Artist's Statement:
       
Ekstasis
 
I do not consider my artistic practice to be a distinct category of my role as a social agent and communicator. Rather, I approach all forms of communication and social interaction with a singular belief: the political realm extends through all levels of thought and action via the constructions of selfhood. I am therefore explicitly interested in understanding, critiquing and manipulating social and psychological conceptions of identity—activities requiring the expansion and critical apprehension of one’s own subjectivity. Therefore, the essential principle
of my work is ekstasis ( ):  
 
 
Ecstatic gnosis, it seems to me, was not knowledge with the purpose of controlling or mastering the Other, but a cosmological knowledge, a means of knowing the Other in order to know oneself anew. It is a mental revolt against the normalized and naturalized self.
  
—Costas M. Constantinou, States of Political Discourse
 
 
Ecological Consiousness
 
I apply the methodology and themes of the ecological sciences to what I do and make in order to redraft the discussion around the politics of identity—not to come to biological conclusions for social situations, but rather to generate critical thought from a systemic and ecologically aware point of view. The greatest injustices and most urgent suffering I have witnessed in my life—whether taking the forms of speciesism, racism, sexism, exploitation or bigotry—all stem from a misunderstanding of the nature of the self, and the obscured sensation of the community of living beings. I hope to make work that operates within and inspires an ecological consciousness—by which I mean a way of thinking, interpreting, and feeling culture as a function of relationships between living beings and their environments.
 
Language Activism
 
My practices include community activism, film and video making, the directing and production of performance and theater works, writing in and across multiple forms/genres, object making, illustration and design, curational and organizational experiments, music and sound composition, and combinations of any/all of these categories. For every realm of cultural production in which I engage I attempt to understand and willfully manipulate my position as a subject of official and vernacular languages (or grammars) that operate within and recede from each realm as constructed modes of social agency. My practice is therefore essentially an activism within the languages and referential systems of the particular medium/media in which I am working.
 
Critical "Dress-Up"
 
As a performance and theater maker I address the performative event as a community gathering composed of individuals democratically generating and examining the meanings of actions conducted by live performers in space and time. By expanding the notion of a performance to this point, it becomes possible for the performing community to temporarily “try-on”, like a critical playing of “dress-up”, any number of pretenses and contexts for performing social roles with our bodies—including entertainment, technical demonstration, catharsis, indoctrination, protest, orgy, or baptism. I have made performance work that deals with the extinction of animal species, the politics of environmental devastation, gender and class-based formulations of personal mythologies, the confusion of domesticity and motherhood, the perversion of imagination in colonialism—all issues with which I have had a personal experience or in which my social role is implicated. The examination of my position as a cultural producer within the referential systems specific to the live-art medium have led me to approach the performative event as an open-ended and democratic construction of meaning—rendering the constructions of “character”, “plot”, “choreography” and “text” open for debate. I often incorporate external texts into my performances—such as legal documents, corporate transcripts, interviews with victims of crimes, pop-song lyrics—by having performers re-voice and re-contextualize them, thereby using the performance event to question constructions of identity.
 
Technical Adaptation
 
As a film/video maker as well as a digital or “web” artist, I am responding to a referential system which, despite the accelerating proliferation of tools and formats called “new media”, has been leveled by the standardization of two-dimensional time-based work into interchangeable bits per second. Although nominally differentiated by various dispensing appliances/platforms, the absorption of the once distinct referential systems of film, television, video, and interactive digital media into an ever-increasing bandwidth has rendered the filmmaker’s language susceptible to the meanings found in these other, “newer” forms. For me, this situation mandates two technical adaptations: firstly, that I re-expose within the image its specific methods of production which are otherwise becoming obscured by digital standardization specifically and by capitalism in general; secondly, that I re-focus my position as a producer of moving images in relationship to this significantly broadened referential system. In my moving image practice these technical mandates are enacted by a series of framing devices: the dependence of empathetic and sympathetic responses to characters and situations upon their aesthetic components (such as the design and “fashion” of chemical protective garments, or the superimposition of documentary images of Greek Jews in internment camps upon the theatrical images of actors playing their parts), and—as with my performance work—a “trying-on” of various cultural pretenses for the production and consuming of moving images (such as demonstration video, romantic melodrama, pornography, or hallucinatory abstraction).
 
A Thousand Selves
 
Finally, it is in writing that I find the ability to most directly access the transfiguration of subjectivity. As the most fundamental aspect of my practice and of my life, I am utterly devoted in writing and reading to the constant and complete restructuring of selfhood. It is entirely possible and recommendable to experience a thousand different selves in a line of poetic text—as a reader, a writer, or as both simultaneously. Writing, unless reduced to economic functionality, is always ecstatic, and is therefore the essence of any other activity in which I represent myself. Besides writing from within localized languages for critical and expository purposes, I most naturally write from a transfigured or multiple point of view: in a long work-in-progress called Night X, the author internalizes de-centralized mythic narratives—such as the Thousand and One Nights, the Mahabharata, a thrift store, or the internet.
The Non-concrete
 
Due to my understanding of the inextricable connection of art and politics, I am always investigating political theories of art making in order to create work that can function for diverse audiences in a democratic and non-dogmatic manner. As an essentially political being, I strive to be an active individual within a positive and dynamic movement. It is necessary that the theoretical foundation of this movement be fluid and malleable, democratic and de-centered, inclusive and emancipatory—it is not necessary or even desirable that it be "concrete", because an effective movement must be able to incorporate a diversity of techniques and methodologies.
 
03/07