MP9 Melissani Project Teaser (Rough)

The Myth of Melissani Cave. Kefalonia, Greece

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)

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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.

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