Adonis Archontides

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                   is a multidisciplinary artist focusing mostly on imaging, video and digital spaces. I’m drawn to the intersections of reality, fiction and simulation – the liminal spaces where they overlap, blur and reshape eachother – and how memory entagles all of them together.

↪ The Sims Saga is a series of still image and video works following the life of Adonis (Sim), a version of myself created in the popular social simulation game, The Sims 4 (Maxis, 2014-ongoing). The series follows his life and struggles with being both virtual and an artist, juxtaposing the artist’s career trajectory with the monomyth, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. It currently comprises two residency documentations told through posts on Instagram, three durational performance documentation videos, two exhibitions (one virtual and one interreal) and their accompanying artworks, as well as two films – one of which is premiering at the end of October 2025, as part of a screening for the Limassol stopover of the Art Explora Festival.


↪ My videogame photography branched off of the first episode of the Sims Saga and has since evolved through a series of focused photographic projects. These works largely explore positive aspects of gaming and engage with concepts such as playbour (labour through play), fiero, and the state of flow. In 2023, I was invited by Matteo Bittanti (Milan Machinima Festival) and Marco de Mutiis (Fotomuseum Winterthur) to contribute an essay to the first Italian reader on videogame photography they were preparing. By the time the book was published in 2025, I was also invited to present my text (developed as a series of journal entries) at Fotoludica, the inaugural Italian Conference on Videogame Photography held at IULM University.


  • Tsushima Haikus, 2021
    An exercise in simulation, produced in collaboration with Androula Kafa for The Fields of Algorithms, a selection of short films curated by David Blandy for The One Minutes. Ghost of Tsushima Sucker (Punch Productions, 2020) is an action-adventure game telling a fictional story during the real first Mongol Invasion of Japan, set on an adapted version of the island of Tsushima. A haiku generator is fed key words about nature, life and simulations, and spits out a poem which is then sung by Google Translate back into Japanese. The english lines are rendered in Electroharmonix, a typeface made by Typodermic Fonts meant to mimic English letters as katakana script.

↪ 3D scanning opened up a world of possibility when I first started experimenting with it in 2019. In 2020, iPhones got equipped with LiDAR scanners, and since then I have been building an archive of 3D models which I pull from to create virtual worlds.

  • φαινόμενα, The Island Club presents A Day, Anafi, Greece, 2021
    In 2021, Piergiorgio Pepe and Iordanis Kerenidis invited The Island Club to a special edition of Phenomenon Anafi, and Christodoulos Panayiotou asked the team to present over a day. My contribution was a collective walk through a virtual dream‑world built mostly from half‑processed scans of Limassol, which we explored together on Mozilla Hubs from the café with the most reliable internet on the island.
     
  • NiMAC, Sensing is believing, believing is seeing, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2022
    In 2022, my project Sensing is believing, believing is seeing was selected as part of the Nicosia Municipal Art Centre’s Contemporary Photographic Practices programme. It consisted of 5 screens and a video of an interactive world collaged together using 3D scans taken all over Cyprus, displaying elements relating to its slow development and rapid decay, and negotiating the Cypriot landscape as one which remains in many ways virtual.
        ↪ Sensing is believing, believing is seeing (Flythrough), 2022

  • Timelapse Flower (Anemone Coronaria), 2019
    The first artwork I created using 3D scanning: made by accident when I neglected the fact that a live anemone flower being scanned on a turntable for an hour would need to be kept wet to survive. Over the course of the 1 hour needed to complete the scan, the flower wilted and fell over, its slow death captured in the 3D model following the tradition of photographic long-exposure processes, while the whole process could be seen in the scanner UI. Looking forward to producing more of these soon.


↪ Upcoming projects

  • Adonis and the House, After, 2025
    In the final stages of filming, Adonis and the House, After is the latest entry in The Sims Saga. Originally conceived as a multi-channel video installation, it unfolds as a non-linear, semi-fictional narrative about an apartment in Limassol (my parents’ home), told through a series of short vignettes set alongside an hour-and-a-half–long timelapse of me recreating the apartment in The Sims 4, recorded in one take. The work grew from the realisation that I have performed this “ritual” in every mainline Sims game since the first one, beginning in my teenage years. It is currently being developed as a much shorter, single-channel video, to be part of a screening programme during the Limassol stopover of the Art Explora Festival, dealing with the gentrification of Limassol. I’ve included some screenshots, as well as a viewing link for the hour-and-a-half–long version of the timelapse.

  • Studies on Breaking Immersion, 2025
    Produced for Extra Live: Doppelgänger, an upcoming digital & VR exhibition hosted at Virtual Art House Turku (a digital copy of Taiteen Talo / Art House Turku) curated by Yev Kravt. It brings together three 3D scans of real exhibition spaces I have had access to in my capacity as an art worker, but not as an artist, now reimagined as virtual stages for my own interventions: The Island Club in Limassol, Sylvia Kouvali’s gallery in Piraeus, and LUMA Arles’ East Gallery. Each space holds a mini-exhibition exploring themes of layering and visibility, from rescued street cats (abundant and often neglected in Cyprus), to image textures spilling through unmeasurable geometry and blending into one, to blooming flowers from different layers of reality, culminating in Studies on Breaking Immersion: an extensive videogame photography series documenting a visual artifact known as z-fighting, where two or more objects occupying the same space compete for visibility.

  • Limassol Zoo, 2025
    Conceived as part of Christodoulos Panayiotou’s 1953, a dramaturgical exercise on the facticity of the present, structured in three parts and lasting fifteen hours. During Part One, I will be recreating the Limassol Zoo in the videogame Planet Zoo (Frontier Developments, 2019) using only elephant enclosures, as a tribute to Julie the Elephant who lived in captivity there from the early 60s until her untimely death in 1998.

↪ Work-in-progress

  • Cyprus in videogames
    I’m currently conducting research on the way Cyprus is represented in videogames. Unsurprisingly, in many games, the island (or a fictional one close-by) is treated as the secret lair of a villain or villaneous organisation.