Vasiliki interviews sol


i think i need to introduce the key point, being the incommensurable amount of data with the incommensurable experience of describing being alive.

FIRST EDIT

V: I was wondering if this is your first time visiting our city, and what you think of the museum?


S: Actually I came here a few years before and I visited the museum to see a festival of experimental animated films. I liked the museum a lot. what really excited about the museum was the way it connects its film program with its art program. and that having this film program brings in an audience which may not regularly engage with a purely art orientated space.  

V: I understand you are now based in both Rotterdam and London?


S: I shuffle between the both, I am living in Rotterdam and have my studio there, but I am still exhibit in London.  

V: Both cities seem to embrace the museum form and the multi discipline concept that our museum supports. I was wondering if this is a part of your work or your practice and research? It seems like your choices of the cities seem to be really close to the concept of the museum. How do you engage with the concept of the museum?  

this will be in a box

S: Well, I didn’t grow up in London, but I spend most of my artistic life there so London has formed more my artistic sensibilities, rather than moving there to be around the gallery and museum world, its actually the other way round, I grow up in a very small town and I moved to London, and there the mass of galleries and museums influenced my practise. I moved to Rotterdam for a masters program, though the Dutch do have a very strong program of support for public art and museums.

V: For the exhibition we chose three recent works, could you please talk a bit more about these choices? You could you maybe introduce each one and describe them more extensively?


S: Primarily I chose these pieces because I think that they engage the moving image in a way which has a relation to the cinematic but which isn’t represented much in cinema. I thought it might be quite nice if the audience is coming into the show in this particular way, a time based image practice, in an art orientated cinema. I thought it would be quite nice addressing this type of program. having things which are either expanded cinema, so moving image installations or work that doesn’t operate in the same way as cinema.  

V: Could you talk a bit more about your understanding of moving image? If I remember well a lot of your work has to do with an archive, which is a rather still form of representation. And a lot of the video work involves motion but not really moving. Before we have talked about research based on TV News and the poetic languages of repetition and trauma it uses.

S: I came to moving image through sculpture from painting and ended up working with more classical durational practices. I think I am still attracted to this sort of stasis that is native to painting and sculpture but isn’t quite as native to the moving image. within the installations I like being able to present information not in a narrative way but in way that is linear, one thing after another but it doesn’t take you away anywhere, its quite static, it builds up in layers in a sculptural way, it creates a place. A lot of the research I’m working on is quite historical, its things that are rather cemented, and so its a matter of looking for ways to tell these stories and using mechanisms like repetition to layer minor changes to the understanding of something which could be told very quickly and easily, using durational methods kind of grow it in layers rather than using a film to tell a story over an hour, but kind of telling the story in two minutes, and then introducing complexity and subjectivities to it through that longer durational arc.


V: I am pretty sure that what we discussed so far would cover most of the aspects in your work. I was wondering if you could speak about each work independently?

S: I would like to show three works that I finished quite recently. I think that the three operate in quite different ways but that they present a similar kind of sculptural stasis on different sides of the screen. I’ll start with the largest one, which is called ‘ a civil engineer’. It’s a room sized sculptural installation with four screens and one projection screen which I finished at the end of last year, and the aim was to create this sense of a latent stasis, that there is possibly a character who imagination is made inadequate by his living condition, and his living conditions are made inadequate by his imagination. there is both a divide and a link between his working environment which is empty and his imaginative environment which is also empty, and it maybe forcedly non-functional, there is not chair, etc. but there are kind of visual links between the the con tent on the screens in the working environment which is kind of more functional and the imaginative environment which is material from third, second life or imaginary interview, or from computer games.


V before you go on could i ask something, you often use the word sculptural, and i understand that in the past you came from a sculptural background, and even painting, i wonder, how do you include or how do you determine this in terms of installation, as you often use the words installation and sculptural, but also the 2d image and so on, but nevertheless its like a still moving, or no senses moving image,


s you mean, there is a sense of motion without progress? it doesn’t change state, its static?


v and also, its not just something you can actually engage with it directly, you can just see it, in a way, it includes a part of an engaging with it, but its a more passive engagement, like a cinematic audience in a way, you go to the cinema, you choose the film, but in another way, you are just watching the film, you don’t, you cannot interact with it, no matter how strong or powerful it can be.


