, heralded and embodied a new aesthetic vision. Indeed, for them the machine was defiantly anti-aesthetic—aesthetically indifferent—a dismissive overthrow of traditional aesthetics and art, all the more so because the kind of work that went into making the machine [and making it work and thus socially useful] was radical. it as an aesthetic as well as social phenomenon. In his hands, technology is no longer simply the triumph of instrumental reason, but unreasonably emotional—charged with human emotion and existential meaning. How does Electros do this? By appealing to ancient Greek mythology, with its embedded existential/humanistic import. By embedding technology, with its abstract aesthetics, in the archetypal dramas of Greek mythology, so that his machines become grand personages reenacting the mythologized human drama in modernist terms.

By investing technology with “classical” and mythological meaning, Electros in effect “classicizes” and mythologizes iets products. “The Laocoon Group” and the “Celestial Visitor”, both are two important examples. The former is an abstract sculpture, the latter a public installation, intended for the central square in Athens, but it is also a sculpture, if more geometrical than gestural in its abstraction. The Laocoon Group is a gestural tour de force, but more to the point is that by naming his intricately fluid, rhythmically moving, freely expressive line after the famous Hellenic sculpture—a marvel of solid stone, all the more marvelous because of the twists and turns of the figures—Vekris imbues it with memorable human meaning. At the same time, his abstract rendering of the ancient sculpture, with its convulsive, tormented figures--the liquid line spontaneously traces their ghostly presence, enlivening the negative space which is the paradoxical substance of the sculpture, even as it symbolizes the snake strangling them-more spontaneous dermizes it. Electros dematerializes the sculpture, undermining its three-dimensionality, and disembodies the epic figures—reduces the ancient sculptural representation to an abstract concept, changes it into a “moving” idea in the viewer’s mind, a lyric phantom that seems to have sprung from the unconscious, rather than consciously made like the ancient sculpture—even as he distills its emotional essence, epitomizing the life and death struggle it depicts through pure, line. Electros turns a weighty three-dimensional classical work, locked in a space of its own, into a weightless two-dimensional modern drawing that hovers in pure space. But Electros liberated line—a line liberated from the mass of the ancient sculpture, a dynamic line that conveys a freshness of feeling that seems missing from the static sculpture, a musical line that flows with time rather than grand figures whose movements have been frozen, and thus seem timeless (and also peculiarly de-energized however dramatic)--has the secret third dimension of the Laocoon Group’s tragic meaning, making it all the more magically moving.

