Imagined Images

PHOTOGRAPHY

Feb 4

The series ‘Imagined Images’ consists of 136 images, all generated with the help of AI. Visual artist Maria Mavropoulou created these images to recall unphotographed memories, moments she imagined or has been told that happened. With her work, she asks: What is the use of a photograph?

Photography Maria Mavropoulou

What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts. Especially family photographs are a tie to our personal history, an archive of who we are and where we came from. They are ‘memory deposits’ from where we keep sourcing the certainty of our life events even if our own memories of them are lost. In this new project, personal memories are absorbed by A.I. and meshed with thousands of others to become a new breed of images, images resembling in an uncanny way those of our childhood photo albums. But what is the use of this new kind of image since they lose their fundamental tie to reality? What is the memory they hold? To whom are they precious, heirlooms that must be preserved?

Trying to reconcile with my own family history, one of displacement, loss and deprivation I visualised with the use of DALLE-2 moments that happened, moments that were unphotographed, moments I imagined, moments I was told about, moments I have hoped to happen, moments that never happened in order to ask myself: How can one rewrite their own history?

“What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts.”

About Maria

Maria Mavropoulou (b. 1989) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of photographic images, such as VR and screen-captured images, GAN and AI-generated images.

Maria’s 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, addressing issues of technological mediation. By using the most novel technology available to her, she creates work that reflects on the new ways images are produced today. 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.

Maria holds a Master’s in Fine Arts and a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work is part of private collections and has been exhibited in institutions and museums in Greece and abroad.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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Imagined Images

The series ‘Imagined Images’ consists of 136 images, all generated with the help of AI. Visual artist Maria Mavropoulou created these images to recall unphotographed memories, moments she imagined or has been told that happened. With her work, she asks: What is the use of a photograph?

“What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts.”

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