Transition to 8 is a two-phase initiative that evolved from a nationally funded research project into a European cooperation project, expanding both its geographic scope and its artistic impact.
The first phase, titled “Transition to 8: Bridging social issues, tech and contemporary art,” was an innovative, research-oriented project implemented in Eleusis, Greece by a consortium consisting of the Laboratory of Qualitative Research in Psychology and Psychosocial Well-Being (Department of Psychology, University of Athens), the Athena Research Centre, and the cultural production and management company MENTOR. Focusing on Eleusis’s social landscape, the project investigated three major social phenomena, environmental pollution, labour, and the refugee/immigration issue, and developed a pioneering methodology that, through physiological recordings sensors and qualitative observations, residents’ emotional and physical responses to these issues are recorded and transformed into raw material for contemporary artistic creation. This phase established the scientific and technological foundations of the approach and piloted its implementation, culminating in a large-scale multimedia festival that returned the city’s “(heart)beat” to the community through art.
Building on this methodology, the second phase, “Transition to 8: European societies in flux” (TT8), is implemented within the Creative Europe framework and shifts the focus toward a broader, more artistically driven European implementation. Delivered by MENTOR, Electroni[k], MoTA, and TAI, TT8 expands the project to multiple territories and places air pollution and its social dimensions at the centre of an ambitious artistic programme of showcase events. Through participatory activities such as bodystorming and sociodrama, communities engaged in collective reflection on urban environmental challenges, while wearable sensors captured physiological recordings that were translated into audiovisual elements. These datasets were then curated into digital moodboards and shared with sound and digital artists, who use them to produce original artworks presented through public showcases across Greece, France, Slovenia, and Armenia, including major festival platforms such as SONICA and Maintenant.
Together, the two phases demonstrate how an evidence-based, interdisciplinary methodology, rooted in social science and technology, can be scaled into a European cultural programme that uses contemporary art as a tool for environmental awareness, community mobilisation, and climate action, in alignment with the EU Green Deal.
Experts in sociopsychology, technology, and cultural production and management formed the collaborating teams of Transition to 8.
The methodology developed for Transition to 8 was based on the need to connect people’s emotional and physical reactions to major social issues with contemporary artistic creation. Eleusis provided the ideal context for the pilot implementation of the project, as a city where the cultural depth of antiquity meets the industrial rise of modern times and, on the occasion of its proclamation as European Capital of Culture 2023, was reinventing its post-industrial identity.
Analysis of the social climate of Eleusis initially highlighted three particularly intense phenomena, environmental pollution, labour, and the refugee/immigrant issue, closely linked to residents’ quality of life and to fundamental human rights. Building on this foundation and expanding the project’s European dimension, the methodology was subsequently implemented across additional pilot territories, adapting the same participatory approach to different local contexts and environmental realities.
In Eleusis, and later in the other two pilot cities Rennes and Ljubljana, community members participated in sociodrama sessions facilitated by expert coordinators, creating a structured space to explore and discuss key social and environmental challenges. During these sessions, participants’ emotional and physical responses (such as temperature, skin conductance, and movement in space) were recorded through wearable technology. In collaboration with scientists from the Qualitative Analysis Laboratory, researchers from the “Athena” Research Centre analysed and processed this material to support the development and expansion of a dedicated digital platform.
The interactive platform serves both as inspiration and as a source of raw digital material for socially engaged sound and visual artists, enabling them to create original works grounded in community experience and data. Through public showcases and festival presentations, the artistic outputs return this collective material back to audiences, translated into artworks that open new ways of perceiving and reflecting on shared societal issues.
Eleusis offered the ideal setting for the first pilot implementation of the methodology developed by Transition to 8. The city underwent profound transformations throughout the 20th century due to rapid industrial growth in the wider area. These shifts attracted people from diverse backgrounds in search of employment opportunities; notably, the arrival of refugees from Asia Minor at that time significantly reshaped the city and reportedly doubled its population.
While industrial development supported livelihoods, it also resulted in severe environmental degradation, affecting air, soil, and water quality. This complex reality makes Eleusis a place where many of today’s major social challenges converge in a concentrated and tangible way.
For this reason, Eleusis was selected as the project’s starting point: a context where scientists, researchers, and artists could jointly build the conditions for art to operate as a tool through which the community can revisit, rethink, and collectively re-deliberate these issues. The city’s designation as European Capital of Culture 2023 further underlined this trajectory, signalling a new post-industrial phase in which engaging critically with social and environmental challenges is not only desirable, but essential for moving forward together.