The gods were responsible for the human disaster of the Laocoon story. Troy’s time was up—the gods had foreordained its destruction—and the so-called Trojan horse was the ironical instrument of that destruction. Laocoon, a priest who warned the Trojans not to bring the wooden horse the Greeks left on the beach into the city--they pretended to sail back to their homeland, leaving the wooden horse as a peace token (ironically, it had Greek warriors hidden inside it)--had to be liquidated. Thus the “liquid” snake from the ocean, sent by Neptune to do the evil job. The ancient sculpture shows the struggle of Laocoon and his two sons at the moment of its maximum tension, while Electros suggests that humanity’s battle with fate—the gods carry out its will—is as ongoing as his line. Indeed, the battle is unresolved in the sculpture—Laocoon and his sons may strangle the snake rather than be strangled by them—suggesting that man does not willingly submit to fate. Electros’ linear sculpture has this same humanistic quality—conveys the same sense of man’s refusal to reconcile himself with let alone capitulate to fate, and death. And the primordial forces of nature, which the snake also embodies. What is significant to me about the “Celestial Visitor” is that it—like Electros’ “Intuitive Navigator”, 2009, “Ecospheres” (1996, 1999), and various Satellites, 2009, as well as numerous other space satellite-like constructions, including his Space Infractions and “Geodetic Pixel Structures” (he calls them all “space architecture,” that is, abstract representations of cosmic space as well as technological inventions capable of exploring it)—signal the triumph of technology over nature, of technical ingenuity over natural creativity, of god-like machines over elemental natural forces. Even when he engages nature, it is a technologized, man-made nature, as “Arti Physical”, 2007, with its illuminated plexiglass growths, accompanied by a breathing sound system, and set in a twilight space, makes clear. Technology is sacred for Electros, and the machine is a god, and the Celestial Visitor is in effect a god from outer space, from the mysterious beyond, or perhaps a vehicle—a new kind of chariot—bringing a deus ex machina to decide the fate of the earth, which clearly depends on technology. The snake in The Laocoon Group is a god from the underworld of nature, the Celestial Visitor is a god from the higher world of technology, and the former is invariably destructive while the latter is inherently constructive. It is worth noting that Celestial Visitor looks like a shrine or altar, just as many of Electros mega structures can be understood as temples to technology. They are not only symbols of technology’s dominance of nature, but of its social dominance, more pointedly, its fetishization: the secular religion of technology, the blind worship of technology, implying a “totalitarian” technological society, that is, a society totalized and perfected by technology, and as such a technological utopia. The Celestial Visitor “project comes out of the science fiction fantasy of an advanced Galactic civilization,” Electros remarks, and the fountain at its center symbolizes the fountain of a self-renewing, perennially young, everlasting technology: his technological fictions are the artistic fulfillment of the modern dream of technological immortality, that is, eternal life achieved by means of technological renovation, re-invention, as it were--of the body. Each of its parts will be replaced by more permanent, refined parts, in turn replaced by more durable parts as they wear out, and finally replaced by enduring parts: the ultimate triumph of technological genius over nature, that is, natural man.
The three-legged Celestial Visitor—the legs hold up its head, which is all the body it needs, for it is the product of a technologically advanced civilization, in which every being has become a thinking machine, that is, reduced to its intellectual and technical essentials. For Electros, this is the ultimate (if ironical) humanistic goal—the integration of man and machine, as his “Talos” figure, “a mythical self automated mega structure” or “Robo-monster,” suggests. Its humanism is implicit in its purpose: “to watch out for the enemy, a guard of the state,” and, more subtly, “an invisible watch power to watch the watchers,” that is, a check on human beings who would abuse technology by using it to dominate, manipulate, and imprison other human beings. Electros’ robots may be technological improvements over human beings, but they protect society from human beings who are the enemies of society. We are dependent on technology to save us from our selves, is the ironical message of Electros’ robots. Somewhat less paranoid, “The Tesla Project”, dedicated to “Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors and technologists of our time,” celebrates “the man that could produce mega phenomena in the earth, by the use of free atmospheric energy”—“a pure genius” who epitomizes technology’s control and mastery of nature. Tesla is also a celestial visitor, as Electros’ monument to him suggests—two legs supporting an arch with a head-like disk as its lynchpin, receiving cosmic energy-information while deftly balanced on the earth. A fountain of steam—the water of life in atmospheric form—could also be placed between his legs, as it is between the legs supporting “A Beam Towards The Stars”, indicating that Tesla also is able to reach the stars—encompass the cosmos--as the schematic constellation of stars mirrored at the bottom of the fountain implies. If Tesla is a god, then Electros’ artistic inventions are his technological angels, effortlessly bridging heaven and earth. Obsolescence may be built into technology, but it evolves faster than nature, as has been argued, endlessly mutating towards greater efficiency and aesthetic perfection, as Vekris’ technological art shows.

As I have suggested, one can understand Electros’ work as a utopian project, if only because of its seamless integration of old and new technologies—mechanical, digital, solar—and, more crucially, because of its humanistic and intellectual idealism. Their integration is evident in Leonardo’s famous drawing of “Vitruvian man” inside a square and circle—in effect squaring the circle, a seemingly impossible intellectual feat. Electros appropriates it, in effect using it as his state of purpose. Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, with his perfectly proportioned body and intellectual brilliance, signifies the classical ideal of humanity. He can also be understood as “intervening” in the cosmos by uniting its opposites, symbolized by the square and circle, geometrical emblems of cosmic completeness. Similarly, Electros’ art can be understood as an attempt to unite humanism and technology, seemingly “cosmic” opposites. Electros’ suggests that technology has a “higher” human purpose as well as a “lower” instrumental purpose. Technology is useful, but it also satisfies the existential need for transcendenceto master nature with technology is to transcend it, to create an aesthetic and intellectual margin of human freedom within it--as Sidereal Spectacle makes clear.

