HAPPINESS RELAY
Why not leave them in peace?
Angelos Floros, Vasilis Alexandrou
Video montage: Angelos Floros, Vasilis Alexandrou
Video shooting: Bob Corey, Martha Gogakou, Dimos Kefalas
Participants: Martha Gogakou, Angelos Floros, Vasilis Alexandrou, Dimitris Bilmpilis
Exhibited: spacetime.community, Thessaloniki, 2022
Presented: Art Academy of Latvia, online, June 15-16, 2023 link
An interactive installation that sets Western philosophical dualism against the Platonic conception of equality, and takes as its subject the forms of violence that are everywhere and are not treated as exceptional — nationalist violence, racial violence, gender violence, ideological violence, economic violence.
The mechanism is silence and sound, used as means of control.
The space is blacked out. A microphone stands at its centre, and the floor around it is marked by LED strips. When the ambient noise rises, the room darkens; when the participants fall silent, it illuminates. A machine learning algorithm processes the acoustic data and adjusts the light thresholds in real time, so the installation is never working from a fixed rule — it is continuously recalibrating against the behaviour of the people inside it.
The result is an oscillation between an ordered and a disordered state, driven by the participants themselves. Their conduct returns to them as digitised feedback, and the environment shifts perpetually between two symmetrical conditions without settling in either. An LED sign displays the word HAPPINESS throughout, unchanged.
What the work proposes is that sustained happiness is not available under these conditions — things are constantly led to confusion. The measure is Shannon's, and the piece uses his formula for information directly: I = −log₂P. The rarer an event, the more information it carries; a state that never varies carries none. A word that stays lit and never changes says nothing at all.
Happiness Relay is part of HAL (Hub of Art Laboratories), a research programme of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University. The work was created within the doctoral research of Vasilis Alexandrou, Political Art in the Digital Age, supervised by Angelos Floros, and supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation under the 3rd Call for HFRI PhD Fellowships, Fellowship Number 5369.