Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης και Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης

Angel Who Recites Poems for the Death of Heroes

I intended to write a note about Eugenios Spatharis (Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης), since it is him that revived an ancient art for a new generation, including those who only saw the shadows projected on the television cave. But I though better to step back a few years, to understand where all this comes from and have perhaps a better idea of where it is going.

In his Memoirs, Sotiris Sphataris (Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης ) Eugenios's father, relates, with painful honesty, the events in his life and time that made him, what I consider, a master of one of the most important expressions of visual storytelling, since our beginnings as cave dwellers until this time of new media, convergence and interactivity, words and phrases which lose meaning as rapidly as a passing shadow.

Behind the White Screen is a perfect title for his memoirs. A screen which not only represents the canvas of the artist, but the medium through which art and life truly interact with those lucky enough to be entranced by its magic.

Sotiráki, as his mother called him, had a life worthy of a Greek tragedy or a Charles Dickens novel, of extreme poverty, abuse and misfortune, of daily beatings by a drunken father who used him as a beggar since he was 5 years old.

But then one day a white screen went up in town. Some oil lamps were lit behind and as the shadows danced and played and fought, a door opened in Sotíris heart that never closed again. And through it a whole spirit of a people came alive and multiplied in thousands of other hearts and minds.

In Plato's dialogue between Sócrates and Glaucon, the allegory of the cave represents a world devoid of ideas where fiction reigns supreme in lieu of reality, a perfect allegory for today, where virtual reality or VR is touted as the new world, where we, as the chained people of the cave, even farther away from the exit, are to spend the rest of our lives, our cones and rods tickled by the bits and bytes that illuminate our fool's paradise.

But from its royal beginnings in ancient China (Han Dynasty), shadow puppets brought stories to life, reflecting the wants and needs, the hopes and fears of people, from emperors to beggars. The shadows liberated people from the chains giving voice to the silent, joy to the sad and fear to the mighty. The cave was opened for the common people and like a virus spread all over the world.

They came to Greece during the Ottoman Empire and as is common with all theater arts, involvement with it was considered a disreputable profession, akin to prostitution whose practitioners were regarded as the lowest of the low, even though on the other side of the screen, people of all walks of life and fortune would enjoy their characters played and mocked, disrobed and challenged.

As a young kid in love with shadow puppets and its Karagiozis character, Sotiris had to suffer many a beating, simply for being them. In a time when a mother proclaimed that she would rather see her son dead and buried than becoming a puppeteer, Sotiris love for the art surmounted every obstacle in his way, in a truly odyssean fashion. And so a living legend was born.

His art did not die with his passing in 1972, it lived in his son, Eugenios Spatharis which carried the tradition until a few days ago, when he also traveled on, May 10, 2009.

The light still burns behind the white screen, waiting for the shadows to appear and the show to begin.

The Birth of a Notion

It is quite refreshing to see and hear here and there little voices accumulating like streams coming from our inner well, in route to the Great River we call life. There is a saying in Spanish: "cuando el rio suena, piedras trae", which I would try to translate as: "when the river sounds (or sings, or roars), stones bring". Any language, saying, or poem gets lost in translation, but there is that other language without words, which is expressed in a warm handshake, not the business lock which signals our enslavement to terms, but the one that simply proclaims our human nature.

My friend Douglas Rushkoff made this little film, which in its simplicity (production not withstanding) communicates in a very direct way, a longing, a hope that maybe, just maybe, enough rocks tumble down the river in unison to recover the lost sense of self which has been stripped from our bones and soul or whatever you want to call the consciousness emerged.

Here it is for your tickling pleasure, thanks Douglas

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Our Earth

In this age when, rather late, politicians still argue if we should cut military budgets to dedicate a pittance to saving our planet and our species from destruction we could look back 30 years ago (in fact we could look back centuries and find the same concerns, albeit more timely) when visionary and designer, poet and engineer, R. Buckminster Fuller stated that we must work together as a crew if we are to survive on our planet, "spaceship earth." (from where his quotes are taken)

Bucky, as he was known, worried about the lack of education and understanding necessary to effectively take care of our planet and its dwindling resources;

...Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it to others---primarily to the politicians---to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.

...I must observe also that we’re not going to sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the Sun’s radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse.

But as John Denver sang in "Seasons of the Heart":

It’s hard to tell the truth
When no one wants to listen
When no one really cares
What’s going on
And it’s hard to stand alone
When you need someone beside you
Your spirit, your faith
Must be strong

What one man can do is dream
What one man can do is love
What one man can do is change the world
And make it young again
Here you see what one man can do

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will b a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."

— R. Buckminster Fuller 1980

The ethics of computers

Only six years ago the New York Times announced that a Japanese laboratory had built the world's fastest computer, ..."a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine." (That is 35.6 trillion mathematical operations per second)

As is true of the robotics field as well the Japanese machine reveals very different ethics and commitment than their US counterparts.

The Japanese government financed this computer to be used at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama ..." to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. "

"By contrast", the article says, "the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas like climate modeling."

Forward 6 years to June of this year and true to the double exponential acceleration towards the singularity suggested by Ray Kurzweil, CNN announced that engineers from IBM and Los Alamos (sounds a bell?) have designed a computer capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second.

Can you guess what this computer will be dedicated to?

