He greets people on his site with a simple “Hi, I'm George. I'm a San Francisco based artist and designer.”
And true to his word his “unique projects playfully re-imagine people’s relationships to their environments and to themselves.'
But that hardly describes what he does. In a way, one could say, he brings joy to people. What is happiness, if not small moments where something pleasant and out of the ordinary takes place.
As he says “When not creating, I do freelance creative work and regularly speak at universities, conferences, and companies on topics involving creativity, urbanism, art, and design.”
And create he does. Before his latest book of illustrations, Urban Imagination, hit the bookstores, he made a sensation with his Pulse of the City project for Boston, and his Mistletoe Drone in San Francisco last Christmas. He's worked with Nestle on The Bubbleverse, “a cosmic portal into your childhood imagination,” which was based on a storyline of “creating happiness” in a laboratory.
And it seems creating happiness is what the Astoria born Greek strives for. He went to Greek school at St. Demetrios in Queens, then attended NYC’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School before heading off to Harvard University in Massachusetts.
However, it was the West Coast that won him over. He now resides in San Fransisco, because, as he said in a recent interview, of his “desire to 'stretch,' and the fact that 'curiosity is at the base' of everything he does.” A lot of the work he does is in the realm of interaction and interactive art, and “kind of saying, How can we poke at all of these kinds of ways that people interact with each other and the world around them and bring a different experience of the world to light?”
He claims inspiration from the “things we take for granted.” When he recounts how he and his friend came up with the “Pulse of the City” project he expresses this burst of creativity “a few minutes of talking and BOOM, in flash of insight our Urban Prototyping festival submission is born. Letting pedestrians creatively hear their own heartbeats! Using their bio-feedback as a way to take a moment to check in with themselves. Co-opting the form of boring parking meters to create a fun, interactive experience. Hacking the urban landscape in order to enhance it. Surely enough, we were accepted. We now had $1,000 and two months to make it happen.”
And that's how he gets thing done, simply, cooperatively, and happily. His "mistletoe drone" created with Mustafa Khan flying over unsuspecting couples in San Francisco's Union Square encouraged them to observe the tradition and kiss under the mistletoe. Another project he created was "The Funk Truck,'' in which a live band played funk music on the flatbed of a truck that traveled around the city. Another projects called "Balloonacy," had 2,000 people frolicking and dancing amid thousands of light-emitting, motion-sensitive balloons in a pitch-black room.
As he told the website The Bold Italic: "All my work is about playfully re-imagining the world around us. Drones have been causing all sorts of paranoia lately and I wanted to reframe them from being something scary and ominous to being fun and human. It's not about the technology, it's about how we use it."
Perhaps that is the bottom line, and that is why one reporter called George Zisiadis, “The Happiest Greek in America.”
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