Pantelis Xagoraris was born in 1929 in Piraeus, Greece. During 1948-1951, he concurrently studied Painting in the Athens School of Fine Arts and Mathematics at the University of Athens.
He was a distinct case among the Greek post-war artists due to his dedication on the relation between art, science and technology.
Like many of his contemporaries working on the cross-section of Optical and Kinetic art, Gestalt Theory and Art Concrete, he experimented with a computer.
Cubical Curve (1987) by Pantelis XagorarisNational Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT)
From 1960 onwards, Xagoraris produced and exhibited works whose form was based on advanced mathematic calculations and geometric designs based on rules of harmony known since the classical antiquity.
His works often refer to the structure of recognizable forms in art and nature, like spirals in column capitals and seashells.
Symmetries of the cube (1971) (1971) by Pantelis XagorarisNational Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT)
Symmetries of the Cube depicts the symmetrical structure of a cube rotated in various axes and was programmed in COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language.
Pantelis Xagoraris is printing the work Symmetries of the cube with the printer unit of the UNIVAC 1107 computer during the opening of the Art and Cybernetics event organised by the Goethe Institute and the Αthenian Center of Ekistics of the Doxiadis Foundation (1971) by Pantelis XagorarisNational Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT)
In 1971 he realized his first work with the use of a computer, the UNIVAC 1107 computer of the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center of the Athens Center of Ekistics.
This was the opening of a series of events titled Art and Cybernetics, organised by the Goethe Institute in Athens in collaboration with the Doxiadis Institute's Athens Centre of Ekistics.
In 1974 Xagoraris worked as a fellow in MIT-CAVS, this way gaining access to the computing equipment of Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group, continuing the Symmetries of the Cube series.
After returning to Greece, Pantelis Xagoraris worked at the Department of Descriptive Geometry of the National Technical University of Athens.
Through the University, Xagoraris had access to an H.P. 9810A calculator and an H.P. 9862A plotter with which he realized the calculations and drawings necessary for many of his works.
Untitled (1988) by Pantelis XagorarisNational Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT)
Pantelis Xagoraris disregarded the separation between art and science and integrated in his practice both the scientific visual observations of artists as well as the aesthetic observations of mathematicians, engineers, biologists and philosophers.
His intention was to extract new aesthetic forms from principles of the natural world that have been applied in art and engineering for their perceived aesthetic and physical qualities.
This story was brought together by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
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Story Author: Stamatis Schizakis, curator EMΣT
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