Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Lοukas Ziaras is a new media artist and researcher with studies in digital audiovisual arts, theology, and postgraduate studies and experience in advertising, applied communication, and culture.

His research focuses on the study of visual culture, concentrating on the primordial need of humans to process natural materials to visualize both seen and unseen aspects of their daily lives, creating images to communicate, store, and preserve information through them. He emphasizes innovation, technology of materials, and tools that humans have used over the centuries to produce images.

He also explores the concept of innovation in ongoing tradition, the development of Mediterranean cultures through visual references, space, place, and identity, virtual reality in the artistic practice of the Greek painting tradition, computer-human and god-human communication, communicative theology and trinity, imagination, mental images and aniconic communication, symbols, metaphysics and transcendental communication, image, perception, interpretation, experience, space, light, augmented reality and experience as a multisensory act of communication.

Studies and educational programs:

- Audiovisual Arts & Digital Media, Department of Sound and Image Arts, Ionian University (BA, MA)

- Social Theology and Religious Studies, School of Theology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA, Research)

- Art, Communication, and Cultural Marketing, Department of Communication & Mass Media of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Sem)

- Lighting Design, Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece. (Sem)

He artistically and research-wise experiments with linking culture with artistic creation and modern technologies. He combines imagery with stage space within a broader framework of the intersection of art and technology. His digital art works have been presented at various festivals and theaters, and he has also participated in production teams for large corporate and entertainment shows, working on content for 3D mapping and Augmented Reality (AR).

He is a co-founder of the LOOX research, innovation, education, and culture organization, where together with his collaborators they aim to develop artistic creation, new media, audiovisual art, and communication in contemporary & digital culture.