Objects in Odysseys constitutes a performance for camera but also a durational work of art in the intersections of the poetic and the technological work created by both the artist and the sea. Having Odyssey and histories of messages in the bottle across seas and eras; an anecdote poetic sentence is fragmented and integrated into small sculptural objects accompanied with fabric with text and GPS sensor. The objects are left to travel on the sea surface; taking the form of drifting materialities towards unexpected trajectories. A common thread brings together the poetic word, geolocation, objects and fluid mobility. Linguistic objects float, driven by changing currents and chance upon a sea surface which is ascribed with agency and potential. The artist creates a poetic condition for the future made of objects, gestures, intentions and words; revealing a universal link between life, sea, womb and destination.
Credits Concept – Performance – Creation: Bill Psarras Main action camera and drone: John Tsanis Extra camera and drone: Chris Spanos
Territorial Poetics (III: Vanity) Bill Psarras 2020 Photo by Christos Spanos
Bill Psarras (1985) is an artist, academic and musician. He is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Performing and Digital Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Peloponnese, in the intersections of performance art, site-specific practices and video art. He has been a former adjunct lecturer at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts of Ionian University (2016-2019) where he also conducted his arts-based postdoctoral research exploring the intersections of performance art, site, technology and geohumanities (State Scholarship 2017-19). He has been awarded as an ARTWORKS Fellow of Stavros Niarchos Foundation (2020-21).
He holds a PhD in Arts and Technology from Goldsmiths University of London (AHRC Scholarship 2013) where his thesis focused on intermedia and interdisciplinary explorations of the emotional geographies of city through walking as art, senses and technologies; proposing the concept of hybrid flaneur. He also has an MA in Digital Arts (University of the Arts London) and a BA/MA in Audiovisual Arts (Ionian University).
His art practice explores poetics across different media, merging the poetic and the technological. This includes site-specific walking performances, media/text installations, video art, digital art, music and poetry; exploring the geopoetics and politics of the urban experience through memory, emotion and place. They have been exhibited in international festivals, group exhibitions and cultural institutions across Europe, US and Asia. His interdisciplinary arts-based research has been published in international journals, conferences proceedings, book chapters and symposia in the intersections of contemporary art, performance and urban-cultural studies. He has contributed as an academic reviewer for Technoetic Arts: A Journal for Speculative Research (Intellect)
As a musician he has composed music for documentaries and self-released a series of e-albums across rock and ambient music. On 2017, he published his first poetry collection entitled Tundra (Pigi Publications). He is the Art Director of Primarolia organisation.
