Moving Image
Iria Vrettou
Iria Vrettou is a moving image artist, born in 1995, from Greece. She has a diploma in Animation from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and she’s currently pursuing an MA Contemporary Art Practice Moving Image at the Royal College of Art in London. Her practice is primarily focused on concepts & modes of hybridity as method of research and practice, whilst engaging with aspects of hand-drawn animation. Her research interests explore the organic processes that lead to the creation of hybrid art works as complete spatiotemporal experiences, and the environmental urgencies that such experiences respond to. She considers the screen, within 21st century cultural production, as a powerful kind of ‘skin’, i.e. the point where different worlds, systems and facts meet and touch.
University Arts London [2014-2017]
What can be perceived as natural is always determined by humans. This has been updated, altered and transgressed as the boundaries of human and non-human become more blurred because of the constantly evolving technologies, new scientific discoveries and the thus emerging socio-political climate. My practice has been investigating the hybrid spaces that are formed between various forms of existence and intelligence: human and not, natural and artificial. I largely apply speculative fiction in animated installations and explore references to the real and various current urgencies (humanitarian, ecological, socio-political) . In this regard, my research the past few months focuses on questions of interspecies co-existence, the fragmentations and mixtures that such co-existence can create and the alternate conditions, atmospheres and states that it formulates. The subject matter of these researches or rather the focal point through which such notions are addressed since the beginning of Y1 of the MA program has been the Volcano, and more specifically a volcanic island.
My work engages with aspects of traditional hand drawn animation as a primary practice, and extends to the realms of 3D animation, projection and installation. The technical methodologies of my practice are such, because they offer the possibility of creating new states of sensorium and atmospheres in which technology meets DIY, low fi processes, abstractions merge with materialities, algorithmic data are questioned by natural entropy. The hybrid states generated by flux are at the core of my research and reflect my concern for alternative ecologies and disidentification.
Sound by TUSK (Pantelis Pilavios & Giorgos Kravvaritis)