ΜONTREAL – Visual artist Gioula Papadopoulou was honored with the Best Artificial Intelligence project award at Dérapage 23, an event in Montreal, Canada, dedicated to non-narrative and abstract video. This event, with a history since 2000, showcased selected works and presented this year’s awards at the Cinémathèque Québécoise on May 11, in collaboration with the Sommets du cinéma d’animation festival. The Artificial Intelligence project award was introduced this year as a special category, focusing on the utilization of contemporary generative AI tools.

The award-winning video, titled “AI made me do it: Ophelia,” was created using Artificial Intelligence systems and recently featured at the Alchimies Numériques exhibition at IMMIX Galerie in Paris. It presents a surreal and non-narrative animation where the classic character Ophelia encounters peculiar dream mutations and unexpected futuristic scenes through multiple variations of an initial image, which was generated as “Ophelia” by an AI algorithm. Moreover, the audio component of the project was also produced from the initial image using an artificial intelligence platform that transformed the image into sound.

Gioula Papadopoulou, an accomplished visual artist and art director/curator of the international festival Video Art Miden, specializes in video art in her artistic practice. She has showcased her work in numerous exhibitions, site-specific projects, and video art festivals both in Greece and internationally. As the art director/curator of Video Art Miden, she has organized and curated numerous screenings, exhibitions, and events in Greece, collaborating with prominent festivals, museums, and institutions worldwide. Since 2020, she has been teaching at the New Media Laboratory, School of Visual & Applied Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.