Faster Than Light, 2018-21

Faster Than Light is a hybrid performance-film about grief, resistance, and being (at-a-loss).

Created through an iterative nine-month collaboration with members of the LGBTQAI+ community in Athens, Greece, Faster Than Light documents the life and legacy of Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh!, filmed in the months before and after his violent assassination, midway into the project's production.Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh! (1985-2018) was a Greek-American drag artist who died at the hands of the Municipal Athenian Police during the daylight hours of September 21, 2018. Cell phone footage of Zak's murder, captured by civilian bystanders, was broadcast widely over Greek internet and TV, spurring a renewed wave of hatred against LGBTQ+ individuals over social media and in-person.As a work of multiform cinema, Faster Than Light (FTL) invites viewers to grieve the loss of Zak/Zackie as one of Greece's most prominent LGBTQ+ activists.FTL has appeared in various iterations at Werkleitz Festival (Halle, DE), Onassis Stegi (Athens, GR), Ars Electronica’s ERROR Festival (Linz, AT), Les Rencontres Bandits-Mages (Bourges, FR), and Athens Pride Week and was realized within the framework of the European Media Art Platform's (EMAP) program at Onassis Stegi with support of the Creative Europe Culture Program of the European Union.FTL on the EMAP website

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counter/transference, 2017

counter/transference is a site-specific performance staged at the Block Museum of Art exploring the psychological notions of transference and countertransference as entry points into broader conversations regarding neurological difference, emotional intelligence, and institutional power.

Through a structured improvisation, counter/transference asks its performers to embody multiple archetypical relationships simultaneously—woman and man, parent and child, healer and healed—questioning the power dynamics within these relationships and exploring the techniques by which these dynamics are both mutated and maintained.counter/transference on the Block Museum website

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Haunted, 2017

Haunted is an improvisational performance staged at Betonest, a former concrete factory turned art space on Germany's eastern border, exploring the notion of haunting from a phenomenological perspective.

In collaboration with Titus Wonsey (sound) and Kandis Friesen (camera), Haunted documents a process of using movement to enter a state of liminality in which the more-than-alive might be sensed, and perhaps even embodied.

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xChrono, 2017

A short film exploring the linguistic entanglements of color and the notion of race, xChrono responds to the art world's seeming indifference toward the reproduction of racialized hierarchies within its own discourse and practices.

Following Cornel West's discussion of the Greek notion of paideia as a process of life-long learning, xChrono addresses the urgency of interrogating the consequences of one's unexamined biases with an attitude of curiosity and from a standpoint of objective detachment.

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General Summit for Imagination, 2016

Exploring the genealogy of poetry-film as an artistic idiom, General Summit for Imagination juxtaposes documentation of Moerenuma Park (Sapporo, Japan), with excerpts from a text composed by the artist in 2013, offering a meditation on the entaglement of aloneness and creativity.

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Light Body, 2016

Light Body calls on Heidegger's notion of enargeia as, “that which in itself and
of itself radiates and brings itself to light,” in considering the fundamental nature of light in relation to the human body.An exploration of analog photography as a method of existential phenomenology/process philosophy, Light Body was captured at the 2016 US Rainbow Gathering in Mount Tabor, Vermont.

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Polar Ring, or the Bering Straight, eventually..., 2017

Using sound and manipulated digital video, Polar Ring, or the Bering Straight, eventually... interrogates the nature of material boundaries/borders from the perspective of wave-particle dualities in quantum physics.

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Tranzspesifik, 2015-2016

A performance archive, Tranzspesifik uses the discourse surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) as a starting point to reflect on the artist's own positionality as a queer-identified artist of Japanese and European descent.

Drawing on insights from gender theory and critical whiteness studies, Tranzspesifik calls attention to racialization (the process by which racialized groups are formed), as distinct from notions of biological race. Furthermore, Tranzspesifik asserts that racialization is inextricably tied to social constructions and gender and sexuality, thereby informing the ways in which we enact language and action in the present.Support for Tranzspesifik was provided for by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIRA) at Northwestern University.

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WIMP Theory, 2015

WIMP Theory explores the

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CON/TRACTION: Liberated Motility, Justified Action, Laughter as a Metaphor for Death, 2014

A mediation on diaphragmatic motion as an embodied representation of death.Creating space for internal shifts-in-state within a larger group exchange, this performance allowed for participants to attune to the the gap between each breath’s conception and completion. This temporal lag–central to our perception of time–became diminished through the practice of laughter. Moving in and out of authenticity, laughter allowed us to locate the still points at either end of breath’s pendular cycle. Through this experience of dynamic stillness, we perceived an impression of death marked not by the cessation of action, but rather by its liberation.Part of the artist's Likely Scenario: Pop-up Performance Laboratory series, Brooklyn, NY
Likely Scenario

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Cosmometry, 2014

Zak Kostopoulos (1985-2018) was an Athens-based Greek-American drag artist and political activist who died at the hands of the Municipal Athenian Police during the daylight hours of 21 September 2018—the event was filmed by civilian bystanders whose cell phone footage was broadcast widely over Greek internet and TV. Faster Than Light (FTL) documents Kostopoulos as his drag persona Zakie Oh! in Athens alongside members of Zak/Zackie's artistic milieu.

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Likely Scenario: Pop-up Performance Laboratory, 2014-ongoing

Initiated at my temporary Brooklyn studio in the summer of 2014, Likely Scenario: Pop-up Performance Laboratory serves as a container for my experimental research on collective transcendence and improvised relationality. Thus far, the laboratory has generated a series of participatory performances and performance-based videos that, together, address questions of neuroaesthetics and chorality.

See the original Likely Scenario tumblr for additional archival material.

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Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, 2014

Zak Kostopoulos (1985-2018) was an Athens-based Greek-American drag artist and political activist who died at the hands of the Municipal Athenian Police during the daylight hours of 21 September 2018—the event was filmed by civilian bystanders whose cell phone footage was broadcast widely over Greek internet and TV. Faster Than Light (FTL) documents Kostopoulos as his drag persona Zakie Oh! in Athens alongside members of Zak/Zackie's artistic milieu.

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