Babis Vekris: electrifying the world of art
Few artists have been as successful in navigating the digital landscape as Electros(Babis Vekris)and fewer have been able to harness the energy of the electronic age as this remarkable talent. Electros employs and manipulates digital material in the same manner that Rauschenberg juggles paper and cardboard. He imagines possibilities and pushes at the boundaries of tradition. Electros art is at once a tribute to new media and a spoof of it. He has described his work as "techno-fictional" which is the perfect portrayal for what appears at first glance to be scientific and functional is soon found to be purely aesthetic...a poetry for both the eye and mind. His work touches the objectivity of mathematical logic but ultimately exists in a universe of romantic illogic.
The installation at the Butler Institute's Beecher Center extends the artist's fascination with language as well as his interest in the superficiality of our understanding of technological markers. The work is enlightening and highly entertaining. Light and sound are employed in ways that remind us of life in what Electros has called an"electro-mechanokinetic" world. But these elements are but metaphors that reach well beyond the obvious. In the end, great art has always done this. Art that has endured through the history of humankind has inspired us to imagine possibilities from the friese on the Parthenon to Michelangelo's Last Judgement.. And while Electros art resides in a vastly different sphere, it's ability to move us and to touch us is no less potent.
Like a mystic who has found a sign of God in a shooting star - indeed, who regards its light as his flesh - the spectator is entranced by the electronic action of Electros’ installations: the ceaseless blinking of their LEDs - a soothing spectacle of randomness, of innocent self-reflexivity - is eternity at its most accessible, cosmic light brought down to earth, if still unmanageable and incomprehensible.
Decontextualized - isolated, that is, radically separated from ordinary use by being exhibited as objects in themselves which made them seem “extraordinary” - then became enigmatic and uncanny, if one was willing to invest one’s emotions in them. The assisted ready-made - a transparently absurd construction - encouraged such investment by means of suggestion: a comic title, a juxtaposition of ordinarily incommensurate things, made the found object evocative, attractive to the unconcious, as well as provocative in itself. Like a dream, it demanded interpretation, but unlike a dream it could never be completely interpreted, because one’s interpretation of it was part of one’s investment in it. It really had no meaning, apart from the meaning one gave it: it was more being than meaning. As such, because it could never be objectified - because whatever meaning one gave it was not necessarily convincing to others, since it was a meaning that grew out of one’s own unconcious concerns - the surreal machine became radically subjective, that is, the emblem par excellence of blind desire.
The titles of Electros’ works acknowledge that they have as strong a place in the surreal tradition of the poetic object or psychic object, as I prefer to call it - the romanticization of the familiar object into emotional unfamiliarity - as in the constructivist tradition of kinetic art. The electronic is inherently erotic for Electros: his artworks move with the speed and efficiency of the libido. More deeply, they invariably display the dialectic of desire - the dialectic or doubleness inherent to desire.
The more advanced the material, the more invested with erotic significance it becomes. By “advanced” I mean that the material is a major feat of human ingenuity, on a symbolic as well as practical level. In reconciling flexibility and durability - softness and strength - Electros’ manmade materials realize the age-old, alchemical dream of combining contradictory properties in one unique substance. Their union establishes a symbolic harmony between the sacred and profane. That is, the materials, are implicitly immortal - unchanging, perfect - but everyday. They are as psychopoetic as the machines constructed of them.
It may seem strange to say so, but the third tradition of art and technology to which Electros’ technological projects contribute began in the Renaissance. It is evident in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Duerer: in the meticulous detail of their landscapes. Their goal of scientific precision - not simply of phenomenological - empirical description, but of analytic observation, issuing in technical refinement and general principles - is realized, with ironic exactitude, in such installations as Electros “FRACTAL LANDSCAPE II”. In these works, the “romantic” indeterminary of landscape - it seems all the more amorphous the closer one attends to its details, and above all the more one tries to bring them together into a whole - is reduced to analytic clarity and subtlety by means of chaos theory. A complex mathematics has led to mastery of what Leonardo and Duerer masterd with their simpler mathematics of perspective and proportion. But their mastery looks preliminary and secondary in comparison to that evident in Electros’ works. Indeed, a comparison of Electros’ technological landscapes and Leonardo’s deluge landscapes is instructive: Leonardo tends to the fractal detail - the breakdown of the chaotic deluge into uniform, modular fractals - that Electros’ Landscapes realize.
The line from the Renaissance mathematics of landscape to Electros’ ultramodern fractal mathematics of landscape is continuous. It reminds us that art at its most radical his always been catalyzed by technological innovation - always had a technical rationale. More particularly, Electros’ landscapes, and his psychopoetic machine objects in general, remind us that the desire we instinctively invest in landscape, including the technological landscape of our environment, can be rendered with remarkable precision.
But Electros’ projects are not only metaphors of desire and symbols of precision, not only hymns to notion and ironic fantasies of eternal life. They are also witty acknowledgments of the pervasiveness - indeed. Inescapability and irresistibility - of technology in our lives, and above all of the triumph over time and mind they represent.
I create artwork inspired by my own biography, sometimes scientific, sometimes whimsical and sometimes conceptual. It becomes in its totality, my emotional response to the issue of privacy in the complexed world of technological art. Innovative concepts of art can take many forms, as the artist strives for the new aesthetic order, also the scientific questions in the artwork gives us a new way of looking at the process of art.
