Encounters in the Age of the Dominance of the Image. Gaze – Handshake – Word – Trace

• Title: Encounters in the Age of the Dominance of the Image. Gaze – Handshake – Word – Trace
• Dates: November 15-16, 2025, 11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
• Location: Athens
• Organized by: CHS Greece
• Open to: All (limited number of places)
• Application period: September 22-October 22, 2025
• Academic coordination: Giorgos Xenos (Artist, CHS Visiting Artist 2020-2021)
• Activity administration: Matina Goga (CHS Greece)
• Contact number and email: (+30) 27520 47030, int. line 1, matina.goga@chs.harvard.edu

Overview

CHS Greece, through its annual workshop series, aims to support Hellenic Studies and the broader field of Humanities, and to offer intergenerational, interdisciplinary, lifelong learning opportunities to the public.

The first CHS Greece workshop for the new academic year will focus on art. The artist Giorgos Xenos will welcome us to his studio and coordinate the workshop with the theme: Encounters in the Age of the Dominance of the Image. Gaze – Handshake – Word – Trace.

In this workshop, references will be made to the image as a universal means of communication, spanning from conventional media to artificial intelligence. The trace as a psychogram.

Art, image, has no boundaries; it is universal, timeless, and understood by everyone. It is a score of memory, the ability of imagination. When art roars, borders disappear.

Based on the dominance of the image, from antiquity to the present, the trace continues to transmit memories from the past to the present and future, evolving memory from conventional to digital and artificial intelligence, to global communication.

Humans, driven by the need for contact and communication, discovered the trace as a recognizable medium, leaving behind symbols that reflected their experiences of existence. The trace is a psychogram.

Today, in the era of virtual reality and its evolution into artificial intelligence, we manage global information by shortening processing time.

We are living in the most critical era of human civilization, because art, with the trace taking center stage, records its own truth.

Art speaks plainly, and its images do not pretend; they are what they are. With its greatest tool, imagination, it pushes you to see things differently. First to imagine, and then to take action. Because change comes when we decide that scales will abandon their natural size chaotically, reaching an excess. After all, after excess comes rebirth; the new is born. The brain is a fierce quantum processor.

Because art itself is a revolutionary act, involving transcendence, tragedy, freedom. The role of the Arts is to underscore in memory the past, present, and future, for the beyond of our culture, traversing the universe.

We live in a changing era…

Handshake

A touch of the part instead of the whole (body), full of meaning. The painter, especially, tends, through his handshake, to put his hand in communication with the potential recipient of his work, and not only.

The handshake is a kind of validation and silent agreement.

It is an honorarily emblematic recognition of equality. The artist grants, albeit momentarily, to another person the use and "possession" of their most quintessential means of expression and strength: their hand.

The refusal of a handshake cancels any communication, not only at the moment it happens, but also thereafter, leaving little hope for the future of the relationship at any level.

For a painter, symbolically, it is a generous act of trust towards the other.

The handshake partakes in the idea of a momentary, minimal gesture performance. It is a "snapshot," a moment of living artwork, that actively partakes in a visual theatrical act.

Trace – Image – Writing

Artistic creation constantly evolves, shifting form and content, necessitating a re-examination of its intellectual product as a distinct cognitive and cultural object in the conceptual development of humanity.

Art, whose origins are found in the trace, silent yet constantly speaking, interpreting meanings, prefigures its semantic horizon: it composes, creates, produces education and culture, marvelous forces for the benefit of humanity worldwide.

I have always been preoccupied with the trace, the image, and writing as another dimension of knowledge, enhancing with new values the gaze, cultivation, critical thinking, access to new mental levels.

The evolution of the trace into image creates writing, while simultaneously imprinting information into memory. Then, humans, as self-moving information, bring order to disorder, thus making the syntax of the image.

Writing, as a timeless value, with the human existence at its core, develops a dialectic, thus attributing the artistic product to its proper dimension and meaning.

Therefore, through writing, humans cast a shadow onto myth, onto the future, thus creating their own culture.