s i think thats something about the possibilities outside cinema, you have an emotional engagement with it but no interaction, and i think thats something about why i like to use animals, because its clear that any emotional engagement with that is a projection, and it is quite static and their motives are quite veiled to us, trying to understand them as humans, their drive. but in terms of the sculptural and installational, i think, i think as an editing practise that i operate in way which i relate to my sculptural practise which i see as being quite aggregator, and being made up of quite discrete units which operate together, and the same for an installation, i don’t, it rarely operates clearly as a story, one of the pieces I’m showing, Black Sun, is more of a narrative story situation but its also a very loose story, which just acts as cement for sets of information building blocks, and its kind of like a text installation almost. with the text its just a way of arranging these pieces of stuff, which i see as quite a sculptural practise, as editing. which


v using the word editing brought me back to something i really admire in your work, which is the concept of poetry, could you talk a bit about that, because for me, its very obvious in some pieces, I can see it even in words, even though i know they are coming from, maybe news, but even with the piece with three monitors, which i have seen in your previous show, it iwas also very poetic view of the situation, or the voice of the woman is amazing, and her figure, and also in that piece there is a part where she is moving through an apartment, and some of the things are from news, and so how do you engage the poetic. or do you even acknowledge this as poetic, or just a way of writing, because you can also deny =, not accept this as a poetic gesture? 
s yeah, i agree with you. and i think i conform to what is maybe quite an english tradition of romanticising poetry where it doesnt exist purely as poetry, where perhaps the language that is used to come to terms with, say, a cataclysmic event. by necessity almost its too much for an everyday discourse and so it becomes poetic, even in the newsreader, and when an interaction with space or an inability to conform a disappointment or depression with a reality that you have to come to terms with, by necessity become quite poetic and i think there is something in that place where the everyday can’t come to terms with itself or an event that you experience can’t come to terms with itself that becomes quite poetic.


v i think we have come to and end. thank you very much. I’m looking forward to working with you oh we have more time, the monitor has just let me know that we have another 5 minutes, so could you tell me a bit more about the third piece? because so far we have not really had much about it.


s yeah, so there is a three screen piece, which is three synched channels, called ctrl esc cmd, which talks about human interactions with animals as controlling, escaping and the failure to command, kind of as a veiled referencer to becoming a useful member of society as a work/capitalist structure demands and the third piece is maybe a little more complex or veiled. 
it tells a story which is very loosely based on heart of darkness by joseph conrad, which again, i think is a nice cinematic reference for apocalypse now which i understand you are showing as part of your war films season next….next month?


v yes, next next month, in two months.


s um and which i think does a simlar thing, which takes the overwhelming experiences, which are everyday for the members of the military which are there and they become poetic, i mean, visually, but the piece itself tells the story of a trading altorhyth going in search of a data scraping algorhyth, as though they are characters, spoken in the first person by this, as a journal by this trading bot and, as i said, its a way of glueing together bits of information about whats happening to the physical world as a result of stock trading which is taking place as increasingly fast rates and the channels which are being placed around the world, so that these trades can take place more quickly because having to take a cable round a mountain means that you loose millions of dollars a day in lost trade time, because its an extra few milliseconds to go around, because the trades are happening at such inhuman speed, and they are kind of out of the control of human beings now, you can get a flash economic collapse which will happen in five minutes, too quickly for anyone to understand. so really its just a way of trying to humanise s a global situation which has been created by humans, but is ultimately totally inhuman, but has a real effect on us, like looking at austerity politics as a result of financial breakdowns, and looking at our pensions, which, i personally don’t have a pension, i impinge, you


v not yet


s you must have one as part of the institution? ]


v yeah, a small percent, its under constant negotiations

s and its part of a pot which is being played with on the stock market, and so the value of that is dependent on computers operating as speeds which we as humans can’t perceive the screens change, the screens themselves can’t change as a rate which can keep up with the numbers which are changing for the trading, and so i kind of wanted the story to be that and the imagery either directly relates to the things its talking about, as animals, or its a way of analogising the situation, and beautifying it, so flocks of birds stand in for millions of little pieces of code which operate consecutively to try and make a trade happen, and the same for shoals of fish, and the rules that you can use to predict flocks of birds can also be used to predict trading events on this scale. i don’t want it to eb a didactic tool. but i want it to kind of illuminate the face that this is an almost un-understandable situation.


v 
the last question 
how would you liker she audience to engage, what do you want them to get out of the visit? how do you expect them to react? are you going to do any like, seminar or something or special evenings? you are talking a lot about the global and the uman time and something that takes out of our understanding of tie and that that creates maybe a common space of understanding in your work

s well, i would like people partly just to be excited by the visuals and go away with the sense that there are things affecting their lives which you don’t think about but you can think through in visual terms by comparing to something other. which is an important tool for me i would like to do a public program of talks, especially as here in holland you had the first stock exchange but I’m not sure if that is going to happen but I’m not sure what state we are in


v and i think we are also working on it, quite intensely


s yeah


v we all hope that its going to happen


s so. yeah more information to follow/…….. on that.

three works

black sun ctrl ecs cmd civil engineer

[Steve with editor's hat on says: can we have something informing us about THE WORK people are coming to see right up front- 1 sentence description will do it.]

i think i need to introduce the incommensurable amount of data with the incommensurable experience of describing being alive.

