In part soundwalk, in part performance art, in part punk archaeology, in part getting lost in the dark; 'Άφρικα: A Certain Kind of Freedom' is a nocturnal rumination bringing together historical bewilderedness with first-person embodied experience of a place. The artist leads a night walk towards and inwards Agios Achillios island in Small Prespa Lake – near the borders of Greece, Albania, and North Macedonia – and back. En route, the walking audience is exposed to wildlife sounds and animal vocalisations, to orchestrated drama, and to historical records directly or indirectly concerning the broader area and its significance during the Greek civil war. Most notably, the latter concern previously unreleased/uncirculated CIA documents that have been released under 'The Freedom of Information Act' 5 U.S.C. § 552. This region has been the theater for many violent fights and atrocities that are deemed of the bloodiest pages in Greek history and that still seem reverberate contemporary politics/tenets. The involvement of the USA in these events is regarded as the first implementation of the Truman Doctrine and, thus, the first act of the imminent Cold War. Given the substantial involvement in Greek affairs for several decades to follow, Greece is generally thought of as one of the first instances of USA-controlled state-building. The area surrounding Prespa Lakes is only scarcely inhabited ever since. Yet, it remains a vibrant wildlife habitat rich in vegetation, forests, and wild mammals (such as boars, bears, deers). The Small Prespa Lake, in particular, hosts several different species of birds, frogs, toads, reptiles, and fish. 'ΑΦΡΙΚΑ: A Certain Kind of Freedom' attempts to (re)situate history, contemporary ramifications thereof, and own subjective sense-making within this unique habitat, inviting the night-walking audience to contemplate on 'freedom' – conceptual, imaginary, or actual freedom.

A short essay as an attempt to revisit — through informal photographic documents, poetic sketches, and autobiographical notes — a field exploration of a certain part of the Heraklion seafront that took place the morning of the 5th of November 2020.

We've spent several days around Ioannina along with members from Medea Electronique collective, Afroditi Panayotakou, and Doros Polydorou, gathering data and considering the specifics of a new multimedia work pivoting on Ioannina Lake and the surrounding landscape. Our exploration activities ranged from radio-walks to 360º photo/videography, stereoscopy, underwater audio/video recordings, interviews, and other.

Text sketches & notes from/for various (non)places, in miscellaneous languages and language hybrids. Silk-screen printed in handmade Nepalese paper of various qualities, in traditional Japanese bookbinding style with side sewing, and also featuring Japanese calligraphies by the author. Self-published in a limited edition of 57 number non-identical copies; of which 5 are to be buried in special locations and so as to invite process of decay and decomposition transform them into something else.

A hybrid AI system is trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus and employing a custom image dataset to generate new colonial ‘gazes’ of Cyprus upon demand. Output text and imagery is used in a number of physical and digital artefacts and events: a physical book comprising AI-generated text and imagery, smartphone applications for iPhone and Android, and a multimedia installation. The project is part of a wider artistic project thematic concerned with decolonial re-interpretations of the island’s history. The endeavour employs an AttnGAN text-to-image generation model and a RNN text generator. The latter is trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus, originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire and reflecting an overly orientalist gaze of the (then) newly annexed British colony. Cyprus is presented therein as a degenerate country whose people are in urgent need of salvation. Trained on such a corpus, the model may then generate new colonial descriptions of Cyprus. These then become the input of a GAN-driven text-to-image pipeline. This subsystem relies on a bespoke dataset that is meant to reflect the local reality since, not surprisingly, the readily available image databases largely fail to account for Eastern Mediterranean landscapes/culture (they generally produce images that are more reminiscent of the Western cities that host the big tech companies that distribute them).

Tactics against Antiquity probes the making and unmaking of intra-personal and extra-personal place-hood, history, and memory. Inspired by the ancient practice of ‘peripatos’ – both as a political act and as a strategy for epistemic inquiry – the artist leads a walk through the ruins of ancient Messene, presenting the audience with audio documents of, and with creative responses to, his own personal (un)makings at play. Tactics against Antiquity draw on found audio, folk traditions, abstract sound synthesis, dark ecology, politicised narratives, transgressive audioscape juxtapositions, tactical silence, speculative ethnography, and real time exploration of various acoustic, electromagnetic, and geophysical phenomena in-situ, in this way intending to bring forth a post-historical and meta-phenomenological perspective of the ‘contemporary’ ancient Messene.