An imaginative steel structure” in the shape “of a Giga coil, ”Sidereal Spectacle” is “a multiple system of air cooling ion reactors one mile in height, built by aliens that will be capable to provide energy all over the planet.” “A power supply collecting loose universal solar energy,” it solves humanity’s biggest problem, thus ensuring its survival, perhaps despite itself. Without advanced technology to harness the forces of nature humanity cannot survive. Electros is implicitly the brilliant alien who can build the Sidereal Spectacle—the visionary artist who conceived its fictional technology. He is an “alien artist”—an artist who intervenes in technology, which art is not supposed to do, since it is presumably inherently irreconcilable with and alienated from science and technology. Does Electros look to the Renaissance—to
Vitruvian man, body and mind seamlessly together in one heroic figure—because it was a time when art, science, and technology were integrated, especially in the work of Leonardo? Electros understands advanced technology, and the science behind it, as few contemporary artists do, suggesting that he is not simply an artist but a technologist. Or rather he safely navigates between the Scylla of art and the Charybdis of technology without being crushed by either. Nonetheless, Electros’ work suggests that the power and grandeur of technology have become greater than the power and grandeur of art. Technology has usurped art’s place in the human imagination, if only because it has become more absolutely necessary for human well-being, and thus more important than art. (Richard Huelsenbeck, the Dadaist-psychoanalyst, ironically noted that modern man could live without art, which may be among the reasons he lives longer than traditional man.) Today technology certainly plays a greater, more vital, more crucial role in human life than art does. “This kind of power plan is not yet possible to be created,” Electros writes, referring to Sidereal Spectacle, “it needs some kind of celestial intervention to be realized.” Electros’ celestial technology intervenes in art, lending art its power, and giving it a new relevance to life, and a new aesthetics. Electros’ art draws on technology’s power, becoming as powerful as it, suggesting that art inspired and informed by technology is the future of art, and because of that the art that speaks directly to the future of humanity.

JEAN C. BATISTE designer for visionary Architecture

It was more than ten years ego, that I was introduced to Electros. Since then I have seen many of his works, of which some are absolutely out of the ordinary artistic experience. A number of his art works have literally stuck in my mind. Entering his studio, the feeling of his work is mythic. It seems that there are mysterious objects in the earth, indicating that sculpture is based on metaphors or visual phenomena, and mindscapes. His subject matter hovering out of the human dimensions, his experimentations extended out of the earthly belief system, suggesting not the artist as a translating device, but the artist as a risk device, for a permanent state of transformation. Electros rarely shows himself without light and motion, hyperactive, hyper-technical, hyper-countering. That replicates constant sensations of techno-fictional lifeless experience. Articulating the invisible into the all-too apparent, seducing our brain by using the over powering displays of inner active electronics, with the frustrating rhythmic motion. This experience belongs to a school of thought of new art politics or future politics. He is an urban shaman who revealing technological prophesies with mechanics of electronic gadgetry. In some ways his art work appeals as a technical puzzlement, and in some other ways scientific phenomenology, in any case his work inspires the psyche in positive rehabilitation on the spirit in relation to the world as we know it today. Scientific and electronic works of art are the associations and obsession that come from some beep place inside the mental structure that is meticulously transformed into Electros’ amazing work of art. His work illuminating and entertaining, takes you to a tour de force of lucid voyage of artificial tranquility something like of an area of eleven dimensions. To my knowledge he is not just an artist or an engineer or architect or a scientist, he is
not just a technologist or inventor or just a thinker. He is all of the above, he can be anything and everything in order to achieve what ever is necessary for the next work of art. He is very gifted at transforming a homely or a cliché idea into something figuratively powerful; recycling and celebrating the debris of our contemporary culture. He is among the most original artists working at the leading edge of technological art today. He is a master of innovative technology, I often see him scavenging hardware and software electronic stores to find the latest devices to activate his work. He is quite interesting when he talks about art and architecture “with my art he said I live in trance, twenty four hours a day. With the architecture, I can be a dreamer. With the development of 3D Studio max technologies and advance structural materials, you can build almost everything and everywhere -on air, under the water, in the depth of the earth, in space“. His architecture looks so simple and innocent, until he unfolds each unexpected innovated section. It is fascinating to hear him explaining the work of Buckminster Fuller, or Saarinen, Morphosis, Jean Nouvel, Predock, or Isozaki, He is one of the pioneers of technology artist, his outstanding international career places him at the fore front of the current debate of contemporary dialectic. He is one of the purest art and technology artists, (all the way technology with body and soul). It is difficult shaping a label on his back, people try to connect him with existing schools of thought like kinetic artist, or light sound and motion artist. It has a link to that, but, his work is over powered with a strange political hybridization margin-mind and machine. I would say that his philosophical platform is lingering between techno performers and what I call techno curiosities. The demand is very strong from his work to the viewer to take a good long look to see what happens. One of the characteristics that distinguishes Electros’ biography from any other artist that I know of is that he built his own world his own philosophy his career literally without any organized social support system. He lives like a high-tech hermit, interacting between big cities and the wildness of high mountains; I guess he has to live that way in order to keep his intellectual purity. He refuses to be a part of New York social circle any more, in many occasions he expresses his disappointments for some people involved with the arts, like curators and dealers. Electros is a fascinating person a wonderful human being and a good friend, explaining him, is difficult to describe and no less difficult to interpret as a simple artistic entity. In times of which humanity suffers from the glorious years of industrial revolution and the developments of irresponsible inventors and scientist that cripple our natural habitat, he keeps as in vein, to be optimistic of the digital future. We always value his contribution in the fine world of art. I am looking forward to seeing his new developments in art in the years to come.

