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For those of you traveling to NY this month and in August:
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
July 28, 2005
Mini Festival of the Moving Arts Project
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
July 18, 20 & 28, 2005
oXymoros presents
SCALE: 1/8"=1'-0"
at the OASIS, Chashama Festival
July 19, 22 & 27, 2005
In collaboration with the ANNEX group
4th World Project-Suspendida
at the OASIS, Chashama Festival
for more details visit www.oxymoros.org
(Irina - tone these first two down a little and adapt for D's personality.)
p.28, Surviving Manic Depression, a Manual on Bipolar Disorder for patients, families and providers.
As Kraepelin described it: The patient sings, chatters, dances, romps about, does gymnastics,, beats time, claps his hands, scolds, threatens, and makes a disturbance, throws everything down on the floor, undresses, decorates himself in a wonderful way, screams and screeches, laughs or cries ungovernably, makes faces, assumes theatrical attitudes, recites with wild passionate gestures."
p.30. <<
Most of us who provide care for individuals with severe psychiatric disorders have received letters in which the envelopes are covered with various messages, often written with different colored pens, at odd angles, and with messages on top of rach other. Mania is the only psychiatric diagnosis that can be determined with 99 percent certainty without even openining one's correspondence.
Notes from: "A Brilliant Madness"
p.14
I remember myself in rage and acting very wicked. I had and incredible command of the language at these times, and I was doing alliteration stuff --"horrible, hateful, hideous Harry"-- just spewing it out of me. I had insights I would never have had at any other time, and in the rage I was feeling I didn't edit any of them. Some of them were really vicious.
***
During the next year, I am passionately working on two pieces of work that are pushing me over the edge mentally and physically. I anticipate that many crazy things will appear on my blog as I immerse myself in research, inner images and emotions and I encourage you to give me feedback even when some things seem too hard to touch.
Similar to the 'method' acting approach, I tend to produce art by immersing myself fully in my work. My approach is not unusual and I assume most artists follow a similar pattern. An emotion or idea sparks my interest and I immerse myself into an experience that temporarily alters my perception. I want my work to be experienced by me as a first-person experience before anyone else experiences it. It is a selfish approach that works for therapeutic purposes. Third-person experience design is what I do for commissioned projects. (This is why your MFA should be a deeply personal experience or you're wasting a lot of time and money for nothing.)
Although a lot of my work initially falls under the category of 'personal narrative', the end result may become very neutral in emotionality for myself, yet will paradoxically seem more personal to others. Sometimes, I forget completely the 'why' and 'how' and other times I embrace an appropriated experience as my own. In fact, going back to 'To The Loss of Innocence' (a project for a small audience and very intimate screening), I can hardly remember what part of the narrative I wrote and what part I appropriated because I lived it when I did the piece. Every time I look at it, besides noticing my crappy editing job on a linear system (I don't edit cleanly), I experience various emotions that I was oblivious to before. Suddenly what I thought wasn't personal actually is, and it is out there for the world to see.
And I will be damned if I have to apologize for being cold, emotional, or melodramatic at any given time.
***
The first piece I am working on now is not clear in my head yet, and will probably be delayed a little more as I try to isolate myself from it emotionally to develop it. This piece is named 'Soulmates' as a dedication to my dear friend John 'Hoi Yee' Lau who passed away last year. This is an interactive dance theatre performance for five dancers/actors using touch sensors on hands, with video/audio depicting flashbacks that are triggered as partners exchange in an abstraction of a waltz. I am collecting these flashbacks to make concrete pictures in my head and I am noting down the specific auditory experiences. In and out comes the sound of a respirator and heart monitor, slowing down to a halt, slowly, patiently and sweetly just as my friend slipped away.
The significance of hand gestures and movement phrases emphasizing the exchange is related to the flashbacks. Besides the fact that I am Greek and we are a touchy feely culture (and yes women hold hands in the streets), I naturally have a strong memory of hand holding during this whole experience of death but it is both interesting and suprising to see who holds whose hand at which occasion.