V: I was wondering if it is your first time visiting our city and what do you think of the museum?

S:Actually I came a few years before and I visited the museum when it was an festival of an experimental animated films I came to see. I liked the museum a lot. I really excited about the museum the way it -----connects its fun program with its artistic program. Having this film program it means that it makes it accessible to more people that wouldn’t necessarily have access to it.

  V: I understand you are now based in Rotterdam or in London?

S: I shuffle between the both I am living in Rotterdam and have my studio there, but I am still exhibit in London.  

V: Both cities seem to embrace the concept that our museum has I was wondering if this is a part of your work or your practice, research? It seems like your choices of the cities seem to be really close to the concept of the museum. How do you engage with the concept of the museum?  

S: well I guess… I didn’t grow up in London, but I spend most f my artistic life there so I guess living in London has formed more my artistic sensibilities, rather than moving there for that, each being the other way around, I grow up in a very small town and I moved to London. And Rotterdam I moved there for pragmatic reason, I moved there to do a master, though they do have a very strong support to public art and museum do have a very strong support.  

V: from what I understand we asked to choose three works could you please talk a bit more about why you choose these three works? You could you maybe one word for each one? and then describe them more extensively. Or what ever make you feel more comfortable.

S: Primarily I think I choose this works because they engage the moving image in a way that has a relation to cinematic but doesn’t necessarily is connected with cinematic representation moving image. I thought it might be quite nice if the audience is coming through this particular way, a time based image practice, art cinema, I thought it would be quite nice addressing this type of product, have thing that are expanded cinema, moving image installation or moving work that doesn’t work in the same way as cinema.  

V: Could you talk a bit more from your perceptive about the concept of moving image how do you understand it? If I remember well one of your works had to do with an archive, which was a rather still representation. It was moving but not really moving. Also another piece was about a research for the News, and another that had to do a lot with a experimentation work that connect more with the test.  

S: I came to moving image through painting and then sculpture and ended up working with more classical durational practices. I think I am still attracted to this sort of status that is native to painting and sculpture but isn’t quite as native to the moving image. In the installations I try to present information s not in a narrative way but in way that is linear, one thing after another but it doesn’t take you away is static, in a sculptural way, it creates a place. And in research elements, and I am looking of telling the stories at the moment I work in a rather historical research is things that are rather cemented, by repetition, try telling the same story to construct minor changes to the understanding what could be understand really quickly and easily, using durational methods kind of grow it in one place rather than using a film a tell in a hour, but kind of telling the story in two minutes.

V: I am pretty sure that what we discussed so far it would caver most of the aspects in your work. I was wondering if you could speak about each work independently?

S: I would like to show three works that I finished quite recently. I think you may have seen all of them, but I am sure you defiantly saw the one I finished last December, which is a five channel video installation. Could you repeat the question?

  And I in away is the same, is linear but it doesn’t necessarily has a linear

v just to give a more detailed description of each work individually and to describe, the narrative or the style, somethings that have to do with your ideas and why. i would be also interested to know which parts of the description you would prefer to emphasise on the work. so you could tell us why you did one and then, the durations and the timelines for the others. for me its important to know how you engage with these artworks

s well i think that the three operate specially in quite different ways but they present a similar kind of sculptural stasis on different sides of the screen. ill start with one, which i think you have seems which is called ‘ a civil engineer’ which is like a medium sized sculptural installation with four screens and one projection screen. on projection. which i finished at the end of last year, and the aim was to create this sense of a latent stasis, that there is possibly a character who imagination is made inadequate by his living condition, and his living conditions are made inadequate by his imagination. there is a divide between his working environment which is empty and his imaginative environment which is also empty, and it maybe forcedly non-functional, there is not chair, etc. but there are kind of visual links between the the con tent on the screens in the working environment which is kind of more functional and the imaginative environment which is material from third, second life or imaginary interview, or from computer games.

V before you go on could i ask something, you often use the word sculptural, and i understand that in the past you came from a sculptural background, and even painting, i wonder, how do you include or how do you determine this in terms of installation, as you often use the words installation and sculptural, but also the 2d image and so on, but nevertheless its like a still moving, or no senses moving image,

s

you mean, there is a sense of motion without progress? it doesn’t change state, its static?

v and also, its not just something you can actually engage with it directly, you can just see it, in a way, it includes a part of an engaging with it, but its a more passive engagement, like a cinematic audience in a way, you go to the cinema, you choose the film, but in another way, you are just watching the film, you don’t, you cannot interact with it, no matter how strong or powerful it can be.

