This series focuses on image-making and image distribution in an era dominated by it while also questioning the bidirectional relationship between the creators and the distributors of images, humans and algorithms. The main idea came from the realization of a correlation between images and food. Food is a basic need of every living creature. It is critical for its growth and survival, while images, on the contrary, are far from critical for our survival.

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I started noticing the vocabulary used for images, for example, on social media, we call our endless image scroll “feed”, or we say “an Artificial Intelligence system has to be fed with images to be trained”. It became clear to me that there is a new kind of “creatures”, A.I.s and algorithms that do rely on images in order to evolve and thus survive. And since those intelligent systems and machines are in charge of more and more aspects of our lives, we too, depend on images in ways that we haven’t yet realized.

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In this new world where every one of us is a set of facial landmarks, trapped in his comfortable filter bubble and where attention is the currency while our choices are more predictable than ever, is still the ability to think for our own fundamental? If not for survival, then maybe to retain our human nature?

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Bio

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 V.R. and screen captured images. Her work and research focus on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the digital spaces we inhabit. Characteristic of her aesthetic is that the resulting images are at the boundary line between plausibility or not, potentiality and non-potentiality, random and constructed. Playing with the perception of viewers, she aspires to question the role and power of photography in an era that is dominated by it. Her first V.R. project, Family Portraits, has been awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2019), and she has also been selected among 30 Under 30 Women Photographers (2018) and a Young Greek Photographer by Athens Photo Festival (2016) Maria completed her MFA studies in 2018, at Athens School of Fine Arts, from where she got her B.A. in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in institutions and museums in Greece and abroad.