'Soulmates' will actually strive not to be melodramatic nor hopeful in any false way (to be fair to John). It will not be about closure either because I believe in circular energy flowing through the universe.
Irina C. Poulos of Oxymoros will be choreographing this and the next piece.
'Conversations with my mother' (as some in the immersive lab email list probably saw already) is a solo interactive performance of a woman's struggle with bipolar disorder. This is a strongly personal piece but I am doing the research to do it justice because I have to address the inadequacy of our health system to properly diagnose and treat this mental health disorder. As I immerse myself into this project, I often wonder whether I have lost my mind and question nature vs nurture and behavioral patterns. Obviously, to be an artist one has to be a little insane so I will plead guilty just to that... Sadly my type of anemia will imitate mild cyclothymic disorder at times but experiencing real patients of bipolar disorder helps me understand the suttle differences.
[from the list]:
'Conversations with my Mother' is a non-linear confession about all the things lingering in my mind since my earliest memories of listening to my mother talk for hours on end. Conversations can be short or last for hours but they revolve around the same topics and obsessions, they are random in sequence and they revolve around objects and people. At short doses, my mother is funny and witty, but spending lots of time with her reveals the illness within. As she chooses her actions without logic or reason, one watches her struggle in making decisions that define her future. The cycle never really ends as the decline itself feeds the illusion of progress.
'Conversations with my Mother' replay themselves in my 'virtual' set in three different languages (Greek, English and French) to deter the audience from fully understanding context (and so that I can quote some really cool authors.) The goal is to protect people whose stories are revealed within the conversations and to emulate my mother's paranoid obsession with secrecy and innuendos.
My mother has bipolar disorder with unpredictable recurring episodes of depression and mania that manifest themselves randomly and cannot be predicted. I have spent most of my life denying her illness -- even while medicating her I listened to her patiently,-- but in recent years I had to confront her reality in order to save myself from the same fate.
My mother is obsessed with objects and she clutters her space and hoards memorabilia for as long as she can. Her past tortures her not only mentally but physically in the photographs and objects she chooses to display and cling to. Objects and photographs shift meaning as her thoughts shift in mood and tone.
It is hard to compete with her in conversation as one cannot predict what will set her off and what direction conversation will go because she may switch from being funny to being sarcastic, bitter and offensive at the blink of an eye and soon after she will become melancolic or self-pitying or randomly violent. The most common denominators in all her moods are a heavy dose of denial and fabrication.
'Conversations with my Mother' is conceived as an interactive performance with projections on objects and one performer or interactor. Recorded narratives play back as images on objects change context and mood in an ever-shifting configuration of a state of mind. The recorded narrative includes only one voice mixed with environmental or domestic noises e.g. cooking, television, bus stop, etc, because in all truth it is difficult to hear oneself speak while talking with my mother. Everyone has the right to be moody and it is hard to draw the line where normal ends and bipolar disorder begins so this piece aims to make the viewer doubt even for a few seconds where their draw that line and wonder whether my mother is truly ill or just really true to her inner voice.
This piece is partially influenced by the female character in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 'flow'-type written narrative in various works by Helene Cixous.
***
Phew. Now I can turn off the butter churner and sleep.
Despite a freaky start and a very depressing first half, the movie has a happy ending and an excellent performance by Adrien Brody but there are a lot of gaps in the plot. On the other hand, the plot is so far fetched, closing those gaps would seem unthinkable... I dug the 70's style special effects too but I was annoyed by all the female characters in the movie and creeped out by all the male characters.
I need to stop watching movies past my bedtime. No wonder I can't sleep all night. I need to start renting some snoozy movies. Any suggestions folks? I am addicted to my flat panel and dvd player.
via CNet (07/15/05); Borland, John
May the happy swapping continue until we drop dead!
