Angelos Floros
Angelos Floros
The idea was initially formed by Angelos Floros and Minette Mangahas in the proposal project Sonic Imago
Performance / interactive installation
Group exhibition: ITP Camp 2024 Performance Showcase, ITP/IMA, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, June 20, 2024
Solo exhibition: Greek Cultural Center, Astoria, New York, June 22, 2024
A study of human communication in the era of the selfie.
Participants come in pairs. One takes the role of the painter, the other of the sitter. They are seated facing each other, and the portrait begins — drawn live on a tablet, projected at full scale behind them, so that everyone in the room watches the face appear at the same speed as the person drawing it.
But the drawing is not only seen. Every stroke produces sound. The line is read as it is made — its direction, its density, its pressure — and translated into pitch, timbre and rhythm, so that the portrait is being composed and performed at once. The soundscape that results is not accompaniment. It is the common environment the two of them are sitting inside, and neither of them made it alone.
The reference is precise. The work descends from Iannis Xenakis's UPIC, the instrument on which a drawn line was the score — where composition stopped being notation and became gesture. What the piece adds to that inheritance is the second person. On the UPIC the composer drew alone. Here the line is drawn by one person about another, in front of them, while they watch and hear themselves being made.
A loop keeps re-performing what has been drawn so far. The portrait therefore never settles into a finished object: each addition re-enters the composition and changes the whole of it, and the sound thickens as the face does. The more complex the portrait becomes, the more complex what the room is hearing.
Which is where the subject declares itself. A selfie is a portrait made in one second, alone, by its own subject, with the sitter and the painter collapsed into the same person — and with nothing produced between two people at all. This work takes the same act and slows it down until the thing the selfie removed becomes audible: the time two strangers spend looking at each other, and the fact that neither one controls what comes out.
Built with a Wacom tablet and pen, a laptop, projection and stereo sound.