(in alphabetical order)

acte vide (Danae Stefanou & Yannis Kotsonis)

acte vide (“empty act”) is the duo project of Yannis Kotsonis and Danae Stefanou. Active since 2006 as an experimental & improvisatory unit, they persistently explore noise and silence in ever-changing real-time formations, usually unrecorded. The duo has created numerous performances & installations,  and has received several international commissions for collaborations with musicians, visual artists and directors such as Raed Yassin, Tarek Atoui and Vicki Bennett. Τhey are the founders and curators of Syros Sound Meetings, a set of research residencies on sound art and site-specific sonic experimentation in the island of Syros, Greece, which has hosted over 120 international sound artists & researchers since its launch in 2012.

Sound meetings

Transpiration

Nicoleta Chatzopoulou 

A composer, performer, researcher and curator based in Athens, Greece.  Within an interdisciplinary background, she focuses on the creation of organised sound based on the relationship between silence and noise, and space and sound, as well as on exo musical sources. Her compositional work includes acoustic works for solo instruments and various chamber ensembles, electroacoustic works, chamber operas and vocal works, algorithmic and site-specific compositions. Her artistic output as viola da gamba player and performer ranges from early and contemporary music to improvised, pop and music as part of multidisciplinary projects. She studied music composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and astrophysics at the University of Wales in Cardiff. She is currently a PhD candidate in architecture and music at the Technical University of Crete. She organises and curates projects in her space NGallery. In 2020 she co-formed the international trio WAN.

Chora

Infinity

Eleni Ikoniadou

Dr. Eleni Ikoniadou is Reader in Digital Culture and Sonic Arts at the Royal College of Art. Her research sits at the intersection of art, theory, and technoscience, with specific attention to sound and voice. Her latest research project, funded by the EPSRC Human-Data Interaction Network Plus (April 2020—May 2021), investigates machine learning in Art, Music & the Culture Industries. Ikoniadou is the producer of Fugitive Voices, a series of online conversations with guest artists, which broadcasts monthly on Movement radio (http://movement.radio/podcasts/fugitive-voices). As member of the art group AUDINT (audint.net), with Steve Goodman (kode9) and Toby Heys, they co-edited the anthology Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019) and produced a series of exhibitions, under the same name, funded by the Arts Council of England (2018-2020). She is founder and co-editor of the Media Philosophy Series (Rowman and Littlefield) and author of the monograph The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (The MIT Press, 2014).

The Chorus

Code Omega

Theodoros Kitsos

He read music at the Ionian University while studying the guitar with Costas Grigoreas. Thereafter he moved to the U.K in order to specialize in early music performance, studying historical plucked instruments (lute, theorbo, baroque guitar) with Elizabeth Kenny. As a scholar of Michelis Foundation, he completed his Masters at the University of York. He continued his studies with scholarships by the Onassis Foundation and the University of York and in 2005 he was awarded his PhD.
He frequently presents lectures, and his papers have been published in journals such as The Lute, Mousicology, Mousikos Loghos and Annals for Aesthetics, as well as in various books. He has taken part in recordings (Decca, Naïve, MDG, Aparté et al) and concerts in Greece, U.K., Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Monaco among others, with various ensembles (Armonia Atenea, Pomo d’oro, Latinitas nostra, Yorkshire Baroque Soloists, Athens and Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestras et al). He is an assistant professor at the Music Department of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

Yannis Kotsonis

Yannis Kotsonis is a sound artist and musician based in Athens. He has composed electronic music for theater, dance, multimedia installations, and film. He gives concerts on a regular basis, often in collaboration with other artists. Yannis has released seven solo albums and has contributed to several compilations. Since 2009 he has been active as an independent workshop, residency, and concert coordinator (Syros Sound Meetings, KNOTmusic, minor act). He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Media Studies, Film and Philosophy, and Sound Design at the University of Wales Swansea and the University of Piraeus in Greece, and DIY electronics and sound art workshops for schools and local community groups around Athens in the context of “Interfaces” and “Sounds Now” (Creative Europe – Onassis Foundation). He also produces and hosts the “Resonator” radio show (for Concertzender radio ) and “Sound Unfolds” (for movement.radio) and co-hosts “Proschedio”, a weekly Athens-based underground and experimental music internet radio show since 2014.