Statement by ELECTROS 2009

I create artwork inspired by my own biography, with kinetics, interactivities and techno-performers; it involves entirely my mental and emotional response to the process of development in the complex world of art and technology. Innovative concepts of art can take many forms as the artist strives for the new aesthetic order; in the meantime, the scientific questions in the artwork show us new ways of looking at the method of creation. Until now, we have been shaped by the invisible power of art history and education that learns from the past but is blinded to the future. Every event in the artist’s timetable happens within some period of time. That event is what molds the art historically. Working for the art creates a way for me to explore life, culture, and their dual influences in our spiritual existence. Art seems to pose more questions than answers. Ultimately, the goal of art is to understand ourselves in a more inner-spiritual level. This is the highest school of knowledge. It makes us see beyond the ordinary scope of life, moving from the visible to the invisible, to the inconceivable, it lifts us in to the enlightenment of the original mind.

Through the ages, after all this progress of time, art became a collective treasury of past creations to which no one can claim ownership, but only participation. The development of art is a linear progression from parallel cultures where art, knowledge and skills, are added cumulatively through the ages so that today’s artist takes his place in progression and contribute incrementally. Art is an ideological practice occupied with the production of cultural symbols. There is nothing more essential for an artist than to classify his own artistic language. Somehow, you just have to break the rules that created you, in order to create your own. The origins of today’s artists working with technology come from a variety of disciplines such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, architecture, etc… Their world of knowledge is wide; their way of thinking is not a common one. I may say that if God does not exist everything is permitted.

The lucidity of the design is always the lucidity of thought. Certain artistic propositions are nothing more than transpositions of a language from other scientifically advanced disciplines. We are in a world where everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. The future leads us to become a collective creative society without a sense of originality, But most importantly, we do not want to create a beauty of a progressive cultural anarchy. Good art has to be honest to its origins, growing out of the context from which it was born. The problem with art today, is that there are people without standards, and particularly those without language. Of course, part of the excitement in art is because it has no standards, but the art community should stop pretending that even the nonsense that we often see on display has a possible merit. Should we be reluctant to criticize no matter how bad the work of art may be? Or shall we think that maybe someday in the future the criteria of the art would be different? Do you think if we criticize work that resembles the best art work that we would ultimately invalidate the whole system? Regardless, any mediocre artwork that is part of your world definitely is detrimental for your intellectual extension.

