We are living at a time when liberalism is losing credibility, the twin revolutions of information technology and biotechnology pose the greatest challenges to our species.
They promise solutions to global problems and the possibility of re-designing life, on the other hand their merger may soon throw billions of people out of the labor market.
Big Data algorithms may create digital dictatorships with power in a small elite while the majority will suffer from its insignificance. Whoever owns the data will own the future.
How is data ownership regulated?
The real danger is that humans will become robots.
The only counterweight is to realize our potential and creativity and resist being turned into subjects.

OUR TRANSITIONAL ERA

“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It depicts an angel who looks like he's about to turn away from something.    He has his face turned to the past.
Where a sequence of events is presented to us, he sees only one catastrophe, which never ceases to pile ruins upon ruins and hurl them at his feet.
But a storm blows from the side of heaven that gets caught in his wings. It pushes him irresistibly towards the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of ruins in front of him reaches to the sky. This storm is what we call progress."

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

The works in this section, abstract or in abstract mood, aim to explore / structure imaginary worlds by playing with shapes and color, seeking an aesthetic balance in the composition of the image, a hidden truth about the person or the world around him, a light in the subconscious perhaps, a harmony ultimately through the clash of ineffable and mysterious forces.

ABSTRACTS

The works in this section present aspects of an intriguing, imaginary, or at least "disturbed" reality that converses with the irrational, the intuitive, or the subconscious.
As memory changes events, with the help and confidence to the random and the subconscious, these works reconstitute memories into a new reality that transcends them.
I am interested in this dual function of the image: its contradiction to maintain established relations in forms, words or meanings and at the same time to deconstruct them.
My goal is to cause an emotional vibration to the viewer where its roots are nourished by the soil of the sensible and the conceivable inseparably.

TRANSCRIPTIONS

PHOTOS

It is now indisputable that we live in a time of transition, high uncertainty
and rapid changes on a planetary scale.
These changes happen so fast that we fail to monitor them or to be informed 
validly and basically, let alone check them out and stand up to them critically
for the co-formation of a sustainable future for everyone.
On the contrary, the modern information traffic storm has caused the syndrome of
a mass indifference or apathy with highly disturbing or and dystopic consequences.
Using images-fragments of such a dystopian future, this section of projects comes to denounce this very passivity, our non-participation in deciding on our lives.

APATHY, A NEW BRAVE CLIMATE

"Cities are a set of things: memories, desires, signs of a language; cities are places of exchange, as all the books of economics explain, but these exchanges are not only exchanges of goods, they are also exchanges of words, desires, memories.", said Italo Calvino.
Personally, I treat some of these images as simple street scenes with a background of hypothetical graffiti that I suddenly found myself in front of and waiting for a while I photographed them in an arbitrarily "favorable" moment.
The bet for these images is - by traveling us mentally in the invisible cities, through their allusions - to activate our possibilities of awareness and reaction as modern citizens, to show us that it is up to us to envision them.

INVISIBLE CITIES

The oldest way for anyone to meet the unprecedented or the unexpected and change his way of thinking or attitude due to the highly transformative power of this experience, is to move from place to place.
The unity of these presented works is part of a broader ongoing project, homage to this very primordial experience and aims to explore and resurrect aspects of it as a "state of mind", without lacking spiritual or metaphysical depth.
Because being on the roads, if one is left travelling, one will encounter places, persons or situations that reside in the rift between possibility and reality, which dare to speak of what they do not know.

ROADS, ASPECTS

In my work I try to introduce a transformative reality already grafted with elements of the imagination. This reality reflects upon the world, as well as itself, through visual elements as provided by digital image processing, the use of the photographic lens and "craft writing": the alteration of the image on the computer, be it a photograph, a painting or simply a drawing.
I think of images as narrative quotes, movie frames or reflective fragments    
        of an essay on our fragmentary, fluid, and transitional world, more like
        metaphors really or allegories for – one or many, real or imaginary -
        ways of seeing.

OPEN STORIES

What may represent / indicate / symbolize the title of the unity of these images?
Which or what can be the “opposite shore”?
It may be death, utopia, childhood, the "unknown", fallacy, fear, our deepest self,
our restless expectation, future, or none of these?
But questions and answers can’t be anything other than a personal matter, 
since of course the pictures themselves have led us to the "shore".

THE OPPOSITE SHORE

My aim is communication as the re-creation of readings for a picture; a language that has hidden inside it what was always there - an emotional or emotive presence; all were made to inhabit and be inhabited by poetic language.
        I think of images as narrative quotes, movie frames or reflective fragments of 
        an essay on our fragmentary, fluid, and transitional world, more like
        metaphors really or allegories for – one or many, real or imaginary -
        ways of seeing. 
        My concern is to narrate / suggestive open stories, building the picture as  
        language, as a means of access to the reality of the «unwritten» world.

Yiannis Galanakis