• It will be used to help maintain the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile

So while most of the supercomputers around the world work towards solving some of the most urgent problems that we face, the US government through its military establishment keeps its accelerated pace towards our destruction.

It's Show Time

Am I ready yet?

Finally the expected moment when breaking a leg is the least of your worries, it is in fact a welcome omen!

I decided to post a slideshow, given that there are many pictures of different moments, from the preparation before the show to pictures showing the actual marionette, since many people believed that it was a pre-made video agains which the performance took place.

As I had discussed with my mentor Deborah Aschheim, this was going to be an experiment to see if the concept worked. The concept being that The Creator represented, among other things, an omnipresence that we took for granted, whose reality was ignored. The pervasive surveillance and control that is now an accepted state in the life of so many people who fail to question some very basic assumptions.

This presence whose control was embodied by the environment itself could become simply entertainment, a surface to which we have become fully accustomed and to which we in fact give our compliance voluntarily.

So perhaps conceptually the experiment worked, since as a "show" it was considered fascinating by most of the audience I had a chance to speak with. But I think that I would like to eventually construct a full scale marionette as originally planned (5 mts. tall). I am more interested in telling a compelling story that can directly connect with the stored archetypes that we carry in our brains and , because of scale and the amazement associated with seeing something so out of the ordinary, our defenses are suspended, letting the images and sounds seep undetected into our psyche.

Later on, perhaps,we will encounter in our dreams or nightmares, or worse in our waking reality, images,facts and ideas that evoke that inexplicable and uncanny feeling of the loss of our mythical innocence. Optimistically I would hope that this would result in recognizing like Pink Floyd says "the writing on the wall".

The Creator was born in Germany as a concept, or rather as a nightmare that my wife Lorena had. As artists we become attached to the object of our creation, even if it represents something as terrible as to what a post-apocalyptic scenario suggests. We treat the creator and the creature with loving care and feel both awe and compassion for them, or perhaps for what they represent. A loss of our own humanity.

It is fitting, and part of the mystery of our lives that we simply accept things as they happen. The performance took place in Linz, of all places. Linz, the birthplace of Hitler bears everywhere you turn and in spite of the efforts to conceal it, an atmosphere of sadness which even the clowns and street performers and musicians who entertain tourists and passerby s fail to diffuse. At our graduation ceremony, Virgil Wong had invited a pair of these street musicians to perform for us. It was interesting to see how the director of the Institute felt so uncomfortable as they sang beautiful but obviously sorry laden songs filled with nostalgia for what is not, sang in a language which nobody spoke but which everyone understood.

Ir Rays

A few posts before I mentioned our amazement at the strength and penetration of the infrared LED's that we are using as the beacon for our performance. I just took a screen grab of what the webcam was recording as proof that I was not seeing visions. You can clearly see the veins on the hand. I really like the shot. It reminds me of the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy

"The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras."
--László Moholy-Nagy

The Small Bang!

Here the Creator is kneeling down since the high-torque spine servo is not powered up.

It has been quite an ordeal to get to this point. In fact a couple of years to be exact. But finally the creature moves, and not only moves but seems to have a life of its own. I will not post video until after the performance but I am very excited by what I see. Philip and I crack up laughing every time it moves because it is so life-like.



But come to think of it, what is happening (philosophy purists will probably disagree) is that life in fact has been transferred and conserved as energy in a different form. This is not something new to me. I consider any work of our hands to partake of this mysterious force that we call life, otherwise how would it inspire us or elevate our spirit?

When I see a painting (in reality, not a reproduction) by say, Vermeer, the emotion I feel is a product not only of the formal beauty, but of being in the presence of time standing still, a few years of someone's life (which just happens to be a master) condensed and trapped like a genius in a bottle. I, the recipient of this gift, am the vehicle necessary for this alchemical process to occur. I release the energy contained in the matter of the painting.

The order of the particles, held by resinous mediums, crystallized by the passage of time which conform the external appearances of the scene resonate and I believe connect me in the most direct form with the creator of the work of art, in the same way that we are in intimate connection with the writer that is sharing her thoughts and life experiences with us.

This is, has to be, an energy transfer that could probably be calculated by an Einstein, but I prefer to simply shed a tear of joy when I find myself in front of the work of art. That is what art means to me.


In case you have not seen a previous post this is what the Creator's creature looks like. Here Lorena is getting some exercise and getting fit to withstand the wild and strenuous performance ahead, after all it is all her fault since she created the Creator. Playing god or goddess does not come cheap. You can see a little animation here

The OZ connection

The software is finally (well...) done. I mean it is totally functional, does what it is supposed to be and it is absolutely beautiful to look at. The design is old-school, meaning lean, efficient and therefore aesthetically perfect on my book. Thanks to Philip for never being satisfied. In fact every day there is some internal change that makes it run faster or adds even more functionality.

I will provide pictures of the UI in full operation as it grabs puppet positions, controls lights, sounds etc. It feels a bit like those old music sequencers which were so intuitive and logical and therefore easy to use, yet produced any result that your imagination demanded. This is the case.

These are some current pics of the UI before anything is loaded. The puppet figure is just a place holder until the cameras, both for tracking and for position display are connected.



This last shot shows the tracking grid. All the application is done modularly so that everything can be customized, such as the resolution of the grid which in this case represents the size of the stage, basically 6x8 meters. Every cell triggers different responses from the Creator based on the performer actions and timing.