Perfect Love #couplegoals #AIgenerated, 2020,2022

Edition of 3 + 2AP.

video request to contact@kyriakigoni.com

How is romantic love being manifested online? How does the algorithm imagine romantic love? Perfect Love #couplegoals #AIgenerated is a work with two parts. The first part is a one hour long video made from images with the hashtag  #couplegoals which were scraped from public Instagram accounts. The captions exist in their own right, as an autonomous ‘script’, while at the same time providing detailed insight into a global tendency that feeds on followers and likes.

The second part is a series of synthetic images of couples, generated by feeding an AI image generation tool with prompts such as "couples kissing". This kind of algorithms get trained with millions of images & captions from the Internet, the images users produce and share. The networked images that are being circulated online are the main training material of the artificial intelligent systems. In the work the two different datasets of romantic love are brought together, the one created by the human users and the other by the machine.

The work is an investigation of the ways everyday love and affection are expressed, and declared online. It 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. In addition, it looks into the iconography of digital self- representation in relation to romantic love and into the different tropes of digital self-performativity. At the same time it touches upon questions of representation, training datasets and biases. 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.