Navigating through familiar interfaces -that new kind of architecture that our digital self inhabits- we are liberated from the constraints of a physical body. In this disembodied experience our eyes become our guides in these virtual environments while the rest of our sensory input is muted and our tactile experience is constrained to the sleek surface of a screen.
However, can the mind be divorced from the body?
Emotions transcend the screen surface. We see, we communicate, we feel. Our body reacts to the visual stimuli, tears, spit and cum are some kind of a materialization of emotions, an organic matter, meeting the surface of a digital abyss.
Those bodily fluids become a magnifying –thus simultaneously distorting –glass trying to look deeper in the screen’s two dimensional surface. But there are only grayscales, color gradients, pixels, 0’s and 1’s. Or maybe not?
(For this project I created color gradients sample picking colors of the most popular communication apps, social networks and porn sites. The original files are of great detail- 11.600 pixels the long side-so I include a couple details also.)
Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989, she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of the photographic image, such as VR, LiDar scans and screen captured images. Her work and research focuses on the new realities created by the connectible devices through which we access the internet and the contradictions between the physical and the digital spaces that we inhabit.
Characteristic of her aesthetic is that the resulting images are at the boundary line between plausibility or not, potentiality and non-potentiality, random and constructed. Playing with the perception of viewers she aspires to question the role and power of photography in an era that is dominated by it.
Her first VR project Family Portraits has been awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2019), and she has also been selected among 30 Under 30 Women Photographers (2018) and a Young Greek Photographer by Athens Photo Festival (2016).
Maria holds a Master in Fine Arts and a BA from Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work is part of private collections and Vontobel art collection and has been exhibited in institutions and museums in Greece and abroad among which are THE National Museum of Contemporary Art of Greece- EMST (2022), Sharjah Foundation (United Arab Emirates 2022) ,Foto Colectania, (Spain 2022), Tallinn Art Hall, (Estonia 2021), Miami Art week, (2020), 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival(2019), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography(2019), Onassis cultural centre(2019), Athens Conservatoire(2019), Slought foundation (Philadelphia, USA 2019), Maison de la Photographie, (France 2018), Benaki museum(2018), Unseen Amsterdam, (Netherlands 2018) National Observatory of Athens (2018), Culturescapes festival (Basel, Switzerland, 2017) Athens Photo Festival (2016), Athens Biennale (2015) Mois de la photo,(Paris, France, 2014)
Maria Mavropoulou also works as a freelance photographer specializing in architecture and interior photography and she is a contributing photographer for the New York Times.
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