Art no longer seems to reflect life. It directs the course of a new discipline that fundamentally relates to science and technology. However subliminally; technology always has been a bearer of bad news mixed with good news. Each announcement triggers hope and controversy and guarantees further debate between nations, humanitarians, legal experts, profit seekers, ethicists, politicians, and the Public. The recent history of drastic changes, in social, political and economical areas, no matter how much success we declare, it seems to me that we all ways get it half way good. For many people, this kind of success is a total failure. The recent environmental and economic disasters should make us be more responsible, the system has totally failed but, the world is not ready for changes yet. The advanced technologies of information are also the technologies of disinformation. Toxic information is for sale, as well as toxic information propaganda, pornography or other kinds of contaminated information, we already produce. We should learn how to live with the future but at the same time, we should always be aware that we are surrounded by media contaminated Materials, and learn how to protect our brain and soul from them. Art and technology show us the gray as well as the colorful areas of life. The ambiguity of language, meaning, and the tugs between opposing roles are essential conditions of our culture. Technology can be scary, confusing, and uncomfortable. Regardless of the circumstances, the trip to tomorrow can be an exhilarating journey. Remember, the science fiction of today is the invention of tomorrow, this means, the art -experimentation of today is the technology of tomorrow. I believe that if nothing unpredictable happens to interrupt our technological progress, some day, we will create a system, which will be able to guide and analyze our biological existence. According to Michio Kaku, after the year 2020, we should have a nearly completed encyclopedia of life that will personalize the DNA sequence. It will also be able to extract, record, and interpret our dreamy and imaginary world.

Future new media in technology will be a direct nervous system interface. A kind of high-tech synergy of virtual reality married with the latest digital developments, fully compatible with the system of the neo cortex, enhancing brain capacity with the use of smart drugs in order to accelerate the learning process. It is potentially the most important technological step since the creation of Stone Age tools. What is the artist’s part in this integrated world? It is showing the way of thinking to the next step of progress through the cerebral process of inspired discoveries; we live in a world others have created. Future knowledge will allow us to overthrow beliefs, images, ideas, or political systems that are potentially negative for the society.

Certainly, technology and its by-products can be potentially negative. People might be brainwashed and enslaved in this technological jungle or some people may turn into high-tech zombies, seduced by the technological abyss. The real future, we will never know. However, we have a chance to make this an intellectual freedom movement and constantly upgrade ourselves for the new challenges to come. Just keep your heart in the past, your mind in the present, and your eye in the future.

Today’s artists are able to discover new frontiers. Artists can see much farther into the infinitely small or the infinitely large.Beyond the spectrum of visible phenomena, their world thrives in a neutral stratospheric space where imagination runs wild and dejavu triggers new visions into the hidden recesses of the mind. The question is how do you visually represent the tech no fictional explanation you have formulated, and connect that technical event into artistic medium in order to keep surprising the viewer without expiration? This might be the magical secret that classifies a work of art as fine art, an aesthetic interpretation frozen in time. The irony and genius of multimedia artists’ creation lie in the fact that as a model of human endeavor it can be even more chaotic and more senseless than the past. In this curious high-tech route, artists inject a hybrid strain of Zen philosophy with mechanical configurations, structural methods and modes of thinking that come from a technological framework of western origins, going back into the mainstream of Hellenic automated mechanics and concepts of science, illusions, alchemy, and metaphysics. The secret to the connection with the human soul in terms of art is hiding in the depth of the earth, the birthplace of nature that has millions of forms of life: in vegetation, aquatic, zoology, ornithology and humanity with its special characteristics of creating art. And what is art? It is something that we make, it is what we see, and what we see is what we remember. We see the technological and economical developed societies impose their laws and culture to the rest of societies. To some people technological superiority means political superiority. Of course in some ways they can use it as a social and racial superiority. This is the other side of technology’s social splitting forces. Certainly art implies to reconnect those mysterious areas of human feelings that have been eroded by the twenty-first century life. That reconnection inspiring as to redefine our selves with universal values.

