Kakia Konstantinaki: Brains in the state of suspension

The project is a live-performed CGI short film that uses non-linear narratives and elements of the horror genre to explore human intelligence and how it uses tools of imposition and domination in order to exist.

In a world free of humans, brains wake up from cryogenic sleep and search for new bodies. In the absence of human bodies, they start possessing inanimate objects. After dominating everything, they notice that their fixation on control has led them to create monstrous entities. In a moment of irony, the brains realize that, to defend themselves against the monsters, they must in effect destroy themselves. Their own intelligence is the monster and must be terminated.

What would it mean if we used our intelligence differently, and “did not treat everything around us as a prop to our own drama”, as James Bridle notes?

The story is a commentary on the domination of human intelligence, reason, and patriarchy. The metaphor of the brain, with its relentless drive to dominate, reflects humanity’s willingness to destroy even itself in order to exist. The work, though not a typical horror film, draws from the genre’s exploration of the liminal and the in-between. “Cosmic horror writers are less interested in shocking you than with the boundary between the natural and the supernatural” – Eugene Thacker. The film seeks to explore the threshold, the hybrid, the never-acquired condition, the endless drive to reach the desired object, which always leads to another liminality that never satisfies. A monster that the human never seems willing to accept. “The monster always represents the destruction of boundaries and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our monstrosities” – Jack Halberstam.

Two years ago, a friend of mine invited me to participate in his project. He asked if he could film me while posing a question that I wouldn’t know in advance. The question was: “What is your life looking like at the moment? Describe it with one word.” I answered instinctively: στάση – stasis, or pause. That word stayed with me. It marked a state in my life that I wanted to understand more deeply. I began imagining a project that would explore the meaning of stasis. While the project didn’t unfold exactly as a study of that concept, I return to that moment as a starting point.

As part of the research, I read “In the Dust of This Planet” by Eugene Thacker, where he discusses how horror unsettles us by disrupting the way we know the world. Horror begins when human knowledge fails and when logic can no longer explain what is happening. We are frightened not only by what we don’t understand, but by the idea that understanding might be impossible. This struck me as crucial: horror as a breach in the human-centric worldview, as a space where rationality collapses. I also read “Ways of Being” by James Bridle, which takes this thought further: What if we moved beyond reason altogether? What if intelligence wasn’t defined by control, classification, and logic, but by openness, empathy, relation, and other ways of knowing?

But why the horror genre? Around the same time, I had been watching horror films for fun and kept returning to my answer in that filmed interview: pause. I noticed that just before almost every jump scare, there is a pause. A stillness that makes the scare land harder. The horror emerges from the stasis. This led me to examine horror not only as a film genre but as a philosophical space. I began exploring liminality – a word, like stasis, that deals with the in-between. I started 3D-scanning spaces that felt liminal to me: transitional, empty, nostalgic. Places that didn’t quite belong to either here or there. In this exploration, certain words kept coming up: suspension, threshold, hybrid, in-between – words that represent the collapse of boundaries, which is a common theme in many horror films. Boundaries between natural and supernatural, inside and outside, human and monster.

The work explores a monster that is not monstrous because it is evil or dangerous, but because it refuses to be defined. It exists in a state of becoming, never fully reaching the desired condition, never fully arriving. It cannot be categorized. It resists being known through reason. It is always transforming – and that terrifies a logic-dependent intelligence.

While the film does not fit neatly into the horror genre, it draws from horror’s deep engagement with the unknown, the liminal, the threshold. It uses horror not as an aesthetic but as a method of inquiry. This project focuses on that moment in a horror film just before the jump scare happens. A character walks slowly down a hotel corridor. Time stretches. Will someone die? Will everything snap back to normal? That liminal state, the second before revelation or return, is where horror resides. It is not the monster, the violence, or the gore that terrifies us, but the not knowing. It is the moment when reason fails. The lack of reason creates horror. The lack of brains creates horror.

In terms of form, I chose to work with non-linear narrative structures, partly because they echo the project’s content, but also because they speak to a different kind of storytelling: one associated with feminine narratives. I have been drawn to these open-ended, non-climactic forms for a long time. They are often compared to open-world video games, in contrast to linear ones with a single climax. I see the open narrative form as a way to resist logic and reason, and thus the patriarchy. Using the openness of feminine narratives became an intentional counterpoint to the film’s themes of control.

Rather than presenting a conventional three-channel short film, I decided to explore this work as a live experience. The Onassis AiR residency gave me the opportunity to do so and made it possible for me to present and test this live format in front of an audience. I am grateful.

Films: “The Blob”, “Brain from Planet Arous”, “The Thing”, “Stalker”, “Possession”, “Brain Damage”, “Halloween”

Books: “In the Dust of This Planet” by Eugene Thacker, “Ways of Being” by James Bridle, “To Be a Machine” by Mark O’Connell, “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher, “The Idea of the Brain” by Matthew Cobb, “The Spectacle of the Void” by David Peak, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” by Julia Kristeva, “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Hélène Cixous, “TransMaterialities: Trans/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” by Karen Barad

Artists: H.P. Lovecraft, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Kathy Acker, David Lynch