Eames Demetrios

A compelling interest in images and their effect on one's imagination led Eames Demetrios to see more than 500 movies in his senior year of high school. After graduating from college in the mid-1980s, Demetrios moved from his native San Francisco to Los Angeles where he honed his filmmaking skills at various film and TV production companies. Mastering his craft, Eames Demetrios went on to create critically acclaimed award-winning films, videos and interactive media projects. The prestigious Long Beach Museum of Art Open Channels grant provided funding for Carpool, August 21, 1992 (1992). Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times issued a "highly recommended" mark to Demetrios' documentary recording the closing of the Charles Eames and Ray Eames studio, 901: After 45 Years of Working, which had also been invited to screen at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. 1992 also saw Eames Demetrios winning a Gold Medal for Best First Feature at the Houston Film Festival for The Giving, which he wrote, produced and directed. That same year, the public television station KCET premiered Common Knowledge: An Oral History of 1988, a time-lapse portrait of life in the media age in which Demetrios interviewed the same 28 people every three weeks for an entire year. In 1995, KCET commissioned him to produce an essay about democracy. Demetrios based his film, They, on "The Bacchae" by Euripides. Another epic project took form in the mid-1990s with the development of the Interactive CD-ROM, Powers of Ten. Utilizing the vast information storage capacity of CD-ROMs, Demetrios included over 250 video clips and thousands of pages of text and images to explore the concept of scale exponentially through an array of subject matter, including but not limited to math, art, literature, biology and physics. "The Chemical Educator" called it a "rich, intellectual tapestry". The original film, Powers of Ten, was produced by Charles Eames and Ray Eames in 1977. Additionally, Demetrios has designed for the Eames Office the recently created and produced a highly innovative traveling exhibition, Powers of Ten. It premiered internationally in Sunderland, England and domestically in Holland, Michigan. While images from the original film, Powers of Ten, are included, the exhibition is customized to integrate and relate local sites and events in the discussion of scale. In February 2000, Centurions: An Oral History of the Century, a joint project created by the Eames Office and the National Gallery for Contemporary Art premiered in Sunderland, England. Most recently, Eames Demetrios completed the documentary, 77 Steps, a visual exploration and description of how Emeco chairs are manufactured. Apart from filmmaking and his multi media work, Demetrios frequently lectures to museum staff and educators as well as corporations on topics related to design, Powers of Ten, and connecting physical space and cyberspace. A fiction book of his, Wartime California, will soon be published by xlibris.com. Demetrios is currently writing an Eames Primer, a thematic biography of his grandparents, Charles Eames and Ray Eames for Universe, a division of Rizzoli.