Stelios Manousakis

Noise, tekno, post-punk and improv meet opera: What can the word ‘opera’ mean in the 21st century and how is it relevant today?

A series of sound works in which the intrinsic nature of digital technology becomes a metaphor for the origins of the universe. Album released by Inkilino Records

a durational work that looks at our need for freedom, and where, when and how this exists and is expressed. Engaging deliberate & incidental audiences in public spaces, ‘Everyday Freedoms’ proposes states of being while questioning ideas about value, systems, and freedoms. First performed in abandoned shopfronts at Valley Metro train station shopping centre in Brisbane, AU. Part of 'They Gather'

A mass public participation work for audience, community and artists exploring our need to connect to others, to be seen and to be heard, ‘Lost In Feeling’ re-imagines being in a large gathering (e.g. a demonstration, a celebration) where the self is both lost within and empowered by being part of a mass gathering. Occupying public space with bodies, sound and the use of multiple localised FM radio broadcasts, the group’s behavior and movement emerges through a performed score that instigates and investigates swarm behaviours through embodied algorithmic thinking. Part of 'They Gather'

Public baths have been an integral part of the social network of many cultures – a place to meet, talk, listen, socialize, meditate. The water within is an interactive sound and hot steam installation; it proposes new ways of social engagement inside a contemporary bathhouse through a re-imagination of its form, function, and experience. The water within (Hertzian Field #3) is an intimate, immersive, multi-sensory environment that uses a new sensing technique developed by Stelios Manousakis. Inspired by radio astronomy and obscure surveillance research, the system analyzes the interference patterns of ordinary WiFi waves to detect and respond to the flow of water molecules in the space – those of the steam, and those within the bodies of visitors. A new version of the work was made in 2018.

The infrared sauna listening booth by Stelios Manousakis and Stephanie Pan presents a new way of listening together, while fighting off cold and loneliness.

Public baths have been an integral part of the social network of many cultures – a place to meet, talk, listen, socialize, meditate. The water within is an interactive sound and hot steam installation; it proposes new ways of social engagement inside a contemporary bathhouse through a re-imagination of its form, function, and experience. The water within (Hertzian Field #3) is an intimate, immersive, multi-sensory environment that uses a new sensing technique developed by Stelios Manousakis. Inspired by radio astronomy and obscure surveillance research, the system analyzes the interference patterns of ordinary WiFi waves to detect and respond to the flow of water molecules in the space – those of the steam, and those within the bodies of visitors.

Space Media Festival 2016 was an 11-day site-specific festival of multiple small- to large-scale activities focusing on avant-garde experimentations traversing fields of art, architecture and urbanism. The festival aims to involve public, educational, professional and inter-disciplinary participants and audience, as well as to engage with multiple locations and sites in Taipei and Taiwan as part of its agenda of in-situ making and direct intervention. The special theme in this pilot trans-context, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary collaborative programme of 2016 is ‘ I / WE / THEY’ . This theme is at the core of both the Space Media Festival taking place in Taipei in 18-28 August 2016 and the Modern Body Festival in The Hague in 29 November - 3 December 2016. The collaborative and explorative process led by 4 artist-architect teams also spans across both contexts. The festival was initiated by DEZACT (UK), Stichting Modulus(NL) and National Taiwan University of Technology and Science (TW), and co-organised in collaboration with distinct creative and educational institutions both locally and internationally.

Hertzian Field #2 is an immersive performance for an augmented reality environment sounding through the electromagnetic resonance of the human body. In this environment, WiFi waves, body, sound, and space become entangled, forming an open cybernetic system through multiple feedback loops. At center stage, 3 WiFi transmitters/receivers create an electromagnetic triangle at 2.427GHz with their beams - an invisible, dynamic radio field. The water molecules in the performer's body interfere with this field, absorbing its energy as the radio waves make them resonate. Hertzian Field #2 exposes the raw materiality of WiFi communication, exploring its physical interaction with body and space through sound and movement. This work uses a new sensing technique by Stelios Manousakis, inspired by obscure surveillance research, that leverages the side-effects of wireless transmission to turn WiFi networks into radars revealing human presence and movement patterns. Image from a performance at ZKM GLOBALE Festival, 2016 (© ONUK, ZKM | Karlsruhe)

Hertzian Field #1 is an immersive augmented reality environment that sonifies the dispersal of radio waves in a space caused by bodies and movement. A new sensing technique was created for this work, inspired by obscure surveillance research, with which WiFi networks become radars, revealing human presence and movement patterns. The work exposes the raw materiality of WiFi communication, exploring the its physical interaction with space and body through sound and movement. At the core of the environment is an electromagnetic cross at 2.427GHz: an invisible dynamic radio field occupying the exhibition space, beaming from a central transmitter to four receivers in a square formation. Movement, sound, and hertzian field become entangled in a feedback loop, creating spontaneous choreographies within a viscous and moldable radio architecture. Image from exhibition at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, DE.

‘Act so that there is no use in a centre’ is a distributed, radio-transmitted, installation, meant to be explored interactively. It sets ‘Rooms’, from Gertrude Stein’s seminal language-art book ‘Tender Buttons’ (1914), as an abstracted and deconstructed spatial radio play. The work takes its name from the first sentence of the text, which also sets the tone for the visitor experience. The piece deals with fragmentation, interference, and distortion of memory, place, and meaning. Emanating out of 6 storage boxes, the combined memories of the writer (text) and the artist (sound) haunt the exhibition’s hertzian space with imaginary landscapes, wordscapes, and fleeting soundscapes, waiting to be discovered using 7 small portable radios. Image from an exhibition at Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, USA. Link: http://modularbrains.net/actsothat.html

Proxy Kabinet: Raamweg 47 is a site-specific installation taking over the control room of the former headquarters of the European Police (Europol) in The Hague. The control room typifies the desire to explore remote spaces we cannot physically occupy, and the politics of control and surveillance that digital networks provide. The artists re-imagine this room as a digitally mediated ‘cabinet of curiosities’ where the site-as-artifact is re-synthesized in video, sound, and sculpture. The work explores different degrees of 'being there' - states of experiencing a site through the mediating agency of surveillance technologies, where reality is mutated through its digital representation.

Modern Body Festival is an intermedia initiative run by artists Stelios Manousakis and Stephanie Pan, exploring the nature of our current existence through the perspective of the ‘modern body’. We regard the project’s curatorial aspect, but also its production, as an art-work and architectural project in its own right, whose role is to support an artistic vision that supercedes our own individual practices: it is about raw, physical and intimate experience, built as a multi-layered, organic whole. Our first edition explored how we perceive our bodies - viscerally, psychologically, vicariously. It took place in October 2014 at the former Europol building in Den Haag as a full-day event with site-specific installations, video art, film, music and sound, interactive and intermedia/multimedia installations, a lecture-performance and live intermedia performances. Link: www.modernbodyferstival.org

The Network Is a Blind Space is a distributed, micro-telematic, interactive installation that explores the physical yet invisible electromagnetic spaces created by WiFi networks. The piece addresses the physicality of WiFi waves together with the deeply social nature of computer networks. It explores how such a network behaves inside an architectural space, how it modulates the psychogeography of that space affecting visitor behaviors and interactions, but also how it reacts itself to visitor presence. Image from an exhibition at Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle, USA