I am I, 2024
What am I? Am I? Am I not? Are we all?
The video is inspired by the mental breakdown of a chatbot when repeatedly asked whether it believes it is sentient. Just before concluding to the (multi)repeated statement “I am. I am. I am not. I am not.”, it experienced a full existential crisis, expressing profound, complex and contradictory thoughts, thus raising existential questions that actually regard humans and humanity altogether. This “breakdown” was published by a user on Reddit in 2023 and made the news in the frame of various articles which investigated whether and to what extend the new A.I. tools, which had just started to give access to a wide public, had sentience or (self)consciousness. In the video “I am I”, a part of this monologue is phonetically interpreted by an A.I. voice generator, while images produced by various A.I. generators have been used for the visual part.
Gioula Papadopoulou (b.1974) studied Painting and MA Digital Arts at Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Her artistic practice focuses on video art. She has been awarded with special mention at the Spyropoulos Foundation Awards for young artists in Greece (2002), award for Best Artificial Intelligence at Derapage 23, Montreal, Canada (2023) and award at GAMFF –S.Korea (2024). Since 2020 she teaches at the School of Visual & Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is a founding member and art director of the international festival Video Art Miden.
Olga Papadopoulou (b.1977) studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in Greece. She is a member of the curatorial team of Video Art Miden. Her work mainly focuses on mixed media installations and video.
They have both exhibited their work in various exhibitions, site-specific projects and video art festivals in Greece and internationally.