Artists do not attempt to discover, although sometimes they do. Science is a discipline that deals with the real world; art is
just the opposite, it deals with a world solely defined by the artist. I must say in order to be an artist using technology, you must know a thousand techniques but use only one: Your own. The contemporary world is increasingly populated by quasi-intelligent gizmos whose presence we not always notice but whose creeping ubiquity has removed much human drudgery. Machines will never replace artists. The process of transferring knowledge and inspiring artistic creation will always be a human one. Energetic applications of technology to art are the materials and the tools of our time. Technology is not only a way of living, or a media for producing; it is an environment of a culture for human beings living in contemporary society.

The earth is already wholly integrated and we are trying to figure out how to connect our nervous systems to the global mechanism. Maybe the answer is that we will connect exactly the way we connect to each other through a bodied and minded
connection. Almost a century ago Nikola Tesla predicted, we will be all integrated globally through technology. Whereas technology by itself can be reductive and ultimately repressive, a multi-level art and technology remains alive because its meanings are so related to us, allowing new paths to be discovered in the future. Its meanings are familiar to us because of its effect on us that such artistic discipline is mandatory. It will shape us in multiple ways and speak to various groups, to the whole spectrum of society rather than to just one of the elites. In the long run, we are transformed by what we experience and by what surrounds us; and the quality of art effects the quality of our minds at least as much as any other human creation.

Art and technology have the power to engage the mind and imagination to a new meaning. Each new level of information or meaning obscures what is below it, hence, new knowledge does not necessarily clarify. We depend on things despite our ignorance of how things work; nature and science intersect in ways we are unaware of. This layering technical synthesis is generally presented in a matter of fact manner. It is catalytic, provocative and creative, stimulating each generation to reach beyond its familiar abstractions in order to discover new profundity. Technology and new media arts appeal to certain people, people who experience in their world the chaos with certain order; (accepting chaos not by principle but as a creative window of free thinking of free interpretations of new realities), so that the art itself is a telepathic situation between artist decoding scientist or vice-versa through technology.

Technological art projects provoke thoughts that need a meaningful interpretation; with the latest ideologies always waiting to
be classified in the endless search for a continuation that can never be stopped. Each innovative idea would be encountered as a part of a larger and recognizable unity and a learning process would be initiated with further analysis. In a broader way, art and technology plays on everyone’s fascination with intricate machinery, a fascination that has had much to do with the rise of technology’s fortunes and the decline of static art. When your soul has been seduced by technology, you will never look at art in quite the same way again. Our era has been enriched by the cultivation of an industrial vocabulary not only in our daily way of communication, but also as the extended tool of the artistic language and literature. The titles of my artworks have been born out of this literature.

For instance: “Geodesic Pixel Structure’’, “Inner-Action’’, ‘’Onoff Mock Machine’’, “Chronovision’’, “Synthetic Motions’’, ”The New Prometheus’’, “Polykinitos’’, ‘’The Elastic Mind“, “Synergetic-Politics’’, “Mausoleum-Technology’’, “Liquid-Reflections’’, “The Hi-fi Sanctuary’’, Furthermore, other art works with subject matter of space aesthetic synergies and space architecture, have titles such s: “Orbital’’, “The Iconographer’’, ’’On Suspense’’, ‘’Planeticos’’, ’’Rituals in Orbit’’, “Innova’’, ’’Mega-Reflector’’, ’’Cyclotron’’, ‘’The Third Mind’’, ’’Tachyonic Sensor’’, ’’Cloneos”, ’’Quadra Animator’’, ’’Hybrid’’, ’’Cosmic Eco’’, “Night spark“. Out of all the arts, the movie industry has made the most use of this technical vocabulary in high-tech fiction and animation and with the development of 3-dimensional suspended holographic imagery. This fictitious entertainment provides an erratic flow of optical - hallucinations that find their way into unsuspecting minds, particularly of young people. This is a new age entertaining industry that has grown to paramount proportions.

