The Lovers from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged photograph of glowing connected devices posed as an intimate couple, exploring digital intimacy and human–technology relationships.

The Lovers

Family Portraits

The screens of the connectible devices we use are the only way we can have access to this parallel man-made universe, the Internet. Our lives have changed, from the simplest task to the way we perceive the world around us. Those devices guide us trough the real world, they answer our questions, they advice us and keep us company day and night. We look at them, touch them and talk to them in almost an intimate way.

Acknowledging these facts made me look at these devices from a different perspective. In this series I create family portraits of devices, reversing the subject/object relation. In this casual scenery of our everyday life, our comfort zones this multitude of glowing immersive gates, like an opposite of black holes, promise limitless possibilities. Information, entertainment, human connection and much more, are available anywhere and anytime, breaking the physical bond with the reality that surrounds us.

 Never before had communication been so easy. Social networks and countless applications are created to serve our constant need for human connection but is there any chance that we have achieved the opposite?

Having for the first time in history such an easy and direct access to a huge and constantly increasing volume of information has made us wiser or are we just creating a detailed and multidimensional mirror of ourselves where we constantly seek our reflection as a confirmation of our existence?  Or do these ‘’extensions of our hands’’ have actually replaced our best friends, our family or even our lovers?

Sunday Afternoon from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, showing connected devices staged as family members in an everyday domestic scene, exploring screen-mediated companionship and isolation.

Sunday Afternoon

Anniversary Dinner from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged photograph of digital devices occupying an intimate dining scene and questioning technology’s place in human relationships.

Anniversary Dinner

Evening with Friends from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, showing glowing screens gathered like companions and examining digital connection, social life and technologically mediated intimacy.

Evening with Friends

Uncle’s Visit from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a domestic portrait in which connected devices assume family roles, reversing the relationship between technological object and human subject.

Uncle’s Visit

Breakfast in Bed from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, showing illuminated devices in an intimate bedroom setting and questioning whether screens replace lovers, friends and family.

Breakfast in Bed

The Gathering from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged group portrait of connected devices exploring digital companionship, domestic life and the human need for connection.

The Gathering

Movie Night from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, showing screens assembled in a familiar leisure scene and examining entertainment, social isolation and technology-mediated togetherness.

Movie Night

Birthday Party from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged celebration populated by connected devices, exploring screen culture, digital companionship and the reversal of subject and object.

Birthday Party

The Hug from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, showing connected devices arranged in an embrace and exploring technological intimacy, affection and the substitution of human relationships by screens.

The Hug

The Strangers from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged portrait of connected devices examining alienation, screen-mediated relationships and distance within contemporary domestic life.

The Strangers

Holy Trinity from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, three connected devices staged together in a domestic interior.
Holy Trinity from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, three connected devices staged together in a domestic interior.

Holy Trinity

Numeric Love from Family Portraits by Maria Mavropoulou, a staged photograph exploring affection between connected devices, synthetic intimacy and the influence of screens on human relationships.

Numeric Love

Although Family Portraits started as a photography series it soon evolved into a Virtual Reality tour too.

The main idea of this VR tour was to create a house interior  that is a common  experience for most of us, but make the visitor feel as an intruder in somebody else’s house. By depriving the familiar feeling one perceives the rather usual scenery as extraordinary, letting him evaluate the situation he is into with a fresh perspective.

Inside this virtual installation photography is the building block of an experience. Being surrounded by a photograph that looks nearly as real as reality poses even more questions about what photography is and where that leads us.

Furthermore the screens inside the virtual tour are navigable also. Just by looking at them the viewer is transferred inside them, experiencing environments that exist only digitally. Immerged into videos and surrounded by sounds the real and the virtual come closer, making it difficult to rely on your senses.

360-degree video still from Family Portraits VR, 2019, placing the viewer inside an uncanny domestic interior where photography and screens connect physical and digital environments.

360 Video still, part of Family Portraits VR tour, 2019

360-degree video still from Family Portraits VR, 2019, showing an immersive domestic space in which connected screens become portals to environments that exist only digitally.

360 Video still, part of Family Portraits VR tour, 2019

360-degree video still from Family Portraits VR, 2019, exploring virtual reality, photographic immersion and the uncertain boundary between sensory experience and digital space.

360 Video still, part of Family Portraits VR tour, 2019

Panoramic 360-degree image from Family Portraits VR, 2019, depicting an uncanny virtual home where screens, photography and navigable digital environments merge.

panoramic 360 image, part of Family Portraits VR tour, 2019

Installation Views


2023/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece

2023/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece

2023/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece

2023/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece

2021/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia

2021/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia

2021/ Installation view of Modern Love (or love in the age of cold intimacies) Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany

2019 / Installation view of “Family Portraits VR” at 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival’ s VR section, Warehouse 1, Thessaloniki, Greece.

2019 / Family Portraits VR tour, part of “For ever more images?” exhibition at Onassis cultural centre, Athens, Greece.

2019 / Family Portraits VR tour, part of “For ever more images?” exhibition at Onassis cultural centre, Athens, Greece.

SELECTED PRESS


RELATED PROJECTS: Archives, Human and Machine Memory

The family album, displacement and technological memory become unstable archives where personal history is reconstructed, inherited or lost.


Imagined Images 2021- 2023

A historically early AI reconstruction of a missing family photo album, examining migration, inherited memory and synthetic remembrance.

A Self-Portrait of an Algorithm 2023

One hundred AI-generated self-portraits ask how an algorithm might picture itself, extending portraiture toward machine creativity, identity and the possiblity of sentience.

Model Collapse 2025

Family archives, dementia and generative-AI degradation meet in a study of memory’s human and computational deterioration.

Afterimages 2025

An arc from the very first AI-generated images toward their possible endpoint, where recursive training on synthetic outputs produces visual residues.

an Index of lATENT SPACE 2025

A custom-coded AI system drifts without a prompt through latent space, exposing the images that trained it as they are understood through the AI’s own lens.