Plunge into the future of art with e-Fos event
Centered on Avyssinias Square in the flea market district of Monastiraki, the fourth e-Fos festival of new media, kicking off on September 25, brings to Athens a panorama of international and Greek productions of digital film, video art, Net art, flash animation and installations. On every evening of the five-day festival, the quaint square, usually adorned with antique furniture and collectibles, will be transformed into a digital landscape, with screenings of films – including «Calypso,» a video art installation by a group of students at the acclaimed Bauhaus School of Architecture – and musical events. Cine Psyrri, in the trendy nightclub district across Ermou Street from Avyssinias, will also host screenings of digital films, a video art exhibition, video games, multimedia projects and round-table discussions on new technology applications. The film schedule is composed of over 60 films – features, shorts, documentaries, experimental images, computer animation and focuses on special effects – from Greece and abroad, as well as a series of educational documentaries. One of the most notable of these films is «From the Ashes, 10 Artists» by America’s Deborah Shaffer. In it, the young filmmaker has recorded the desperation of 10 New York artists following the September 11 attacks. Also of interest is the documentary «Sex Dolls» by Alison De Fren, who went underground in the sex industry to reveal the production of humanoid sex robots, the sex industry on the Internet and the development of sex-related video games. Austria’s Adriano Kestenholz will be presenting a portrait of the celebrated Austrian architect Livio Vacchini, while a group from the MIT University Media Lab uses digital imagery to redefine representational art in the future. American artists Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra use animation to comment on the future of man in light of recent advances in genetics, and Britain’s Chris Granlund travels into the past in «Art that Shook the World» to analyze the incredible qualities of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film «The Battleship Potemkin.» The third venue being used by the festival is the Plato Club on the corner of Pireos and Petrou Ralli streets. The program there will start on Friday, September 28, at 10 p.m. with «1 Giant Leap,» a CD/DVD presentation by Faithless members Duncan Bridgeman and Jamie Catto, with the contribution of guest artists such as Baaba Maal, Brian Eno, Dennis Hopper, Neneh Cherry and Asha Bhosie. On Saturday, September 29, the Plato Club has invited the choreographer Constantinos Rigos and installation artist Alexandros Psychoulis to create an interactive environment in which the public can get a Warhol-like 15 minutes of fame. A special open-air exhibition will also present 46 samples of video art, CD-ROMs and video games, while there will also be a presentation, for the first time in Greece, of films made especially for the Internet (e-movies). Events will come to a close on Sunday, September 29, with a forum at the Athinais cultural complex in Votanikos on computer animation.