s i think thats something about the possibilities outside cinema, you have an emotional engagement with it but no interaction, and i think thats something about why i like to use animals, because its clear that any emotional engagement with that is a projection, and it is quite static and their motives are quite veiled to us, trying to understand them as humans, their drive. but in terms of the sculptural and installational, i think, i think as an editing practise that i operate in way which i relate to my sculptural practise which i see as being quite aggregator, and being made up of quite discrete units which operate together, and the same for an installation, i don’t, it rarely operates clearly as a story, one of the pieces I’m showing, Black Sun, is more of a narrative story situation but its also a very loose story, which just acts as cement for sets of information building blocks, and its kind of like a text installation almost. with the text its just a way of arranging these pieces of stuff, which i see as quite a sculptural practise, as editing. which

v using the word editing brought me back to something i really admire in your work, which is the concept of poetry, could you talk a bit about that, because for me, its very obvious in some pieces, I can see it even in words, even though i know they are coming from, maybe news, but even with the piece with three monitors, which i have seen in your previous show, it iwas also very poetic view of the situation, or the voice of the woman is amazing, and her figure, and also in that piece there is a part where she is moving through an apartment, and some of the things are from news, and so how do you engage the poetic. or do you even acknowledge this as poetic, or just a way of writing, because you can also deny =, not accept this as a poetic gesture?

s yeah, i agree with you. and i think i conform to what is maybe quite an english tradition of romanticising poetry where it doesnt exist purely as poetry, where perhaps the language that is used to come to terms with, say, a cataclysmic event. by necessity almost its too much for an everyday discourse and so it becomes poetic, even in the newsreader, and when an interaction with space or an inability to conform a disappointment or depression with a reality that you have to come to terms with, by necessity become quite poetic and i think there is something in that place where the everyday can’t come to terms with itself or an event that you experience can’t come to terms with itself that becomes quite poetic.

v

i think we have come to and end. thank you very much. I’m looking forward to working with you

oh we have more time, the monitor has just let me know that we have another 5 minutes,

so could you tell me a bit more about the third piece? because so far we have not really had much about it.

s yeah, so there is a three screen piece, which is three synched channels, called ctrl esc cmd, which talks about human interactions with animals as controlling, escaping and the failure to command, kind of as a veiled referencer to becoming a useful member of society as a work/capitalist structure demands and the third piece is maybe a little more complex or veiled.

it tells a story which is very loosely based on heart of darkness by joseph conrad, which again, i think is a nice cinematic reference for apocalypse now which i understand you are showing as part of your war films season next….next month?

v yes, next next month, in two months.

s um

and which i think does a simlar thing, which takes the overwhelming experiences, which are everyday for the members of the military which are there and they become poetic, i mean, visually, but the piece itself tells the story of a trading altorhyth going in search of a data scraping algorhyth, as though they are characters, spoken in the first person by this, as a journal by this trading bot and, as i said, its a way of glueing together bits of information about whats happening to the physical world as a result of stock trading which is taking place as increasingly fast rates and the channels which are being placed around the world, so that these trades can take place more quickly because having to take a cable round a mountain means that you loose millions of dollars a day in lost trade time, because its an extra few milliseconds to go around, because the trades are happening at such inhuman speed, and they are kind of out of the control of human beings now, you can get a flash economic collapse which will happen in five minutes, too quickly for anyone to understand. so really its just a way of trying to humanise s a global situation which has been created by humans, but is ultimately totally inhuman, but has a real effect on us, like looking at austerity politics as a result of financial breakdowns, and looking at our pensions, which, i personally don’t have a pension, i impinge, you

v not yet

s you must have one as part of the institution? ]

v yeah, a small percent, its under constant negotiations

s and its part of a pot which is being played with on the stock market, and so the value of that is dependent on computers operating as speeds which we as humans can’t perceive the screens change, the screens themselves can’t change as a rate which can keep up with the numbers which are changing for the trading, and so i kind of wanted the story to be that and the imagery either directly relates to the things its talking about, as animals, or its a way of analogising the situation, and beautifying it, so flocks of birds stand in for millions of little pieces of code which operate consecutively to try and make a trade happen, and the same for shoals of fish, and the rules that you can use to predict flocks of birds can also be used to predict trading events on this scale. i don’t want it to eb a didactic tool. but i want it to kind of illuminate the face that this is an almost un-understandable situation.

v

the last question

how would you liker she audience to engage, what do you want them to get out of the visit? how do you expect them to react? are you going to do any like, seminar or something or special evenings? you are talking a lot about the global and the uman time and something that takes out of our understanding of tie and that that creates maybe a common space of understanding in your work

s well, i would like people partly just to be excited by the visuals and go away with the sense that there are things affecting their lives which you don’t think about but you can think through in visual terms by comparing to something other. which is an important tool for me i would like to do a public program of talks, especially as here in holland you had the first stock exchange but I’m not sure if that is going to happen but I’m not sure what state we are in

v and i think we are also working on it, quite intensely

s yeah

v we all hope that its going to happen

s so. yeah more information to follow/…….. on that.