MARIA MAVROPOULOU

In their own image, in the image of God they created them

Maria Mavropoulou (Athens, Greece, 1989) inserts a number of text prompts in a text-toimage algorithm. The AI, which has an incomprehensibly large pool of data, has no need for a Muse to be inspired. Billions of photographs serve as reference points and guide the machine towards its goal to interpret the request in a visual output The artist then develops the result further, multiplies the tiles, connects them, selects, and, through subtle reflection and duplication, she makes the resulting images seem familiar to us. In this way, such powerful, almost wildly fiery pictures are created that we are forced to ask whether AI could at some point make artworks with greater meaning—rather than asking whether this has irrevocably placed into doubt the referentiality of a photograph to reality. For the decisive moment is here the step from language to image, which the AI, with the aid of an enormous training archive, takes to transform the inputted statement into images whose origins we will never fully be able to trace.

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 the photographic image, such as VR, LiDar scans and screen captured images in order to investigate the contradictions between the physical and the digital spaces that we inhabit. Her work has been exhibited in a number of institutions in Greece and abroad among which are Foto Colectania (Barcelona, 2021), Tallinn Art  Hall (Tallinn, Estonia, 2021), Miami Art Week, (2020), 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival(2019), Maison de la Photographie (Paris, 2018), Benaki Museum (Athens, 2018), Unseen (Amsterdam, 2018), SHED London (2017).