Giorgos Chloros’s work, Video portraits 1, is actually not about portraiture, but rather the in-between moments that comprise the majority of our lives, moments of waiting and thinking that are rarely documented. The large-scale video projection (420*225cm) consists of footage of different individuals in the midst of a seemingly mundane instant in their day; however, the person is unknowingly being filmed by the artist, who is covertly positioned a safe distance away. The intention of the work was to film something honest — the camera is being used, but “absent” due to the subject’s ignorance of its gaze.

Typically, Giorgos’ video works are filmed in a studio setting and a direct relationship is established between the subject and the camera. In this project, he allows the location and condition of the public setting to dictate the outcome; he does not interfere with the surrounding activities, he relies on the existing, natural light and finds his subjects by happenstance. The result is a study in the simplest gestures of human behavior, as well as an example of the voyeuristic license taken by artists to observe them.

text by
Laura Mott

We are surrounded by figures, surrounded by speech, ideas, experiences, people are sharing with us what they want, or what they can. We are not really the ones to decide what we want to hear.
Do we really want to learn about other people? What is communication and how can we communicate? How big is the level of complexity to understand the others? How important is whatever we are listening to everyday? How big is the daily input of useless or useful information? What is useless and what is useful? How can we define importance?
The above were the thoughts that led me to my installation “hear me now”. I am thinking of our individualistic lives, and the flow of today that wants us to be important, persons who have something to share and contribute to the lives of the others. Those thoughts made me place the viewer in the center of an installation, who is surrounded by projections of human figures who are talking to them continuously. They are talking about random things, they are “jumping” from one topic to the other, they speak all together at the same time, they don’t care if the viewer is able to follow or not.
I invited 15 different people to come in the studio and talk. I told them that they were able to talk about anything they wanted. I didn’t limit them thematically. I just wanted them to be as natural as possible. They were alone in the studio, and i left them free to talk about what ever they wanted. All of them immediately started talking from one minute to an hour and a half. They were recalling memories, describing situations, expressing ideas, brainstorming, generalizing, or going absolutely into personal stuff.
The figures are walking from a distance to the point that they have to be. When they finish talking, they walk back so they fade out, blur out and this is how they disappear from the frame and then an other person appears on the screen. I had almost 10 hours of raw footage, so i created four three hour long playlists which are looping and never the same person appears more than in one screen at the same time.
The installation is in a black painted space around 7×7 meters with no physical or artificial light source, four black screens in dimensions 2×3 meters, placed in front of the corners of the space from the floor to the ceiling, four high definition projectors, four HD media players and four active speakers, paced behind the screens.

This is the result of a series of video installation experiments where space is a fundamental factor. We recorded small everyday actions with the intention to use them in space, see how they could work and try to change their context in some way. Space can give different meanings to every video and can potentially make the viewer wonder what he is looking at… We finally chose and recorded the action of laughing with the intention to project these videos on a series of windows. Video and sound are activated (starting to laugh) when someone passes in front of the window.
With space as a fundamental factor in our interactive video installation we recorded the action of laughing with the intention to use the videos in space and see how they work and in which way the context is changed.
Space can give different meanings to every video and can potentially make the viewer wonder what he is looking at…
In our previous presentation of the work, we chose to project the videos on windows facing a street near clubs and main tram stops. Video and sound were activated (starting to laugh) when someone passes in front of the window. The videos were projected in small scale so that they fit the windows and the sound was generated by piezzo electric elements attached on the windows, so the windows themselves were vibrating and acting as speakers.
The installation was working all day long and the projected figures were “laughing” at a wide range of people passing by, from people walking to their work or waiting for their tram, to people coming from the clubs next door to urinate, causing different kind of reactions.
Each video is back projected on one window. The windows are painted with a thin layer of semitransparent white paint. The area in front of the windows is monitored by a surveillance camera and when people pass the motion detection is transferred through a micro controller to the computer. With the use of Max/Msp/Jitter software, the video and the sound is triggered. The sound from the computer is amplified and sent to the piezzo electric elements that are attached on the windows and vibrate them, making them act as speakers. When there is no motion detected the videos go back to a standby video loop position which is silent.

Flow project, hasn’t yet been physically realized, so this is a digital representation of an installation. It is an attempt to place a large scale piece of natural landscape, between four walls and bring together the water as a natural element, with the representation of it in the video. This is a two minute video with very loud sound, followed by 30 seconds of silence and absolute darkness.

Face to face, is part of my bachelor thesis project, “ireallydontknow”. This is the fourth part of “ireallydontknow” installation, where the viewer, sits in the same table with me. The viewer faces me, while i am staring them straight into the eyes, trying to have a non verbal communication. In the space, the viewer is not destructed by any other source and is supposed to relax and give themselves some time to think. They can do something, that almost never do in everyday life, do nothing, but look someone deep in the eyes.

Confessions, is an audiovisual installation, which was part of my bachelor thesis project ”ireallydontknow”. This was my first project in which had to do about other people than myself and was depended on their personality and freedom to behave and act on their way. I was interested on what people are doing when they are alone, how they react with the space they are in, their comfort while being recorded and where can a project end up if my directions are limited in just placing my subject in front of a camera and let them decide what to do.
I gathered 12 people and put them, one by one, in the same place, while keeping the same filming angle. I left them alone and my directions where that they can stay inside, up to one hour and that inside the room they could have whatever they wanted or needed.
When I collected the whole footage and edited it, i noticed that all of them at least said something, while most of them have been talking a lot about different things each, they where inspecting the space and almost all of them enjoyed the process and got many thoughts out of it. I decided not to do any cutting in any video but let them play in real time. I put each video in a dvd and i used twelve screens and dvd players to play them back in the installation.
Confessions was the first part of the ”ireallydontknow” installation, so i created a small corridor, filled it up with the screes, so the viewer had to pass through it in order to see the whole exhibition. They could move freely in this corridor and they could focus in any of the videos that they where interested in. Also they could listen to all of the sounds together and catch up some dialogues that where created by the twelve monologues.

The door, is a single channel, large scale, video projection which was in the main space of the exhibition ”ireallydontknow”. In the video, one can see light that is bleeding out of a door’s gaps, so it is creating its outline, then a man constantly opens the door a little bit and tries to inspect the space behind it. When the door opens, the whole video frame becomes very bright so it works as a light source in the installation space. By its setup, it is an attempt to get out of the two-dimensional projection space, and becomes a three-dimensional object which communicates with the sculptural space, is becoming part of it and it opens a door into that.

Chroma, is a large scale, single channel, video projection with sound, which becomes the central piece in my exhibition ”ireallydontknow”. It is a self-portrait, a close-up, in which i appear, applying paint on my face. I am mirroring myself on the camera’s lens filter, while creating organic, warm and vivid textures on my face and then I shave.
The video is projected on a black wall and this is what makes the limits of the frame invisible, it integrates with the whole space, and it pops-out of the screen becoming part of the space.
The scale and the details, in combination with the strong energy coming from the direct staring, is what makes the relation video – viewer really intense.

Nice and clean is a real time video, it is a recording of an everyday action from an aesthetic point of view, with references into painting and photography. It is an interior steady shot, a moment that the light reforms the shape and the sound brings you back to the picture.
This is my first video, where the camera is a silent observer, which doesn’t move and also there is no montage. It is an attempt to observe everyday moments with an open eye and get their beauty.