Sociodrama: Its history, basic principles and structure
Going back to the early 1920s, we find a young imaginative researcher, Jacob Moreno, who placed in the centre of his theory humans as an organic and necessary part of society, in which they participate adapting to various social roles. Moreno studied medicine, mathematics and philosophy. As a student, he rejected Freud's theory - which “moved” individuals away from the “non-human” society of the 19th century and “placed” them in the treatment room to protect them. Moreno was interested in the possibilities given to individuals by participating in groups, and therefore he was one of the pioneers of group psychotherapy.
Why sociodrama?
Within the transition to 8 project we want people to talk about their shared experiences in each pilot city, shed light on their patterns, their various relationships (family, friends, social and professional interactions) and how they perceive and experience their living conditions. The goal is to look into the internal structure of their community as a social group regarding their social interactions beyond what "meets the eye". Sociodrama supports this process by allowing participants to take on different roles related to problems that the members of the community face and act on them as if they experienced a real-life situation in a “place-action-motivation” framework. In this way, the method addresses the group as a collective body rather than focusing on individuals in isolation.
A group methodology - A group experiential process
Sociodrama is a group methodology that focuses on problem-solving practices within human relationships. It cultivates an understanding of the social systems and behaviours that shape individual and collective identities, exploring social issues, social justice, trauma, prejudice, stigma, interpersonal tension, intergroup conflicts, treatment, justice, etc. It also implicates many non-verbal communication indicators (facial expressions, posture, eye contact, gestures, tone of voice, body language, physical movement, etc.).
In addition, sociodrama enhances participants’ understanding of their values, emotions, and attitudes, while also giving them the opportunity to experiment with new ways of behaving. Its ultimate goal is to help individuals gain distance from social behaviours and roles that have become deeply ingrained, so that they can respond differently to familiar situations. At the same time, it also operates on an introspective level, since from the very beginning of a session, once the topic has been defined, shared characteristics, thoughts, emotions, and hopes emerge through a process of exploring the self and one’s place within society.
Structure of a typical sociodrama session:
- Warm-up: Participants decide on the subject matter they will tackle.
- Casting of characters: Participants either decide on their roles spontaneously or the moderator proceeds with the casting.
- Role Development: Participants expand their roles as they imagine them.
Each sociodrama session ends with discussing the group's approach to the subject, possible solutions, new ideas presented, etc. That works in a mirroring and reflective way, addressing the intellect and the emotion and enabling the creation of synapses between the social roles we take on in real life and the roles represented within the sociodrama sessions.
Have you ever felt the rhythm of your heartbeat changing when you experience joy or when you are emotionally charged? Have you ever noticed your palms sweating during social interaction? Have you ever caught yourself nervously moving around or co-existing in peace with others in the same space? Such physical behaviours can be recorded with minimal intervention using modern technology similar to our smartphones.
In Transition to 8, residents of the different pilot cities participated in sociodrama sessions where they expressed their views and interacted on the social issues of environmental pollution, labour and the refugee/immigrant issue. At the same time, researchers recorded the heartbeat, galvanic skin response and the motion of the participants who opted to wear the Shimmer Sensing bracelet sensors.
Researchers then conducted the physiological recordings analysis (heartbeat, skin stimulation and motion) using the sound and video recordings of the sessions, and the notes taken by scientists during the sessions. The analysis offered a flow of information that, in combination with the qualitative analysis of the audiovisual recordings, was provided to artists to use as digital raw material via the digital platform. Data collected during the sociodrama sessions were processed in such a way, so that the participants were not recognisable, in compliance with the Ethics and GDPR protocols that were always made known to the participants.
In total, through a series of interactive visualisations and sonifications, based on the physiological data analysis and the qualitative analysis of the audiovisual material, artists got inspired and created innovative artworks reflecting the social issues at stake within the community of each pilot city.
The digital platform developed within Transition to 8 facilitates the transition from social phenomena to contemporary artistic creation. It offers a set of tools that provide a multimedia presentation of the research results available and free to use for artists who engage or would like to engage in innovative forms of expression and the general public. This digital platform expands the idea of a moodboard by including the properties of interactivity and dynamic content, presenting the research results in an understandable audiovisual format. Artists are able to see, listen to and download the data collected during the sociodrama sessions as digital raw material. The data are categorised and correspond with sound, visuals and movement through graphs that represent the different emotional states of the participants during the sessions. As an online tool, the platform is able to connect with other online and offline applications, expanding the possibilities of artistic creation and setting the basis for pan-European and international creative and research collaborations.