Sound meetings

Transpiration

Marinos Koutsomichalis

Marinos Koutsomichalis is a media artist, scholar, and creative technologist. He is broadly interested in the materiality of self-generative systems, (post-)digital objecthood, sound, image, data, electronic circuitry, perception, selfhood, and the media/technologies we rely upon to mediate, probe, interact, or otherwise engage with the former. His research and artistic activities reciprocally inform one another by virtue of a mixed method that combines situated creative practice, bespoke software/hardware development, ethnographic research, field-work, critical theory, analysis, workshopping, and DIWO (Do It With Others) experimental making. In this way, they draw on, and concern, various subareas in arts, humanities, science, technology, philosophy, and design. He has hitherto publicly presented his work, pursued projects, led workshops, and held talks worldwide more than 250 times and in all sorts of milieux, from leading museums to underground venues. He has a PhD in Electronic Music and New Media (De Montfort University, UK) and a MA in Composition with Digital Media (University of York, UK), has held research positions at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (Trondheim, NO) and at the University of Turin (IT), and has taught at various universities and institutions internationally. He is responsible for more than 25 academic publications in scientific journals and conference proceedings, for more than 15 music albums, and for a book. He is a Lecturer in Multimedia Design for Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology (Limassol, CY) where he directs the Media Arts and Design Research Lab.

Sāk vitt ok vītt of verǫld hverja

Inhibition

Panayotis Panopoulos

Panayotis Panopoulos was born in Athens in 1967. He received his University Degree in Education from the University of Athens (1989). Both his Post-graduate Degree and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology were received from the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of the Aegean, Mytilene, in 1991 and 1998 respectively. He teaches at the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean since 2003. His research interests concern the anthropology of music, sound and performance. His ethnographic publications (in international journals, e.g. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnologie Française, and in edited volumes) concern the symbolism of sound and hearing in modern Greece, the study of local cultural associations and the role of musical performances in the symbolic construction of place. He is currently conducting research on the culture of the Deaf community in Greece and collaborating in projects with visual artists. “Voice-o-graph”, a project of arts-based ethnography with visual artist Panos Charalambous, was presented at documenta 14, Athens/ Kassel in 2017. He has taught at the Democretian University of Thrace, the University of Crete and Panteion University, Athens. He has been a Research Visiting Scholar at Princeton University (2002-3, 2012) and the University of California, Berkeley (2009). He has also taught as invited lecturer at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2012) and at the University of Cologne (2018). He is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Greek Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Flatus Vocis/VOICE–O–GRAPH (2017)

Passage (2016)Διάβαση (2016)

Dana Papachristou

Dana Papachristou is a musicologist and artist who focuses on the combination of arts through the use of new media. She has studied music (piano, clarinet, composition), musicology at the University of Athens, and Music Culture and Media in the departments of Media and Music Studies. She holds a PhD in the discipline of Philosophy of Art in regards to Deleuze and Guattari at Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and the Ionian University. In the recent years she has participated in interdisciplinary research, music and geo-locative projects. She is a founding member of Akoo.o collective. At the moment she is a teaching fellow at the University of Thessaly in the dept. of Culture, Creative Media and Industries.

