Street Art

Street Art in Athens: Project Carpe Diem & Same

"While not architectural necessarily, one of graffiti's primary
locations is our built environment".

Street Art is one of the most popular types of art in our times, actually one can say that is the kind of art that describes this generation. An unsanctioned art form mostly developed in public spaces, to express its disapproval against government's sponsored initiatives.

Although, that Street Art started from the streets it haven't eliminated its existence only their, it's aesthetics are constantly now used in various illustrations as into titles sequences and films too. Below are some clips from two Greek series that heir titles sequences and idents have been influenced by Street Art and artists like Bansky.


"G4"

G4, the title of the series, refers to the name of a high school class, the story is based on the students' lifes and how they cope with issues like drugs, family, school and relationships.






"Αγρια Παίδια" (= Wild Youth)

Another TV series about trouble youth. Here, we watch the adventures of four friends while they are tring to fight their fears, discover their selfs and face the future.

Dada Cinema

" I give chance a chance as I do in painting, as I do in film. That was the main credo of Dada: the discovery of chance as a possibility of expression. [...] suddenly found that everything was permitted. You could go anywhere with any material. You should not hold back. Your whole unconscious, your whole belief should sputter out, should come out. It was really trying to find a new form of expression".

- Hans Richter, Camera Three, 1975

Dada was a movement that was EVERYWHERE!! Artists had left the paints and brushes for a while and they tried to experiment with the new rising medium, Cinema. Below are three of my favorite Dada films, which they have always been strongly influential in my work.

Le Retour A La Raison (1923) by Man Ray

Filmstudie (1926) by Hans Richter

Emak Bakia (1926) by Man Ray

Cinema is no longer reflexive it has no story to tell:
it becomes the mere agent os successive or simultaneous contrasts.

Think Diffrent

In 1997 the first ad with the "Think Different" slogan.

The one-minute commercial featured black and white video footage of significant historical people of the past, including (in order) Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, R. Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright, and Picasso. The commercial ends with a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if to see the possibilities before her.

Basic Concept

I was always interesting in the emotions that a picture can create, therefore, I am always trying to create films, with emotional loaded imagery. In this short film, I am focusing more on the positive aspect of things, by the end of the film I want the viewer to gain a feeling of hope and
positiveness that will allow him/her to see the light in the end of every tunnel.

“… see the positive possibilities. Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination... - Ralph Marston.”
= in simple words to express visually the “ positive thinking attitude” ( always looking at the bright sight of things/finding a way out)

The whole piece would be based on a surreal line and it would look like a unusual dance

Autoportraits

Sculpture genetique 1971, Art Synecretique 1964, - Jaques Lizene

Getting inspired by Jacques Lizene's work, especially the two pieces above, I try to produced a series of my own interpretation of what a self portrait could be.

No.1

No. 4




No. 6

No. 9

" The Art of Vision"

" The Image must BE EVERYTHING"
- Fernard Legar

The eye replaces the lens in "Emak Bakia",
by Man Ray.



The eye and lens superimposed in "The Man
with a Movie Camera", by Dziga Vector.

- What vision and film have in common is a fundamental dependence on light moving in time, and that what we call an image is the shape given to light's movement by the computation of the eye and the brain and by the mechanical and optical apparatus of cinema.

Contemporary Dada

//CalArts Jazz Cd Artwork





Cover and insert artwork made for the 2003 CalArts Jazz CD. The imagery was collaged by hand and then assembled in Photoshop.

//Stalker Film Poster (unofficial)



Mock film poster made for the film Stalker (1979, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky). The imagery was collaged by hand and in Photoshop.

http://flex.io/

Dadaism

Dada was more than an art form or culture,

IT WAS A STATE OF MIND.

("Canalization of Refrigerated Gas...", 1919-1920, Max Ernst)

- The Dada movement tried to express the negation of all current aesthetic and social values. Their works were designed to shock or bewilder with the aim of starting the public into reconsidering accepted aesthetic values.

- Dada works forced the observer to question accepted realities and acknowledge the role of chance and imagination.

Across the Universe (2007)

An original musical film directed by Julie Taymor, Across The Universe is a fictional love story set in the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, the struggle for free speech and civil rights, mind exploration and rock and roll. At once gritty, whimsical and highly theatrical, the story moves from high schools and universities in Massachusetts, Princeton and Ohio to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Detroit riots, Vietnam and the dockyards of Liverpool. A combination of live action and animation, the film is paired with many songs by The Beatles that defined the time.

"...Music's the only thing that makes sense anymore, man. Play it loud enough, it keeps the demons away..."









http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/acrosstheuniverse/

Step 1: Pitch Video

I was always interested in the way that an art-movement, mostly apply in painting, can be reproduced into the art of film-making. So I decided to take the the three art-movements that I often find myself been inspired of (Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism) and translate them into the language of film.

CUBISM (1908-1914):

- The Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting rejecting the single viewpoint.
- The movement was conceived as "a new way of representing the world".

=> The initial phase of Cubism (Analytic phase 1907-1912) attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceive them.

("Weeping Woman, 1937, Pablo Picasso)

DADA (1916-1920's):

- Characterized by a spirit of anarchic revote. Dada revelled in absurdity, and emphasized the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation.

( "ABCD", 1923-1924, Raoul Hausmann)




SURREALISM (1920-1930's):

- A movement dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention.
- The movement's principal aim was " to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality".

("Anatomie du désir", Hans Bellmer)

"When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we knew before"

- Henry David Thoreau

Big Big Project!!!

As you already understand I am a horrible blogger:P Guilty as charge!! Although, I am gonna try, briefly, to take you throughout this project's process and to show you all the different directions that its been through.. I hope you enjoy the ride:)