“Image Eaters” by Maria Mavropoulou
Maria Mavaropoulou is a visual artist based in Athens, Greece with an outstanding body of work in her name.
Her work has been exhibited in different museums in Greece and abroad. She was also awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival for her VR project Family Portraits in 2019.
Her most recent work ‘Image Eaters’ discusses the relationship between human and Artificial Intelligence. Humans supplie A.I.s with ‘resources’ so that they can grow or in other words, advance. In return, the algorithms create and supply us with a ‘desirable’ personalized content. As Maria mentions, “The main idea came from the realization of a correlation between images and food.” It’s very interesting how we call a series of images or information, ‘a feed’ (e.g. on social media), also an input of images or information in a system in order to train it is called ‘feeding’. The A.I.s have turned into a ‘creature’ that is feeding off of our human experiences which we record or share in the form of images. The project posts an important question, whether we are the masters of our own lives or we have given up the power to technologies; this new type of ‘creatures’ to run our lives. Who creates whom?
