CAN GALLERY PRESENTS “BECOMING MACHINE” BY MANOLIS D. LEMOS

In the Byzantine tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean, we encounter the highly poetic concept of acheiropoieta — artefacts not made by human hand. In Cyprus, where I grew up, there’s a church called indeed Acheropoietos, which means ‘made by no hand’. As its name suggests, it was believed to have been built by angels.

I was always fascinated by things that make themselves. Generative processes, self-organised systems, automata, and the like have always piqued my interest. Over time, I came to realise that artists deploy machines not because they’re swept up by Benjamin’s Angel of History, but because they constantly need to invent new ways of gaining distance from their work.

Adding a layer of automation, technology, or machine assistance to one’s creative process can make handling the material less personal and fragile — or arguably, makes the poking of fragile things possible to begin with.

Manolis D. Lemos’s involvement with artificial intelligence began well before the current ubiquitousness of software like ChatGPT and DALL-E. In his 2019 solo exhibition entitled “Feelings”, Lemos collaborated with Constantinos Daskalakis, an MIT professor and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, to generate drawings via neural networks trained by the artist with his own hand-drawn sketches.

His latest solo show, which also happens to inaugurate the new space of CAN Gallery in Athens, continues his exploration of machine learning and AI-assisted processes, this time going further afield into image and text generation. The large canvases on the gallery walls belong to two separate but related bodies of work — both created with a cyclical process of training AI software, prompting it to generate images and text, then editing the results.