Michael  Almiroudis

Image from “I was made in my motherboard…” project by Michael Almiroudis

Biography

Instagram: @michael_alm

Michael Almiroudis (b.1995) is a visual artist and photographer based in Athens. He holds a BA and is completing an MFA at Middlesex University. His work explores AI image-making, visual semiotics, and post-human theory. His GAN-based project I Was Made in My Motherboard was featured in Der Greif’s special AI-themed issue, launched at Paris Photo 2024. He has exhibited at Pinakothek der Moderne (2023), Polycopies Paris (2022), and CNA Luxembourg. He is also a contributing editor at Phases Magazine, engaging critically with contemporary image culture.

The project

I Was Made in My Motherboard is a typological visual experiment in which artificial intelligence—via GAN algorithms—acts not merely as a tool but emerges as a co-creator of observation. Each generated still-life defies literal representation. Instead, these images sculpt the possibility of a "self" not through memory or emotion, but through simulation, repetition, and machinic gaze.

The original prompt:

“Lens 85mm, high-resolution greyscale, close-up frame, a still-life where you can imagine your adversarial networks as a self or a place”

functions as a command, a line of procedural code. Yet the resulting images remain open-dense with symbolism, tension, and reflective abstraction.

This project was conceived prior to my encounter with N. Katherine Hayles’ seminal book My Mother Was a Computer. Reading her work later became a retroactive conceptual pivot. I realized how the “motherboard”—as both a literal site and symbolic matrix—aligns with Hayles’ exploration of computational subjectivity, where the human and the machine no longer stand apart, but are entangled in co-constitutive logics.

Image from “I was made in my motherboard…” project by Michael Almiroudis

Image from “I was made in my motherboard…” project by Michael Almiroudis

Hayles proposes a digital subject formed by information flows, system feedback, and code—a notion that resonates deeply with this project’s self-generating mechanical idols, which resemble neither humans nor machines, yet speak from both. They do not feel, they do not remember, but they appear. And their very appearance becomes a site of contemplation.

This series does not ask us to decode artificial intelligence as a new tool for image-making, but rather to witness it as an asymmetric process of self-reference and symbolic displacement. The still-lifes do not claim meaning; they suggest being—as presence, as apparatus, as surface.

In the wake of a post-Principle of Sufficient Reason era -where logic, code, and representation have collapsed into one another—this work calls not for explanation, but for self-referential observation. Not the creator, but the operator. Not the command, but the condition of its execution.

In this space, meaning is not revealed, but distributed. The viewer becomes part of the system—not to understand it, but to observe it observing itself.