Stratos Bichakis

“between soil and signal” is a three-part audiovisual performance featuring live electronics and Cretan bulgari. It reimagines the atmosphere of long-duration poetry singing and oral traditions from Balkan, mainland Greek, and Cretan communities. Expanding poetry beyond language through an interplay of immersive sound and dynamic moving images, the performance crafts a world that is at once synthetic and organic, fragile and intimate, inspired by cosmogonic myths, magic spells, and folk songs. The three parts explore themes of creation, nature, and desire by combining generative and filmed footage with instrumental and electronic sounds, including data sonification derived from experiments on the resilience of natural systems. 

“between soil and signal” serves as a laboratory for the collective and individual imagination, reflecting on the ungovernable, ecology, and the libidinal. It resists rigid subjectivities and seeks connection, adventure, and resilience, while unveiling the fluid, boundless experience of being by bridging myth, technology, tradition, and ecological awareness.

"The hour-long sound composition can be understood as a media autobiography in itself, since it includes material developed over a long period of time. It includes improvisations with analog and digital systems, urban field recordings, code-based experiments, and signal-oriented approaches to sonification, using biometric data and studies on the resilience of ecosystems. Through this process, I wanted to explore different ways, temporalities, and modalities of observation and sensing."