In The Mirror Cabinet by Maria Lalou
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Algorithms are dictating our everydayness by our personal data being controlled in the constant overflow of information. It is almost impossible to configure whether our decisions are free from the influences of the networked algorithmic society that we are living in. In which respect could we instrumentalise our algorithmic technologies in order to alter our controlled network presence.
As an Artist-in-Residence at the Centre for Law and the Humanities, in the School of Law at Birkbeck University, Maria Lalou is scripting and directing a workshop in Birkbeck Cin-ema with invited guests on her continuous topic “Can the camera be used as a tool or re-sistance against algorithmic governance?” A three act workshop In The Mirror Cabinet, based on her publication of the same name (2018) experimenting with the borders of cam-ouflaging in a spatial configuration of cinematic space vs network space, within the context of specific invited experts, opening the doors to the public on 20th March for a live performance workshop. Drawing on her fifteen year trajectory of practise based research that utilises staged events that are filmed, Lalou’s work focuses on the relationship between the history of cinema and the possibility of its devices becoming the tools of freedom from the algorithmic governance that we live in, where the relation between camera, view and actor, subject and object is foregrounded and destabilised.
Maria Lalou (Athens 1977) is a conceptual artist and filmmaker, with particular characteristic on diagrammatic drawings of her investigations while she completes her sculptural work and registers filmic material in collective staged improvisations that she directs is a conceptual artist and filmmaker, with particular characteristic on diagrammatic drawings of her investigations while she completes her sculptural work and registers filmic material in collective staged improvisations that she directs. She explores the topic of viewing, incorporating cinematic apparatus and Her art works are in the edge of social experiments and practised rhetorics by staging art installations on the steps of theory of the spectacle. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rieitveld Academie in Amsterdam and a degree in Architecture of Space and Object Constructive Technologiesby Technological Institute of Athens (West Attica University). Lalou has been active in the visual arts for years focusing on the role of the artist as a worker in the arts under a white coat and deconstructing both her the role and the one of cultural institutions. Large-scale installations, performances, as well as films and publications characterize her work. Lately, she is re-thinking the viewers’ position questioning the status of virtual images and the mediation of data controlled by algorithms today, with advocate Vilem Flusser and his thought on the programmatic reality. She has published two monographs, [theatro] (2015) and ‘the camera’ (2019). Along with her autonomous practise, since 2012, Lalou works collectively with the architect Skafte Aymo-Boot, under the lens of modern Athens’ chronicle and its concrete skeleton buildings, publishing her third monograph [UN]FINISHED(2023), collectively with Aymo-Boot. Together they founded and direct ‘Cross Section Archive’ in Athens.
She is the co-founder and co-curator of ‘Cross Section Archive’
in Athens and a member of CREAM, University of Westminster, as a PhD Candidate, and she lives in Amsterdam and Athens.
With Elena Loizidou: on script/non-script, Daniela Gandorfer: on political reorganisation, Bill Balaskas: instrumentatiisation of new technologies, Julie Marsh: camera values on so-cial structures, Nathan Moore: on spatial dynamics of control, Andreas Philippopoulos-Michalopoulos: on materiality of absence, Julia Chyrsostalis: νόμος vs law, Maria Chatzichristodoulou: on facilitating social change.
Final cast to be announced, shortly
Contact name:
Elena Loizidou