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos (akoo.o), Dwelling Stories

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, Audibility

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, Vox populi vox dei

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, The Social life of Water & Facets of Resurrection

Anna Papaeti

She is Associate Research Professor and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE). She writes about the nexus of music, sound and trauma, as well as the interections of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. She held two Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowships at the University of Goettingen (2011–2014, FP7) and at Panteion University, Athens (2017–2019, Horizon 2020) respectively. Her research has also been supported by DAAD, Onassis Foundation, and the Centre for Research for the Humanities, Athens. She has published widely in edited volumes and scholarly journals and co-edited two special issues on music torture and music in detention. She has presented her research in international conferences and exhibitions including documenta 14. She worked at the Royal Opera House (London, 2014–2006), and later as a dramaturg at the Greek National Opera (2006–2009). She is also a research-based-art practitioner, working in sound and textual forms. She created the podcast The Undoing of Music for Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2019), as well as the installations The Dark Side of the Tune for ‘Hypnos’ exibition at Onassis Stegi (Athens, 2016) and New Parthenon for ‘Iasis’ exhibition (Tilt Platform, Loutraki, 2019), both created with Nektarios Pappas.

Papaeti Anna & Pappas Nektarios, New Parthenon (2019)

Papaeti Anna & Pappas Nektarios, The Dark Side of the Tune (2016)

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri

She was born in Greece, and is a composer and sound artist based in Switzerland and Ithaca, NY. Since 2016, Papalexandri has been an Assistant Professor of Composition at the Department of Music at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY. She is known internationally for her elegant and innovative sound kinetic constructions that she develops both independently and together with Swiss kinetic artist Pe Lang. Papalexandri’s works interweave the borderlines of sound art, composition, visual objects and performance and explore the factors that link these art forms. Papalexandri obtained her BMus degree in music and her MMus degree in composition from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Following postgraduate studies and research at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. In 2004 she received a full fellowship and completed her doctoral studies in music composition (Ph.D.) at the University of California, San Diego (2008).
The recipient of the Humboldt-University of Berlin: Cluster of Excellence International Fellowship (2015), Papalexandri has been honored with numerous awards, residencies, and grants, including the ProHelvetia grant, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation Commission, the Berlin Senate Sound Art Grant, the Swedish Arts Council Composition Grant, the Berlin Senate Composition Grant, the International IMPULS Composition Award, and the Dan David Prize for Contemporary Music, Cornell Biennial Award among others. Papalexandri has been nominated as composer and sound artist in residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; EMS studio Stockholm; the Villa Concordia, Bamberg; the Instrument Inventors Institute, The Hague; and St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Papalexandri is known internationally for her subtle sound constructions employing few means, which she makes both herself and together with Swiss artist Pe Lang (1974/Switzerland). Their work invites us to reconsider the concept of technology as they create minimal yet sophisticated kinetic sound installation systems that capture the enthralling interplay between rationality and illusion. Exhibitions include the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Museum of Musical Instruments, Berlin; ISEA, Hong Kong; the San Francisco Art Institute; Transmediale, Berlin; the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; Donaueschingen Festival, Kunstmuseum Basel; The Rolex Learning Center at EPFL/Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Martin-Gropious-Bau, Berlin. Papalexandri has given guest lectures, artist talks and workshops at several European and North American universities, art venues and presented her research at national and international conferences, such as MUDA museum of digital art, Zurich; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; University of Toronto; New York University, Waverly Labs for Music & Computing; Helsinki University of the Arts, SAMA Sound Art and Sonic Arts; Media Archaeological Fundus, Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Berlin; AEP School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell; The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford; Institute for Research in Music & Acoustics, Athens, Greece; Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany; Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany, the ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong; University of Oxford; Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queens University of Belfast.
Since 2019, Papalexandri has been collaborating with Guy Hoffman and the International Contemporary Ensemble-ICE on a large-scale project titled “Human and Machine Improvisation in Action,” supported by a Cornell NYC Visioning initiative grant.

