Konstantinos Damianakis

During his Masters at Goldsmiths, Konstantinos Damianakis focused his artistic practice on expanding and developing his sonic vocabulary towards integrating abstract processes. These were developed theoretically in response to the works of Byung-Chul Han, Deleuze, Guattari, and others, before materialising as complex algorithmic processes of digital sound. These culminated in the electroacoustic composition, Alogos Syllogismos (2020), which was part of his dissertation exploring neoliberal technologies through Byung-Chul Han’s theory of Psychopolitics. The process of composition and system design was realised by mapping Han’s conception of Big Data (Dataism, Quantified Self, Digital Unconscious) into a complex instrument incorporating Machine Learning (Wekinator), analysis and manipulation of large sound file corpora (FluCoMa), and his idiosyncratic hybrid between Granular and Concatenative Synthesis. What emerged from this system is a machine-learning instrument for mixed performance that produces an uncanny double of the instrument coupled with it. Avoiding predictability, this instrument creates an analogy between the deconstruction of digital sound and our self in Big Data, while capturing the vortex of (dis)information in which the contemporary subject disintegrates. 

Influenced by a conceptual approach to making sound and music, Damianakis explored an integrated method for Media Composition, blurring the line between score and sound design. His piece “Eyelenda” explores narrative media scoring emphasising the abstract visual qualities of Icelandic landscapes through granular and spectral processing of the electric guitar.

His rescoring of the animation “Special Fried Rice” focuses on aesthetic incongruence and minimalist expression as a reference to technology.

“Artifice” explores the transformations of a piano sample that follows the uncanny transformation of the scene.

Furthermore, collaborating with the animation designer Martina De Gennaro, he created the score and sound design for “Serena,” a short story about obsessive-compulsive disorder based on the collection and merging of real stories. Field recording and minimal sound design is used sparsely along with the score in order to create a fertile sonic environment for the voice of the narrator (Josephine Carl) to be clear and placed in the fictional context.