Independent open-source file-swapping projects have not been muzzled by the Supreme Court's recent ruling that commercial file-trading companies that encourage copyright infringement by users could be liable for digital piracy, although the court case has been a topic for discussion among open-source programmers. Freenet founder Ian Clarke says commercial peer-to-peer (P2P) software developers are likely to be the ones most affected by the court's decision. "Even then, the impact is really to make them more careful about what they say both within their companies and externally about aspirations for their software," he notes. Many open-source programming projects are decentralized and do not generate revenues, although the file-swapping software they produce is similar in function and popularity to that used by commercial P2P software distributors. Intellectual property lawyer Jeffrey Neuburger argues that open-source developers could be deemed legally responsible for copyright infringement if they are not careful. Few open-source programmers seem willing to halt their projects, although some are taking pains not to appear as through they are endorsing copyright infringement. Still, it is hard to deny that many of the most prominent P2P concepts and products, such as BitTorrent, sprang from open-source projects. BitTorrent is a popular file-swapping tool, but its use for sanctioned activities, such as the distribution of open-source operating system files, is increasing.
So, every couple of years I try to update all my personal data (don't worry Scott - not leaving quite yet) because it helps me make my 5-year plan. As of today, my EVL site is ancient and Google doesn't always do justice to who I am.
With a new class coming in the Fall and my one-year anniversary approaching, I feel that maybe it is time to try to feel like home here. I used to always make a 5-year plan and it gets harder rather than easier as one gets older.
So first I have to look at what I have done and I have been a very busy girl as it turns out. Tom DeFanti once told me beware of 'breadth and go for depth' but 'depth' comes with age and 'breadth' is who I am by nature.
So here is Episode I:
(in Honor of George Lucas, I will do a trilogy installment of this)
Many years ago when I was in high-school and had to decide quickly what I wanted to do in life (this was Greece and if you don't know what you will be doing by 15 you're screwed) I knew two things: I loved art and I loved tech. Now back then, the marriage of the two disciplines in a traditional country like Greece was deemed 'just too darn weird' and I was advised to go to the US for studies. I went to the (late) Dean of Athens School of Fine Arts, Nikos Kessanlis and he looked at my portfolio and told me "if you have the means to study abroad my dear, you should go".
"Go and do what?", I wondered. My answer came while reading an issue of Time Magazine that featured the CAVE(tm), Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. I was a teenager and I was mesmerized (busted!) but the real answer came much later.
At this time, I was taking art classes and french after school and my mother wanted me to be a classics teacher. I did great in all BUT my science classes and gym class (yes I was sickly and nerdy). And then, my 10th grade classics teacher hung himself and suddenly, being a classics teacher didn't seem like a great idea to me. You can say that he somehow did me a favor.
Thankfully, my high-school was one of those prestigious snob schools with an actual US college placement counselor who helped me figure out how to do what I wanted under my parents' nose. That counselor (whom I will not name) alone was worth the thousands of bucks my parents spent for tuition. My after-school art teacher (Liz Tenny) also helped by convincing my mother I had a future in art school. Liz's class was my safe haven and Liz was my personal savior.
I wanted to study painting first (somewhere cool!), then go do a graduate degree at the home of the CAVE at UIC. However, since my father lived in Chicago, I decided I would do a double major in two schools: A BFA at UIC in Electronic Media and a BFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in Studio Arts and then stay at UIC for the MFA. I applied and I was accepted and I packed and I left and I kissed my boyfriend goodbye. I was 17 years old and 4 months. And after I confused my advisors at both schools art offices, I managed to make a 5-year plan for graduation with two degrees. Lesson learned: be persistent and don't take no for an answer.
Enter dot.com era, my father and I started a business of computer services: custom pc's (pre-dell, back when a dell was from 'hell' and so was packard-bell), design services and soon, internet service and websites. Ahh...those were the days (sigh). I stuffed all my courses to 2.5 days of the week and worked with my father 24x7 the rest of the time and I am not exaggerating. It helped that my snobby school made me breeze through pre-reqs so I can focus on art classes coursework only.
