In the Shell
Lida Zacharopoulou
Description
In the Shell is a multimedia installation that explores transformation, memory and classification through AI and marine specimens. The work draws on an archive of shells, corals, and urchin remains the artist collected from remote coastlines over many years.
These specimens were photographed and used to train custom AI models that generate speculative shell forms: species that do not belong to a single organism, but emerge from accumulated biological traces, data patterns and computational interpretation. The installation combines a looping single-channel video with 3D-printed objects.
On screen, gridded compositions gradually shift between real specimens and synthetic shells, evoking erosion, mutation and becoming. Selected generated forms are materialised in pearly white 3D prints, appearing as physical residues of a digital process. The work considers flow as movement between natural and artificial states, memory and data, matter and image, shells carried and transformed by water, and forms carried into being through algorithmic drift.
The work invites viewers to encounter shells as archival fragments and speculative futures, reflecting ecological loss, technological mediation and regeneration.
Lida Zacharopoulou
Lida Zacharopoulou is an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist and AI engineer based in Athens, Greece. Her practice explores how AI shapes perception and mediates the relationships between reality, memory and fiction. Through speculative research, worldbuilding and storytelling, she both employs and critiques algorithmic systems to examine their social, political and ecological implications.
She holds a BSc in Informatics and Telecommunications from the University of Athens, an MSc in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and an MA in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her professional background includes positions at CERN, the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and GWI. In 2025, she was an Art and Technology Research Resident at the G&A Mamidakis Foundation, and in 2026 she completed an artist residency at Notam, the Norwegian Centre for Technology, Art and Music.
Her recent projects include transmedia work Niros Archipelago (2023–2026) and Digital No-Man’s (2023), an AI-generated short film that received the Best Artwork Award at the IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery 2024. She also contributed to BlackboxAI, a multimodal installation investigating gender bias in AI, which won the Goethe-Institut’s EthicAI=LABS award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions including the FILE Festival, Medialab-Prado, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Vilnius Academy of Arts and the Athens Digital Arts Festival.
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