Lorenda Ramou

She is a pianist, musicologist, and concert curator. Her predilection for the contemporary repertoire is reflected by all her artistic choices. Her recitals often combine piano music with the plastic arts, literature and theatre. Following studies at the Paris Conservatoire and London’s City University, she took part in courses run by the Centre Acanthes and the Académie du XXᵉ siècle with Pierre Boulez, David Robertson and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. She has studied under Tonis Georgiou, Claude Helffer, Marie-Françoise Bucquet, Denis Pascal and Steve Drury. In 2017 she gained her doctorate summa cum laude from the Paris Sorbonne University and the Paris Conservatoire, on the subject of Nikos Skalkottas’s piano music. She is actually a post-doctorate researcher at the University of Athens, as a State Scholarships Foundation fellow.
She has appeared at numerous European festivals, the USA and Chile, in venues such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Düsseldorf Tonhalle, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the TSAI Performance Center in Boston, the Megaron in Athens and Thessaloniki, and Onassis Stegi. She has collaborated with the composers Mauricio Kagel, Maurice Ohana, George Crumb and Frederic Rzewski, visual artist and performer Leda Papakonstantinou, Fluxus artists Ben Vautier and Ben Patterson, writer Pascal Quignard. Greek piano music occupies a special place in her concerts, research and recordings, with more than 10 CDs (ECM, BIS, NAXOS…). Recently elected as Associate Professor at the University of Ioannina, she also works as project manager and concert curator at Onassis Stegi (“Music connects the Stegi and Panteion University”) and gives the seminar ‘The Piano in the 20th and 21st Centuries’ at the Athens Conservatoire. Her work has received support from the Academy of Athens, the French Ministry of Culture, the British Council, the Fulbright, Gaudeamus, Meyer and Leventis Foundations and from the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University.

Yorgos Samantas

Yorgos Samantas is a social anthropologist engaged in sound, listening and walking as cultural practices and as artistic media. His fields of interest extend from urban to rural environments, and from ecology to technological mediation. Among others, he has been engaged in research on electronic music, water and the politics of the (sound-)scape, mental health, public memory, and art institutions and the city, either solo or collectively, within trans-disciplinary endeavours between arts and social sciences (Fonés, akoo.o, “learning from documenta”).  He often uses artistic work as a ethnographic tool, or, in reverse, ethnographic research as a process for artistic production.

He has worked as a research, educator, sound designer, and field-recordist in projects about the city, radio, theater and ethnographic films, as an art mediator, and a dj. He is a member of TWIXTlab, within which he is coordinating the organization’s contribution in “B-Air: Art Infinity Radio” cultural cooperation project about the radio, music, sound art and vulnerable social groups, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos (akoo.o), Dwelling Stories

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, Audibility

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, Vox populi vox dei

Papachristou Dana & Samantas Yorgos, The Social life of Water & Facets of Resurrection

Danae Stefanou

Danae Stefanou makes improvised sounds and texts. She is Associate Professor and founding director of the Experimental & Improvised Music Ensembles at the School of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where she also runs two arts-based research initiatives (noise:muse and Critical Music Histories) and supervises numerous graduate projects on critical historiography, improvisation, DIY aesthetics, and issues of gender & politics in contemporary music. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals (JRMA, JIMS, Musicae Scientiae), music dictionaries (Grove Music Online) and edited volumes, including the Cambridge Companion to Film Music (CUP, 2016), Made in Greece: Studies in Greek Popular Music(Routledge, 2018), Contemporary Popular Music Studies (Springer, 2019) and Music and Landscape / Soundscape and Sonic Arts (Universal Edition, 2019). Active as a performer since the 1990s, she has performed, composed, and curated hundreds of independent intermedia actions & events in public spaces, DIY venues, arts institutions & educational establishments, and received project commissions from the Onassis Stegi, SNFCC, National & State Museums of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki & Syros International Film Festivals, Athens Festival, Megaron Concert Hall, Goethe Institut,  Institut Francais, Arts & Humanities Research Council U.K. & Arts Council Ireland, among other organizations.

Sound meetings

Transpiration