Melting Pot

2020

GIF made with AI-generated imagery

Cyprus is promoted as the island of Aphrodite and a lot of the island’s tourism material focuses on Greek mythology and folklore. However, Cyprus has been a melting pot of cultures since prehistoric times, and the beliefs, customs, and stories of the island’s diverse communities reflect this. Cultural diversity is further evidenced by the island’s archaeology sculptures of mythical beasts and gods from Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian and other cultures are abundant, however their stories have been left out by the country’s official narrative. For these GIFs, over 3000 images of Cypriot sculptures of beasts, gods and mythological creatures from all cultures and time periods were fed to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, as a training set, to learn and generate new images. The AI generated images of hybrid sculptures, a melting pot of cultures and styles – presenting a folklore narrative from a machine point of view.