solid flute tone
flute tone continues
my name is Adnan Naseem Khan, I'm a film maker
in Dallas, Texas, United States
my profound journey to Greece, exploring
Greece, began when one of my professors and good friend
Max Kazemzadeh invited me to film this
majestic journey of reliving the myth of
Melissani Cave in the form of an art installation and
he told me it would be an interactive audio visual installation
to actually illustrate the myth. It sounded
astonishing and fascinating and I was really excited to
visit Kefalonia island, I should say the island with miraculous
surprises. (water sounds small splashes, with music)
(music beats)
(music with sounds of photo camera clicks)
(music)
My name is Max Kazemzadeh, I'm a professor at
Gallaudet University in Washington, DC.
I was invited by the Ionian Center
and just in some discussions with Rita Blaik, who
is a PhD student/candidate in material sciences at UCLA
we started to discuss some of the things
via skype that Kefalonia had to
offer. One major component was myth.
There was one myth in particular that was quite interesting, and that was the myth of Melissani.
and Melissani was a nymph
Nymphs are sort of super-human and..
sub-god-like, and are there to entertain the gods
bring dancing, joy, life, love, creativity...
energy, to the god's
house, and the story of the nymphs was very interesting
The nymphs actually guarded the waterways
and the plant-life... the spiritual world.
and so rarely seen by human eye
they would hide in caves and certain areas of the river
and didn't travel much
Anyway, there was one Melissani nymph in particular
who fell in love with a satyr
named Pan. Turns out that Pan was a satyr
kind of half man, half goat...with the horns and the furry
legs...and um, and Melissani fell in love with
this character that played a flute that
seduce the nymphs. Well it turns out that this story of
Melissani was a tragedy, because Pan being
the musician that he was, kept evading the love of
and maybe relationships, um in particular the one with
Melissani, and Melissani was heartbroken to the point where she threw
herself into the Melissani cave lake, which
is now called "The Melissani Cave Lake"
and committed suicide. During the discussions with Rita Blaik, I thought this was really interesting
that there was this myth, this mythical character, this whole mythical story
that was directly connected
with an actual physical location. I started to think about technology
can expand the scope of human action
in such a way to where it makes us super-human
on some level. And so this became the impetus
for this project in Melissani, to build interactive environments
interactive systems that would be able to
extend or expand the scope of human action within a space
So, in this process
I started to think about people that were friends of mine
around the world that were specialists, conceptually
and technically in these arenas
and also people that I liked to work with in the past, so I
invited them all to come, and instead of developing
a project prior to coming and installing it
as I seem to usually do, I invited them
to come to Kefalonia and to build the project
onsite, to conceive the project onsite and to build the project onsite
with people from Kefalonia that would like to collaborate and corroborate
with our project, and so we all
arrived one by one here with this idea
of reliving the myth through technology, and
expanding the scope of human action, and um
the last two weeks we've been researching
the sites and sounds of Kefalonia
and the myths. We've been interviewing individuals in
Kefalonia, um, getting their opinion about what the Melissani
myth means to them and actually what they remember of the
myth of Melissani, and integrating all of this into a
um, interactive exhibition performance
within the cave of Melissani
so the process, the evolution of the
project has arrived
at a point where we are building, instead of an exhibition space that would stay
up for a month or two, we decided to
develop a um, performance exhibition in the lake
a one night event that would last two to three hours
in the Melissani Lake. So we got approval for the lake, to work in the space
There are boat-men because we have to embark
from the entry-point through the lake to a mound
in the lake that we are setting up projectors, computers
um, we've already laid down cable for power
um, we've sort of
wired this lake so that it's ready for interaction
and so at 7PM
the exhibition and performance will begin. Visitors will come from
Melissani Lake City, from all of
areas around Kefalonia that we've visited and handed out fliers
There's excitement in the air, it's really nice. They will line up
and they'll each jump in a boat. There are three boats
Boat-men will paddle them through
the lake as a kind of water-tour. And through
this tour each boat will be given a cell phone
that will allow the visitors in each boat
to interact with the Melissani characters
with the projections and with the sounds, as an
interface to connect to Pan, who will be performing
live in the cave with his flute.
The boat-ride will last
probably 20 minutes, 25 minutes
We'll have people cycling through and then at the end
there will be
some kind of sort of climax, and
from what I understand from the people I've spoken to
from the municipality, from some of the art centers here, and from the
citizens here, nothing like this has ever been done before
in the lake, and um, I've never done anything like this before, so I'm really excited
to have this opportunity to be here.
(music continues)