Kyriaki Goni. Couple Goals

Kyriaki Goni
perfect love #couplegoals #AIgenerativeImages, 2020-2022
Single channel video, 20.000 scraped images and captions from Instagram public accounts colour, silent, 63΄ 45΄΄, wallpaper 5 x 2m, 180 AI generated images
Courtesy of the artist

The Perfect Love: #couplegoals #AIgenerativeImages is a video composed of images, captions and likes from approximately 20,000 posts under the hashtag #couplegoals, collected from open Instagram profiles in July 2020 by a scraping algorithm. In addition, Goni used sentences like “couples who are hugging tenderly” or “people kissing” to produce, with the help of an image generation algorithm, 180 new images of lovers that are shown as a wallpaper. These images exist only in the digital reality and have uncanny features: limbs and fingers are redundant; the geometry of the bodies is far from human.

The Perfect Love: #couplegoals #AIgenerativeImages raises questions about the increasingly dissolving barrier between the public and the private, the difference between the virtual and the real, the staged and the banal, as well as the gap that exists between the visible and the invisible in the digital domain. Finally, it aims to engender questions about those virtual, carefully edited and ‘framed’ representations of love on the Internet, versus the reality of real-time romantic relationships. We find ourselves in a voyeuristic position of observing couples and reading their intimate declarations of love and dedication and voluntary relinquishment of privacy.

Μoreover, the post-archive and the composite images call into question the online sharing of personal material, the stereotypical nature of what we regard as personal, and the way in which digital representation standardises feelings, affection and their image. Social networks observe us, learn from us, and then reconstruct and generate new images – of tenderness, in this case – which we, in turn, learn and are expected to identify with.

Biography

Kyriaki Goni was born in Athens where she lives and works.  She holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts (Athens School of Fine Arts) as well as graduate and postgraduate degrees on Social and Cultural Anthropology in Athens and in Leiden, Netherlands. Working across disciplines and technologies, she creates expanded, multi-layered installations. She connects the local with the global by critically examining questions of surveillance, distributed networks and infrastructures, ecosystems, as well as human and other than human relations. She writes and teaches frequently as part of her practice.  Recent solo shows include:  SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen; KVOST Art Collection Telekom, Berlin; Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; Drugo More, Rijeka; Aksioma, Ljubljana. Group exhibitions include 2nd Warsaw Biennale, 8th Gherdeina Biennale, Ars Electronica, 24th Thessaloniki Photobiennale, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale2020, and the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial. Prizes and fellowships include: Allianz Kulturstiftung and Bertelmanns Stiftung, Ars Electronica and Telekom, the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, Greece, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

https://kyriakigoni.com/

 

 

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