Irini Mirena Papadimitriou (GR)
Irini Papadimitriou is a curator and cultural manager, and currently Director of Exhibitions at Diriyah Art Futures. Between 2018 and 2024 she was the Creative Director at FutureEverything, and in 2023 the Artistic Director for the Sea Art Festival 2023 with Busan Biennale, South Korea. She was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A, and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans.
Recently curated exhibitions include: AI: Who’s Looking After Me? at Science Gallery London; Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries for Sea Art Festival, Busan Biennale, South Korea; FutureFantastic, Bangalore, India; Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data and You and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens for Onassis Stegi, Athens; Money, Ruins, and the Sea, NeMe, Cyprus; [Digital] Transmissions, National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan; Artificially Intelligent, V&A.
Irini is a co-founder of Maker Assembly, a critical gathering about maker culture, and she has been a co-curator for the Arts & Culture experience at Mozilla Festival, including the 2019 exhibition Trustworthy AI: Imagining Better Machine Decision Making. She has served as jury member in awards such as Prix Ars Electronica, D&AD, Lumen Prize, EU STARTS and ACM Siggraph.
Irini contributed as a co-curator to the Signal Forum program.
Keywords: curating, AI, digital arts, art and technology
Morning topic: Machinery Missionaries
The boundary between human and machine activity is increasingly blurred with each technological advancement. What techno-human ecosystems are we creating? Are these ecosystems intentionally designed, or are they merely accidental consequences? What are the opportunities and limitations of collaboration between humans and machines? What are the dynamics of this collaboration in creative and artistic processes? How can interdisciplinary cooperation support innovation in policy?
The parallel world in the form of machine and robot systems generates in society not only ambivalent feelings of oscillation between utility and threat, but also a never-ending series of outstanding works of art in literature, film and visual arts. The tension that arises between the living human and the "animated" machine is one of the most topical lines among the energetic themes in art. At a time when control over many vital resources is being handed over to data centre algorithms, there is an almost parallel increase in the level of anxiety, fear, or feelings of loss of control over the previously valid ecosystem. The works presented in the chapter Machinery Missionaries refer precisely to this ambivalence of autonomous machines and at the same time insistently recall the old Faustian question of the possibilities and limits of human knowledge.