Transition to 8 uses technology to explore social phenomena through an innovative and pioneering methodology. It generates comprehensible data by observing how emotional states arising from social phenomena are manifested in individuals’ physical responses. In this way, the methodology enables the transformation of collected data into artistic creation.
Electronic music
Transition to 8 engages electronic music as an artistic field that offers distinct possibilities for translating collective experiences, emotional states, and social tensions into sound. This choice is not incidental: electronic music has long been associated with practices of experimentation, technological mediation, and cultural renewal, while also often functioning as a space of expression for communities seeking new forms of visibility, participation, and collectivity.
From disco and house to techno and their later evolutions, different electronic music scenes emerged in close relation to specific urban environments, social conditions, and cultural demands. Without constituting a single or homogeneous field, these currents highlighted the close relationship between sound, the body, technology, and community. In this sense, electronic music has not only been a musical genre, but also a space in which new modes of encounter, coexistence, and expression have been tested and reimagined.
At the same time, the development of more accessible production technologies expanded the possibilities of music-making, enabling more people to experiment with sound and create work outside traditional musical systems. This dimension of accessibility and experimentation is particularly important for Transition to 8, as it relates to the capacity to transform data, lived experience, and social stimuli into new artistic forms and creations.
Within the project, electronic music is approached not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as a strategic dynamic medium for the artistic processing of social and environmental experience. Through collaboration with artists working across contemporary and experimental forms of sonic creation, Transition to 8 explores how sound can function as a carrier of memory, intensity, collective experience, and public reflection.
Sound art
Alongside electronic music, Transition to 8 employs sound art as a key artistic language for translating environmental reality into shared experience. Sound art functions as a bridge between two artistic worlds, music and the fine arts, taking sound (and the many ways it can be processed, shaped, and spatialised) as its starting point. Rather than unfolding only through time like a traditional musical piece, sound art often unfolds in space and time simultaneously, inviting audiences to move through an environment where listening becomes physical, situated, and relational.
Within TT8, sound art allows for data often perceived as “invisible”, to become perceptible and discussable through installations and immersive sonic environments. It draws on a wide spectrum of practices: sonic experimentation, sculptural thinking, interactive and architectural settings, visual and audiovisual correlations, and data-driven systems. This makes it particularly suited to TT8’s interdisciplinary approach, where scientific measurements and community responses can be translated into sound installations, spatial compositions, and interactive experiences that the public encounters not as information, but as embodied perception.
Historically, sound art has been shaped by artists who challenged disciplinary boundaries, from figures associated with contemporary music experimentation, such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, to visual and sculptural practices that expanded the idea of what an artwork can be. This hybrid nature continues today: sound art resists fixed categories and often refuses the division between “high” and “popular” culture, reaching toward electronic music, alternative scenes, contemporary art, and research-based practice. TT8 aligns with this lineage by treating sound not merely as aesthetic output, but as a critical and conceptual tool, capable of connecting data, environment, and society through listening.
Transition to 8 approaches art as a means through which the experiences and emotions of the community can be articulated and transformed. In this context, digital arts take on particular significance, as they have historically developed in close relation to technological change and to the shifting social contexts of each era.
As early as the 1950s, artists and designers began experimenting with technology, while from the 1970s onwards programming became increasingly integrated into artistic practice. At the same time, the film industry, television, and video games gradually familiarised audiences with the aesthetic and expressive possibilities of electronic processing.
The widespread diffusion of digital technologies during the 2000s further strengthened this relationship between art, culture, and technology. The World Wide Web and the constant interconnection of people created new conditions for the development of Internet Art and new channels for the dissemination of artistic information. Today, social media offer platforms through which almost anyone can create and distribute their art, while artists continue to explore the boundaries of new media and critically reflect on the consequences of the technologies used in everyday life.
Within this environment, the constant accumulation of data, resulting from the extensive use of technology and the internet over the last decade, led many artists to study, interpret, and visualise such data, thereby shaping new narratives. This also gave rise to Data Art, a field that draws on both online and offline sources and uses the internet to make data accessible. In this way, the chaos of countless data points is transformed into a new way of understanding ourselves and the world, and can also function as a metaphor for human experience.
It is precisely within this dynamic that Transition to 8 is situated. The project provides artists with data for the creation of works that emerge directly from the emotional and physical responses of participants, in the sociodrama sessions, to the social issues affecting their city and community. Through this process, artists develop new ways of perceiving and interpreting community experience, while the community itself actively participates in shaping the artistic outcome. In this way, community and artists become co-creators, jointly forming a distinctive artistic approach to the concept of experience.