Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989, she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of photographic images. Examples include VR and screen-captured images, GAN and AI-generated images. Her work and research focus on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the virtual spaces that we inhabit. This addresses issues of technological mediation. Her work explores digital identity and representation in the post-social media era, algorithmic bias, network culture, power politics between machines and humans, and the multidimensionality of our experiences in our always-online world.
Get to know the artist
We asked Maria Mavropoulou some questions to get to know her and her practice better.
What does the theme ‘Emergence’ mean to you/your practice?
A main aspect of my work focuses on how the volume of information we produce and consume can be mediated through the digital sphere. For example, in my research, I usually look for statistics to understand our online behaviour, and through this prism, a vast amount of intuitive decisions can be observed and show the bigger picture.
Also, using text-to-image AI systems in my work gives me this insight into a “collective subconscious” of images. Looking to create the “average images” of a specific theme I find it very interesting how billions of images are merged together to create this latent space of concepts and then produce this new breed of images that are AI-generated.
What do you love most about being a part of our festival?
The exhibition spaces that are out of the ordinary as well as the diversity of the visitors.
What would you like the audience to take away from experiencing your work?
Presenting a work that explores the emergence of a new kind of intelligence, an artificial one, in a medieval church feels to me like an ideal exhibition venue, that sparks exactly the associations that I intended this work to initiate.
What message or emotion do you aim to convey through your work?
I hope to spark the feeling of interconnectedness between different kinds of intelligence and through this the experience of the sublime.
Could you describe the feeling you get when you see your art resonating with people?
That’s the most satisfying feeling, when the audience can resonate with the artwork! It also creates a collective experience that I cherish.
Find out more about Maria Mavropoulou
You can find out more about the groundbreaking AI work created by Maria Mavropoulou by exploring their website. You can also follow them on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