In the arts, the industrial vocabulary has been extended and used as a rhetoric of a series of interesting metaphors connected
with art and science stating that nothing happens by accident and that the chaos is a matter of appearance only. Art is a place
alluded to the theoretical tangents of every science, by the mystical teachings of every religion, and by the wildest speculations f every imagination. For me there is always something illusive out there which I am trying to get it into my mind. Fine art is an endless source of instigation and deviation of complex fantasies with new meanings that transform art into civilization; whatever those meanings might be, and whatever you conceive them to be. Meanings of that origin give me feedback to reach the art sources, this is an important support system for me and the charm of that is that it can move me as well as puzzle me why things occur as they do.

Today’s art has become increasingly complex as a new mind product, and farther from clarity. Subsequently, art and technology
treating kinetics as an artistic ideology continue to be my intellectual occupation and concern. Over the years of course, many kinetic practices have progressed with the times, and they are able to offer the kind of belief system that is now in favor of the public. I would like the kinetic part of my artwork to interact with the machine, which coexists with the high-tech architectural principles in parallel. The association between technological art, and architecture is relatively a recent one.

All my concepts are made with multiple schematics and gadgets programmed to perform with rhythm, repetition, recurrence and periodicity. The motions are embedded in counterpoint so they can be seen over and over again with a sense of discovery. When my art is on display, viewers, especially young people react with a lot of enthusiasm. That for me is the most satisfying. I ike a reaction when it is honest and spontaneous. Young people are my best fans. I make art for a time that belongs to the future. My artworks have cycles, which relate to a place and time and becomes different each time you look at them. Sometimes I combine several technologies in a single piece. Some of my artworks are manifestations of hex mode sciences and transgenic digital configurations. Other artworks employ electronic devices to produce an illusion of natural phenomena. For instance, my installations ‘’Electronic Rain” (which was exhibited in the current museum) and “Scientific Remedy‘’ have a sensation of a techno-physical puzzlement like a 3-dimensional animation, transforming the physical space into an optical techno performance. A recent installation entitled ‘’Arti-Physical’’ is a frozen garden across the dark space which becomes a mystical display of a transparent crystallization of light and color, turning into a techno-physical ritual to attain nature’s way of purification. The iconography of this installation is an imagined artificial scene, a landscape of repetitive industrial materials.

Other times, a piece of my artwork captures the eye solely for its cheerful or playful ingenuity. My artwork has an active existence in present time in the viewer’s intimate space, co-existing with the viewer in a way that static art never can. Some of my other projects are interactive, they activate with the appearance of the viewer who then becomes the force of a momentary virtual situation. With the absence of an audience, the artwork hibernates indefinitely. The uniqueness of art made
with technology, which results, in a kinetic act or in a structural event, often leads to a very powerful mind-bending effect. That effect merges to an illusionary experience like an equation fractal activity, which takes place between the concept of the
act and its content. This is an association in which both events retain an identity enriched by intercourse, where their respective roles are continuously transposed, and the focus of illusion is in constant fluctuation with the axis of actuality.

This is the framework that shows the rebirth of the contemporary dialectic, and it is this framework that successfully developed
the tradition of the new in art. The results are alternately called madness, perversity, fetish, transcendence, superb, vision, genius. Today, in spite of our global turbulent times, and in spite of the economic and commercial difficulties, art and technology remains active, as ever, because of is capacity to satisfy technical and imaginative artistic ambitions. I would like my artwork to lead the viewers into a state of meditation. This is the age of electronic witchcraft, the age of the lost center. We feel that the scientific part of the art can be supported and understood; but it is not clear in many respects what it is about -is it about technology, about science or about art? Perhaps it is the result of a mind product. Often mind products change our understanding for the new in art.

Art is a wonderful mental malady that artists are mostly infected, the traces of that host going back to the ancient of days. Inevitably, artists need art as a healing instrument for their mental condition to enhance themselves. We are primates of the universe conditioned by the extensions that technology itself imposes on us. I hope that we never lose the privilege of experiencing all the fine creativities, which we are able to experience until now, and above all making art. Regardless, of the emotions, hardships and disappointments, because of human malice, the making of art is rewarding in its unique way. This is my world of art and science.

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