This work is not about AI, but about the occupation of digital space. It’s not You, it’s Me was part of the exhibition You & AI, Through the Algorithmic Lens (curated by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou) that took place in Athens in June-July 2021 and was organized in Athens by the Onassis Foundation. It is an art intervention taking place simultaneously in the media, online, and as a big scale, site specific installation. The piece investigates how AI is changing the dynamics of self-representation and identities, and how technological mediation produces its own types of performativity and practices of othering. Through a communication campaign, the project invites members of the audience to post a selfie by attaching to the #greece2021 – this is an existing hashtag, part of a media campaign with the mission to celebrate the 200 years of modern Greece. It’s not You, it’s Me occupies that very same hashtag space but instead, presents a collective snapshot of an “extended demos” consisting of both real and fake intensities: citizen selfies are mixed with decontextualized faces from other humans posted by globally distributed micro-labor force, as well as synthetic faces of non-existing humans posted by programmed bots. The durational video work, presented through a large-scale screen installation, invites the viewer to negotiate meaning through different distributions of reality over fakeness in the latent space of a nationalist fiction.
