Philosophy Hut at Thisio Station (Neen Plateau)

Here's some pics of the Philosophy Hut. It's smaller than I originally planned but I actually thik it works better at this scale, its the perfect spot to relax in after you're been Baptised by August(In The Name of Neen, Miltos Manetas). Inside you can contemplate the light and shadow created by thg\e cut-out patterns or watch Angelo's walking face (TalkingAndWalking.com, Angelo Plessas).

Walking Building on FIX factory

The Walking Building was projected onto the facade of the Fix Factory on Monday 17th July, as part of the Grand Promenade exhibition.

Grande Promenade opens tonight in Athens

The Grand Promenade, curated by Anna Kafetsi and her fantastic team opens tonight in Athens.After 9 pm I'll be projecting the "Walking Building" onto the facade of the ex FIX factory, for one night only.

At the same time in front of the Thisio Metro station you can check out the Philosophy Hut which is part of the Neen Plateau, a project for the Grande Promenade that also includes Angelo Plessas' TalkingAndWalking.com (with a very unexpected accesoryfor a website ) and Miltos Manetas' Neen Baptism which will be taking place every afternoon this summer.

Miss Dior goes to War

Miss John Galliano blasted everybody's brain off with his utterly fabulous haute couture collection for Dior. enjoy

Urban Suburban

There is an area on the far west of Athens called Ασπρόπυργος which translates to White Tower, though there is nothing white in sight but smoke coming from all the factories. Aspropyrgos overlooks the bay of Eleysina and Salamina island, in what must have been a stunning landscape in ancient times. Now its an industrial wasteland but somehow it retains an elusive beauty. If you drive away from the factories you find a sparsely inhabited landscape of car cemeteries, weird ad-hoc shacks, stray dogs and ominous looking trees, all in an industrial haze that photographs really well. I was there to oversee the fabrication of my little Philosophy Hut for the Grand Promenade exhibition which opens this Monday in Athens. More on this soon...

Whateverville

Today we were once again lost in Milan's outer suburbia, which actually looks like the outer suburbia of anywhere: you coulsd be in Los Angeles or Eindhoven or Paris or Whateverville, this place always looks the same and there's nothing to do. We were there looking for a tv/film studio where we could test some projectors. The Blue box space had a few leftover props which are always intersting, and the collection there was definetly hot: A winter tree, a part of a staircase, an ancient egyptian door, a cart with a stack of plastc chair, some large chess pieces and of course a styrofoam snowman. You could almost make your own Blair Witch Project meets the Mummy meets any movie that doesnt make any sense anyway, just like Milano Eindhoven Los Angeles Whateverville suburbia.

Gogol Bordello

Last night we got totally lost on the way to villa Arconati in Milano's Outer Suburbia. The place is totally amazing, a kind of fabulous falling down palazzo with extravagant topiary trees la la la. Gogol over performed as usual and though I was excited to see them the sound was so bad it all became rather unbearable. Still their logo is cool.

Fashion Week Usual

It's Mens' fashion week or fashion month or whatever. Nothing really new on the horizon, mostly it's unwearable clothes or last years fashion or just bad taste. Even Kim Jones showed a kind of boring sportswear collection where you can see stuff that you can get in H&M already (on sale!). As usual the only interesting ones are Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme and Raf Simmons. Finally a great double-breasted jacket from Dior as a follow up from last seasons' phantom of the opera looks but a little more subdued, and a cute cut off trenchcoat, maybe just as catwalk accesory but still a nice look.Raf worked the Suit and Sandals look

Neen Demo at SYNCH

So here's some photos from last nights' Neen Demo at Synch in Benaki Museum, curated by Angelo Plessas. It was a kind of perfect situation where people stayed for a long time lounging on the soft ruin concrete sofa pieces,
you could hear the faint guitar background sounds from Rafael Rozendaals' MisterNiceHands.com intersepted by the farting noises which made everybody laugh, Mai Ueda sang her "shower songs" in Greek, people threw Angelo's ballerina up in the air (ElasticEnthusiastic.com) and Miltos Manetas' ManInTheDark gave the usual Neen Mystery accident where his man in the dark started duplicating himself until the computer crashed. All this could not be possible without the super crew of the Synch Festival and the tons of super hardware from Multirama.
Pleople spent time on the pillows checking messages, taking photos, clicking and laughing and sleeping and it was all very neen indeed