Dad and I were busy and ambitious and a great team since I was a little kid. In Greece, child labor is the horrible act of contributing to the family business any which way you can. Picture me as a 12-year old translating for my father in his board of directors meeting or on trips with vendors in Europe. Or working at the gift shop at 15, decked out like I was 20 so that I can run the business without anyone noticing I was a teenager...I met lots of celebs at that post, including Jeff Koons and his ex-wife paging through his special Playboy issue, and James Hetfield of Metallica who asked me "where can one have some fun in this town [Athens]?" while holding a giant can of Sapporo in his hand.
On a side note, my family was living in comfortable middle-middle class until George Bush senior decided to go to war in Iraq and cause 30% of all tourism-related businesses in Greece to go bust. We had a good ten or so years before that in business, even through the Reagan/Thatcher recessed Europe of double digit unemployment and inflation. In those ten years I learned the basics of business: sales, customer service, marketing, packaging, merchandising, schmoozing, accounting, data entry and 'tough-love' economics.
The business dad and I opened in Chicago did great except for the fact that we ran out of money after 2 years because my father for the first time took a risk on business rule #1: always save for 2-3 years of rain when opening a new business. When we closed the doors of our operation, we had 3000 customers and were doing great. Except for being broke. I cried and cried and so did my father but we pulled through and it was easier for me because I was not a 55-year old white man with a thick greek accent and no college degree.
So how did we do it?
Wait for Episode II on my next cough-syrup induced insomniac night. And no, I won't do it backwards like George. Since I already posted the Official Bio first, it is more like 'in media res', as in the Iliad and the Odyssey. (Damn my classics background.)
MARIENTINA GOTSIS is a new media artist and uber geek interested in gestural interfaces, dance, introspective narratives and precolombian art. She manages several facilities and assists with research at the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. In the past ten years she has run her own consulting business catering to small and medium business and not-for-profit organizations with service offerings ranging from design to technical writing and information architecture to server and network deployment and administration. She moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in 2003 where she received an MFA in Electronic Visualization in 2003 and a BFA in Photo/Film/Electronic Media in 1999 from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1995 to 1996. She has taught many art and technology courses at Harold Washington College (Chicago), Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University and at the University of Southern California. She is affiliated with the oXymoros Dance Theatre in New York and The Free School Project in Athens, Greece.
Just for the record, Thalassemia is a genetically inherited disease that affects millions of people worldwide, many of which have no clue until they are very ill or until they try to procreate. Greeks, French, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, and a great deal of other ethnic groups are affected by this hemoglobinopathy.
The genetic mutation seems to have resulted from nature's attempt to evolve the people of malaria-ridden zones to be more resilient to malaria. Needless to say, mother nature's plan backfired and instead I have inherited Thalassemia Minor (trait) from my father and have never really had to test the malaria theory myself...
Don't worry - the trait is not life threatening on its own and some lucky ones are completely asymptomatic but you have to live carefully, almost like a transient diabetic! So on the days that I look as lively as a hungover turtle, don't ask what is wrong unless I am unconscious. I always eventually recover.
I may be 'lucky' to have Thalassemia Minor but millions of others are not because they have Thalassemia Major or Intermedia which requires frequent blood tranfusions and iron chelation treatment. Life expectancy for these patients has increased over the last 20 years but it continues to claim the lives of thousands who can't receive proper treatment. The disease is also known as Cooley's Anemia or Mediterranean Anemia and depending on your language, see anemia vs. anaemia and thalassemia vs. thalassaemia.
If you don't have the disease, go donate blood. United Blood Services has reported dangerously low supplies of blood this week.
I have been thinking about doing a campus-wide Thalassemia awareness week. If you would like to know more about the disease, visit http://www.thalforum.com. I help moderate the Thalassemia Minor forum since nobody has a clue about it on this continent. If you would like to volunteer, drop me an email.