Dimitris Papanikolaou: Aerial Breaths

We understand our social identity in relation to others, but we perceive others implicitly through the traces of their interactions with the physical space near us. What if our urban environments could remotely mediate these traces, allowing spatially unrelated people to experience each other’s presence collectively? “Aerial Breaths” is a proposal for a city-scale physical telepresence public-art installation of wirelessly connected giant inflatables placed at selected sites in the city of Athens; this work will enable visitors in each site to physically experience the presence of visitors in other remote sites, questioning our perception of locality, belongingness, and social identity. The inflatables are cubic-shaped and collectively share the same volume of air, forming a city-scale closed system of beacons.

Anyone can animate any inflatable beacon by sending bursts of air to it using their mobile phones. Sending, however, a burst of air to a beacon requires removing the same amount of air from another beacon. Watching a beacon deflate signifies someone, somewhere, uses this air to inflate another beacon. Watching a beacon inflate signifies that someone nearby uses this air to publicly manifest their presence in your common surrounding environment. Beacons illuminate, revealing the identity of the beacons they exchange air with. Depending on people’s location, point of view, and level of engagement, the closed system of the beacons enables patterns of cooperation or competition to emerge across locations, reflecting the two categorical ways with which we perceive our socio-locational identity: “us-versus-them” and “here-versus-there.”

Through their reciprocal transformations and monumental size, the inflatable beacons both signify and influence the collective identities of transient “locals” and “outsiders”: strangers who happen to “be there at that time” without otherwise any sense of a common identity, belonging to the place, or awareness of each other. Athens consists of multiple neighborhoods, each with its own local character and each containing building blocks with unbuilt empty lots. The project intends to connect such diverse localities through a common physical telepresence platform. During my residency, I plan to develop the code for the front-end and back-end system of the platform and connect with the Athenian artistic, curatorial, and production scene to identify contextual conditions and collaboration opportunities.