Untitled #18 (In Their Own Image, in the Image of God They Created Them)

"The era of artificial intelligence is often imagined as a time when humanoid robots will interact with us in our daily lives. Failing to realize that we have been interacting with AI for some time now led me to wonder how to visualize software rather than through the hardware it manifests itself. If AI is the spirit, what can be its body?

Work has always been a part of human life, regulated by religion, ideology, and governance. One’s job defined a person’s place in society, perceived identity, and self-esteem. In this series of works, I decided to focus on industrial settings, as I find it important to reflect especially on this creative, productive, and even innovative aspect of AI, which is now able to operate a production line with minimal human assistance.

Throughout human history, creativity has been considered a divine power. Gods were believed to be the creators of the world and humankind. In ancient Greece, inspiration was granted to mortals by the Muses, and thus artists were seen as vessels through which higher truths could be translated into an art form accessible to humans. Today, AI requires no other inspiration than its training set of billions of images created through the painstaking efforts of humans.

To create the structures that I call TECHNOTOTEMS, I input a text prompt into a text-to-image generating AI, using a prompt like, for example, 'a complex and sophisticated structure of pipes, valves, and manometers used in oil refineries.' I then select an image I like and ask the program to create many variations of it. I use the images produced by the AI as tiles. To create the final result, I mirror half of the constructed image. The final image is composed inside our brain, in the fusiform gyrus area, which is dedicated to face recognition and tricks us into seeing faces in everyday objects, an illusion known as face pareidolia. Interestingly, just as the first thing that human babies can recognize is their parent’s face, the first field of machine vision to evolve was face recognition. These structures are transformed into beings through this biological process vital for our survival.

As AI spreads across productive and creative industries and work positions are eliminated, are we condemned or freed? Are we giving up too much of ourselves in exchange for the hard work it offers to do for us? What happens inside AI's opaque, complex mathematical minds? What are their ethics? Who are these entities? Are they restless slaves we exploit, or the masters we obey?"

– Maria Mavropoulou

Presented by KÖNIG GALERIE as part of REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954-2024. AI in Context #2, 17-24 November 2024, Heilig-Geist-Kirche, Essen, on the occasion of the AI Biennale in Essen, Germany.

KÖNIG GALERIE has evolved into a dynamic platform for contemporary art in Berlin and beyond. Initially founded by Johann König as "Johann König, Berlin" in 2002, the gallery specializes in showcasing the work of both emerging and established international artists, with a particular emphasis on younger generations. Its program is characterized by interdisciplinary, concept-driven approaches, encompassing a wide array of artistic media, from sculpture and painting to video, installation, printmaking, photography, and performance.