Angelos Floros, Vassilis Alexandrou

Video montage: Angelos Floros, Vasilis Alexandrou
Video shooting: Bob Corey, Martha Gogakou, Dimos Kefalas
Participants in the video: Martha Gogakou, Angelos Floros, Vasilis Alexandrou, Dimitris Bilmpilis

Exhibited: space_me.community, Thessaloniki, 2022, link
Presented: Art Academy of Latvia, June 15-16, 2023
Published: Floros A., Alexandrou V., "Happiness Relay", in Conflict as a Catalyst for Change, Art Academy of Latvia, 2023

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Description

Happiness Relay is an installation that allows participants to engage in individual or group performances. The idea came from Vasilis Alexandrou, who wanted to build a project around happiness with silence as the key to managing it.

The installation highlights the binary mode of Western philosophy, founded on Aristotle's dualism, against Plato's ideas of equality and dynamic balance. It underlines the violence faced by people worldwide — violence rooted in nationalism, racism, gender discrimination, totalitarian ideologies, and economic inequality — a steadily growing trend that affects daily life.

Visitors enter a room where silence illuminates the space and noise plunges it into darkness. A luminous square formed on the floor by LED strips marks the position of the microphone, giving visitors the security they need in blackout conditions; its central position encourages people to move around it along a circular path. Even a barely audible sound signals the relay to shift from light to darkness.

The audio footprint of the room is recorded and digitised. A machine learning algorithm trains the controller to decode the degree of order and disorder in the space and to adjust the threshold at which the disturbance condition applies. The dynamic shifting of the audience between order and disorder moves the boundary between the two states in real time.

The work explores stillness, confusion, and happiness. The constant switching between "Happiness" and "non-Happiness" is ultimately interpreted as futile, since it produces no sustained pleasure. Happiness Relay uses silence to monitor human stress and to set a threshold for the utopian and dystopian environment of our time.

Happiness Relay is part of HAL (Hub of Art Laboratories), a research program 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.