In June 2024, at the Gyeongsangbuk-do International AI·Metaverse Film Festival held in South Korea, Gioula Papadopoulou was awarded for A.I. made me do it: Ophelia.
Gioula Papadopoulou
New art built on the material of the unforeseen
Text: Chryssa Nanou
From the fallacies of the artificial intelligence up to the shattered certainties of literature and philosophy, Gioula Papadopoulou, visual artist and artistic director of Video Art Miden, draws her artistic material by giving room to the unforeseen, already having an intricate work under her belt, which plays a key role in the renewal of video art in Greece.
Artificial intelligence tools, technology, video, as well as inspiration from the theater and cinema, are contemplatively oriented towards the future and the past, tracing intertemporal or even timeless notions, such as coexistence, nature and life itself, building the basis for a an unpredictable, futuristic and often enigmatic imagery.
“I was always intrigued by the dimension of time and the elliptic or symbolic narrative in cinema, the theater and visual arts. All the above are inextricably linked for me and I was equally fascinated by the visual films by Peter Greeneway, Samuel Beckett’s plays – to whom many of my works render homage – or Tony Oursler; I was blown away when I saw for the first time a video installation of his. In Greece, during my university years, we did not have not many opportunities to get acquainted with video art. The fact that my supervising teachers, Chronis Botsoglou and Tasos Christakis, encouraged my to base my senior thesis exclusively on video, at a time when video art was not a part of the Athens School of Fine Arts curriculum, played a key role for me in developing an interest on this medium ever since a student.
In June 2024, at the Gyeongsangbuk-do International AI·Metaverse Film Festival held in South Korea, Gioula Papadopoulou was awarded for A.I. made me do it: Ophelia, a work created through the use of A.I. systems that had been bestowed with the Best A.I. Artwork Award at the Dérapage 23 Festival held in Montreal, Canada.
It’s a surrealistic, non-narrative animation, where a classic character (Ophelia) comes across dreamlike mutations and unpredictable futuristic scenes through a series of variations of an original image created as “Ophelia” by an A.I. generator. The audio part of the work was produced with the help of an artificial intelligence platform that “translated” the image into sound.
She goes on to explain the A.I. made me do it: Ophelia creation process: “In summer 2022, the first widely used platforms for the creation of images through A.I. generators came along. After running a series of comparative tests, mostly out of a ‘researcher’s curiosity’ I would say, I decided to try out a topic I had already addressed in my previous works, that is Ophelia. The research challenge that popped up next was to test the limits of the variation that could be produced by a simple prompt without any further clarifications. This way, I created multiple variations of the topic, always having the same original image as my starting point. As I came to notice that these images kept evolving in uncontrollable and unexpected ways (for instance, Ophelia was gradually transformed into a male figure or futuristic shapes, even took the form of Mickey Mouse), I decided to portray these transfigurations into an experimental animation.”
Artificial intelligence is not a fresh fruit; it has been a decades-long research field in the art world as well. What has changed nowadays is the massive access to A.I. tools, which has caused a stir, but definitely not a revolution. For the time being, there’s nothing revolutionary in this massive use. On the contrary, an average consumer’s aesthetic seems to be rehashed; to be honest, the more the platforms are enhanced the more it becomes the norm.
When referring to the changes brought upon in the area of art by artificial intelligence and discussing whether we find ourselves before a revolution, Gioula Papadopoulou observes: “Artificial intelligence is not a fresh fruit; it has been a decades-long research field in the art world as well. What has changed nowadays is the massive access to A.I. tools, which has caused a stir, but definitely not a revolution. For the time being, there’s nothing revolutionary in this massive use. On the contrary, an average consumer’s aesthetic seems to be rehashed; to be honest, the more the platforms are enhanced the more it becomes the norm. Within this framework, it is not easy to create something interesting and personal unless you take the time to delve into the whole process. What I still find stimulating in terms of visual art is the element of the error, at least while it still exists as a possibility. The error and the observation of the unforeseen continue to leave room for a new art to spring.”
Most of her works are not inspired by current affairs or topicality, but of existential issues that have been running through art for centuries. “Even the recent Ophelia created by artificial intelligence tools is in fact a remark on the fluidity of human nature. Sometimes, though, current reality is both a trigger and a pretext. Along with my sister, Olga Papadopoulou, we have created over the last few years a series of installations and ephemeral participatory environments as a reminiscent of the covid era, commenting on issues that originated from the state of seclusion and isolation, as well as from an existential revaluation we were all forced to go through, one way or another within a crashing context. Together with Olga we have been working on a cluster of works that explore the relation between human beings and nature, while at the same time I keep experimenting with A.I. tools on works that will be included in the wider series A.I. made me do it. I feel like bringing together two of my most cherished things, in which I immerse myself for hours: nature and technology.”
Speaking about the Video Art Miden Festival and its 20-year-long journey, she stresses: “Video Art Miden was born in 2005, in Kalamata, out of the founding team’s need to communicate a form of art we had all been involved with and loved. Yorgos Dimitrakopoulos, Margarita Stavraki and myself were the founding members, later on joined by Maria Bourika, Nikos Podias, Martha Zoupa, Danny Kargas, Olga Papadopoulou et al. Working side by side with beloved and steady partners we shared a beautiful ride and matured together. When we started out, back in 2005, the situation was completely different: the Internet was still in its early stages and social media were barely making their baby steps. The transfer of big-size digital files was tricky, while it was far from easy to watch video art online, unlike nowadays. The need to watch an art that interested us and to be in touch with the up-to-date artistic production in Greece and worldwide was the driving force to get the Festival into motion. All these years we have teamed up with many acclaimed artists, festivals and museums around the globe. I feel as if we are part of a grand world family.”
Since 2020, Gioula Papadopoulou has been teaching at the New Media Lab of the School of Visual & Applied Arts of AUTh’s Faculty of Fine Arts. “The visual art work is a totally private affair for each artist. Nevertheless, communication and interaction that take place in places such as a Fine Arts Faculty can prove to be meaningful and life-giving,” she mentions. “In times such as these, where art and humanitarian studies are afflicted from all sides or considered a redundant luxury (I would cite the recent removal of art classes from the high-school curriculum as an example), a university school is a hive of creativity, a core and a network for the artists of the future. What I consider to be really important is that students seize the present-day, experiment freely, learn how to work alongside one another, grasp the world and the global developments, and succeed in mapping their own course, leaving their proper mark in the years to come.”
BIO
Gioula Papadopoulou is a visual artist and art director of the international festival Video Art Miden. She was born in Athens, 1974. She studied Painting and MA Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her artistic practice focuses on video art. She has presented her work in many exhibitions, site-specific projects and video art festivals in Greece and internationally. She has been bestowed with a special mention at the Spyropoulos Foundation Awards for young artists in Greece (2002) and the Best Artificial Intelligence ArtWork Award at Derapage 23, Montreal, Canada (2023). Works of hers are showcased at the MOMus-Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, Greece.
As an art director/curator of Video Art Miden, she has organized/curated numerous screenings, exhibitions & events in Greece and has collaborated with significant festivals, museums and institutions on a worldwide scale. Since 2020 she has been teaching at the School of Visual & Applied Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Faculty of Fine Arts.
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