Confluence — Constantinos Gallis

Constantinos Gallis
Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR

Hello, my name is Constantinos, & I am a Greek-Swiss artist, musician & student based in Cambridge, MA & Athens, GR. I am currently a dual degree student at MIT, pursuing a Master in City Planning & a Master of Architecture, & I hold a BA in Urban Studies from Stanford University, where I graduated with departmental honors & distinction. I am curious about the effects of urban change on the natural environment & society, I have explored my interests through academic research, teaching, large scale installations, performances, audio-visual investigations, & practical work experience at firms in Athens. GR, New York, NY & London, GB.

cgallis@mit.edu Instagram

I am one half of Oo-PS, a collaborative research & design practice working across scales to produce narrative-driven artwork, writing, music & objects as ways of anticipating sets of future socio-environmental challenges & designing theoretical methods to meet them.

Oo-PS

I write, record, produce & occasionally perform music under the alias Shrinking Violet, a project that modulates between ambient, dreampop & indie rock in an effort to create music about memory, distance & uncertainty.

Shrinking Violet

Back

Confluence
San Francisco, CA
Ambient Light Installation
[w/ E. Petersen, K. Han, A. Adriano, L. Laugharn]

Confluence was a week-long ambient light installation atop the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the tallest building in the Bay Area. The work was designed for the low-resolution ambient projection system developed by Jim Campbell, which uses 11,000 custom LED fixtures to project images that reach across the Bay. The project was a response to the way in which daily urban life separates us from nature; how we perceive a distance between ourselves & the water, land, & living beings which sustain us, & how we treat living beings as subjects, even commodities, rather than realize them as kin.

Confluence materialized a portrait of the natural in which we recognize ourselves. Illuminating images of water & life, categories & distinctions are blurred. Commonality among moving, agitated, bodies is found, a strange view in which nature becomes altered & familiar at once. The installation was paired with an original soundtrack I created entitled Atop This Weathered Tower, which follows the sequence of visuals.

[Listen to Atop This Weathered Tower]
[Watch Full Sequence]