Soft Ruin for a Neen Demo

This was my contribution to last nights' Neen Demo at Benaki museum in Athens. Angelo had asked me to make a kind of furniture/ instalation for the show, so people could hang out. Somehow I came up with the idea to make a soft building based on the iconic Le Corbusier domino frame that you find everywhere in Greece in a forever unfinished state as a kind of reverse ruin. I textture mapped a frame with not too much fake neen graffitti done in photoshop and then it collapses and becomes a kind of classical ruin, an 18th century romantic electronic bucolic soft concrete squat, always thinking back to Gufram, Group Memphis, Studio Alchimia, all the 60's italian avant-garde and somehow all this made perfect sense last night.

Some Recent Press

Angelo, Miltos and me are on the cover of EGG magazine with Neen Plateaux, our project for the Grand Promenade, which opens in 2 weeks in Athens. Inside they have a super nice article on Neen World and the projects that were born out of it such as P130, Cloud House, Superneen and Blue Wave, as well as several more pages on the Neenstars.

it's funny to see Neen World published so widely recently, considering it stopped existing in 2003 after the CASCO accident. Its almost becoming the Atlantis of the internet... Elena Skoula interviewed Angelo and me for a Greek newspaper. She even came up with terms of her own, and I think we might have a Neen journalist finally. This is a really cool interview/abstract confessional/free association of MM, AP and AA by Marina Fokidis in Lifo, one of my favorite free press magazines in Athens. Charlie Makkos took a realy cool portrait, and at last my vanity was satisfied. And finally an interview at Ozon Magazine byNatassa Papachristou, with another nice portrait by Charlie.

The New Black for Buildings

So even though the winning projects of this competition have been slowly surfacing in local media, and even though my proposal didnt even register in the first 20, somehow I'm still interested in this project and was happy to work on some additional photorealistic images. Photorealistic is sch a funny term and especially because my whole approach used to be to never ever produce this type of renderings, because I was always trying to make reality look like a computer image, especially in built projects likeTeleportDiner, Pause and Forever Laser. Recently I'm more and more into a kind of "Brutal Surrealism" as Memos Filippidis put it in the review of the New Trends exhibition. So anyway apart from doing more of these images, I thought maybe I'll try another material? Even though I'm knee deep into an exposed concrete fixation, I was curious to see what this apartment complex looked like if it was in white stripes...

or even a kind of classic red brick, which is such a generic material for new construction it's almost interesting and very scary indeed...and then I did a search for a leopard print, because I had a feeling that animal fur might be the new black for buildings, and what luck, I found a rainbow leopard print, so unexpectedly better even though Angelo looked over my shoulder and totally didnt go for it. So these images and many more became a kind of debate between a Brutalist Fantasy and a Flamboyant Reality, and what is building with exposed concrete formwork if not another texture map.

Lovett/Codagnone

Here's a quick look at the totally fabulous new book on Lovett/Codagnone who, apart from being tons of fun to be around, have been doing some fantastic work. The book is out on CHARTA and it covers 10 years of works, performances and photographs and includes some cool texts by Lia Gancitano and Octavio Zaya. Here's some of my favourite pics, including the great cover.

Napoli Est

While in Napoli I met Danilo Capasso who amongst other things is working with a group of people on rehabilitating a previously industrial area in East Naples. Their group is called N.EST and their idea is to start infiltrating the area with art rather than with commercial development. It's an interesting approach because we have seen so many of these areas around the world that go from "the new place to be" to "everybody is moving to" to "it used to be much cooler" to "I never go there anymore". Check out East Napoli while it's really hot