‘Looking for Kline’
Darryl Georgiou is a nostalgic media artist.

“For me, Art is about heightened awareness - awareness of spaces we usually don't notice or sounds we don't listen for.”
In 'Looking for Kline' Georgiou took the 1975 Play For Today 'Gangsters' as his starting point.
Set in Birmingham, Gangsters is arguably the most unusual series ever shown on British television - we urge you to check it out, they don't make 'em like that no more, and it's pretty amazing they ever did!

Darryl made inter related art works comprising of six performative ‘incidents’ mapping fictional scenes and key locations onto the contemporary Birmingham landscape, he creates memory maps with “places that are linked because of how they feel”. Exploring the notion of ‘Psychogeography and how the geographical environment influences the emotions and behavior of individuals’. Georgiou inhabited characters and re-visited former sites where John Kline (the lead character in Gangsters) was based.

Georgiou playing the The White Devil... "On the whole, I would rather be in Philadelphia"..

Darryl's contributions to the Test Bed show included a psychogeographical walk around key sites from the Gangsters show. About 20 of us set out on a fine spring day with Darryl acting as tour guide, prompting the audience to remember the places as they were in the TV series and evoking many glazed smiles as people harked back to the glory days of '70s Brum.

Darryl also created 'Nirvana' - a key setting for Gangsters and reproduced the Nirvana sign to be installed on an empty shop front in Five Ways Shopping Centre. Inside the shop he displayed the animated version of the title sequence for the TV show, with a series of clips of Darryl recreating speeches by the 'White Devil' character, an evil WC Fields character, played in the show by the series writer.

Media Artist Georgiou works across a wide range of intermedia disciplines. He was born in Birmingham and trained in Time Based Media at Art and Design School in Bristol . His early practice focused on photography, film and video art installation. He currently works across art, design and digital contexts in the development of multi-disciplinary public art commissions. These collaborative projects are often linked to areas of urban renewal or regeneration.

Recently commissioned for a site-specific collaboration with Will Alsop and Norbert Brunner for Vienna Art Week '06. A series of public projections onto temporary objects, 4-9th April 2006, Robert Stolz Platz 3, Vienna . Georgiou's previous Art/Architecture collaborations include being part of the team that won the BBC public vote for the Square One competition (the proposed redevelopment of Nottingham 's Old town square). Georgiou was lead artist, designing a reactive environment and curating a programme for a 40 metre mobile proscenium with a collapsible outdoor screen. Nottingham Square One was a collaboration with architects Patel Taylor (Finalists in the international competition). Georgiou's brief was to make artwork for responsive architecture that provided content and a framework for public participation. He was also commissioned to make a 24-hour light installation for entrance of the National Centre for Popular Music (1999), RCA Professor Nigel Coates radical lottery project in Sheffield .

Georgiou has curated a networked (telemetric) programme called Virtual Squares linking European sister cities including Dresden , Coventry and St Petersburg , on 26 May 2006. Involving interactive works of art – based on combinations of performance multi-media and moving image. The project was collaboration with Trans Media Akademie. The work employs dance, cameras, screens and electronic media, notions of surveillance or tracking movement, are a recurring motif.

The Box 328 project, Artists commission from Photographic Archive, Central Library Birmingham City Council. Co-author: John Holden. Part of a series of events celebrating the work of Victorian photographer Sir Benjamin Stone. Parallel events and exhibitions took place at the National Portrait Gallery and V&A Museum . London and City Centre Billboard Project, Birmingham 2006/07. Box 328 is an 'artists print-work', two of which have entered the permanent collections of the V&A Museum , London and the Birmingham Central Library Photographic Archive. Website and project launched at the House of Commons in November 2006.

Co-Exhibitors/Collaborators : Sadie Plant (3,653 Decade words) Co-Curator: John Holden Composition: Rolf Gehlhaar. Online Prototype (test hosting): Lessrain New Media (London/Berlin/Vienna) 2005, Full version (online hosting): Lessrain New Media 2007 Research Prototype One: The Herbert Gallery Coventry External screen (after dark only) 3-9 May 2006, with M Takeo Magruder. Prototype Two: Composition, generative sound-scape Rolf Gehlhaar, based on words (and meta tags) by Sadie Plant., CD (and limited edition vinyl record) September 2007.

Key exhibitions and publications include: In Memoriam (Walsall Gallery 2001), DVolution Critical Images (DVerse 2000 Lux, London ) and touring exhibition with Ikon Gallery (Inheritance 1996). Recently shown work at the Vapriikki Museum, Finland 2004, National Film Theatre, London 2005, Wolverhampton Art Gallery 2006, MTV ( Europe ) Decade broadcast June 2006 and image contribution to 10 Ways for Getty images (both in association with Tom Roope at Tomato). Also Aidan Gallery in Moscow 2006.

He was editor and director of image theory journal Ten.8, who published the ‘Virtual Dialogues' – Photography in the Age of Cyberspace in 1992.

His artwork is held In collections including Walsall Art Gallery and Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, (New York/Athens) collector Dakis Joannou owns one of the world's largest collections of modern art. The Lux, Centre Georges, Pompidou Paris, Museu d'Art Contemporani Barcelona, Birmingham Central Library ( Photographic Exhibitions Collection). Victoria and Albert Museum , London (Photography & Print Galleries)

Future Projects include Photo Espana 2008 and a commission for a major public artwork on Wang-Fu-Jing Street , Beijing , for the 2008 Olympic games.

Georgiou is MA Media Arts course tutor and Post Graduate programme leader for Design and Visual Arts Department,

Coventry School of Art and Design

He is represented by Getty images

Darryl's dad used to run a chip shop in Five Ways