Dimitris Agathopoulos is an independent New Media Artist.

His artistic research and work focus on creating Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences and narratives, algorithmic art, AI-aided art, 3D sculpting, 3D modeling, experimental animation, sound design, digital scenography, projection mapping, and painting. He teaches 3D Design in the MA in Digital Arts program at the Athens School of Fine Arts, and he also instructs courses in Plastic Arts with Digital Media and Digital Audiovisual Representations at the Department of Interior Architecture in the School of Applied Arts and Culture at the University of West Attica.

Art, AI, and the Transformation of Vision

We often speak of vision as if it were a neutral capacity a clear way for the world to reveal itself. The rise of artificial intelligence unsettles this assumption. AI does not simply expand what we can perceive. It exposes the deeper instability of our idea of seeing. Human vision was never natural in the strict sense. It has always been shaped by biology by memory by culture by the habits our societies impose on us. What AI does is bring this hidden structure to the surface by placing next to our familiar gaze its own unfamiliar and synthetic way of perceiving.

Something similar happens with creativity. For centuries art was tied to the human subject to intention and emotion. Yet when an algorithm generates an image that surprises us we are confronted with a strange paradox. The creativity we believed to be exclusively human appears distributed across two agents one biological and one computational. This does not reduce the role of the artist. Instead it forces us to rethink the ground on which the idea of creativity was built. Perhaps what AI reveals is not the brilliance of the machine but the constraints and blind spots that have always shaped human imagination.

There is however a deeper tension. The machine sees through data and every dataset contains traces of history and power relations. Inequalities racism and gendered assumptions remain present inside the training material no matter how invisible they appear. The algorithm therefore becomes a double figure. It is both the product of our collective ideologies and a force capable of unsettling them by showing us patterns we might refuse to acknowledge. Art becomes a field where this conflict plays out where the human desire for control encounters the strange autonomy of machine vision.

AI should not be treated simply as a tool. It compels a philosophical question. What does it mean to see or imagine when vision is no longer exclusively human. In this sense AI acts almost as a critic that exposes the assumptions hidden inside our own perception. Artistic practice becomes a negotiation a place where human subjectivity the structures encoded in data and the unfamiliar gaze of the machine meet and collide.

The transformation of vision through AI is therefore not only a technological shift but a conceptual one. We do not just see differently. The act of seeing itself becomes unstable and open to redefinition. Within this uncertainty art discovers a new urgency, an opportunity to examine interpret and even embrace the nature of both human and artificial vision.